Cheddi's Last Stand

Land Rovers prowled the streets, bristling with British tommies and submachine guns. Army helicopters whirred overhead. Military radios crackled back and forth. It was election day in British Guiana, and Her Majesty's government in Whitehall was determined to ensure the peaceful elections that seemed to be the colony's only hope of ending its three-year reign of racial violence. But -not for the first time-hope for stability in British Guiana was thwarted by Marxist Premier Cheddi Jagan.

The election was specifically designed to oust Jagan, whose People's Progressive Party is overwhelmingly supported by Guiana's 295,000 East Indians. To guard against a repetition of the 1961 election, when Jagan won a parliamentary majority with only 42.6% of the vote, the government introduced a system of proportional representation under which he would have had to win a clear majority to return to power. Since no other party is willing to join a Jagan government, the British hoped that the election would result in a coalition headed by Attorney Forbes Burnham, a moderate, pro-Western leader whose People's National Congress Party is backed by his 190,000 fellow Negroes.

Familiar Tale. To a certain point, the election went as planned. Jagan piled up only 45.8% of the vote; Burnham won 40.5% and stood ready to form a coalition with the third-running United Force Party (12%), headed by Portuguese Businessman Peter d'Aguiar. But then Cheddi simply refused to resign. "The election was fraudulent," he announced. "The British government will have to force me out." Unimpressed, the governor formally appointed Burnham Prime Minister.

It was a familiar tale. Jagan, a dentist turned demagogue, founded the P.P.P. in 1950 with his Chicago-born, sometime-Communist wife Janet, and won the colony's first general elections in 1953. Jagan's intemperate demands for independence and deliberately incited sugar strikes forced the British to boot him out after five months. Ever since his return to power three years ago, Jagan has gone out of his way to foment racial passions. When last week's elections were announced in October 1963, his answer was to send his sugar workers out on a savage strike that lasted six months and took 173 lives before 5,000 troops restored order.

Bedtime Reading. By contrast with the P.P.P.'s racist election propaganda, Burnham's campaign focused on such needs as public works projects and agricultural reform. A silk-smooth speaker and one of his country's top criminal attorneys, Burnham earned a law degree with honors at London University, reads himself to sleep in English ("political novels"), French (Lamartine, Corneille), or Latin (Cicero, Tacitus, Catullus). Originally a co-founder of Jagan's P.P.P., Burnham soon soured on Cheddi's Marxist rantings and, fired by his own ambition, set up the anti-Communist P.N.C. in 1957. If his ideas today are sometimes vague, he is an avowed friend of the U.S.-and needs to be, since the backward colony desperately needs U.S. aid.

Above all, Burnham is determined to damp down racial hatreds. "Every case of hooliganism will be ruthlessly dealt with," he vows. "We will not condone violence." Nonetheless, the colony may well be in for more violence before Jagan goes back to dentistry.

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