Still fiddling with majoritarianism

On my assessment, given its legal context, President David Granger’s statement that he will accept nothing less than the counting of the broadly defined ‘valid votes’ of the March 2020 elections to arrive at a winner threatens to take the elections quarrel to another constitutional/unconstitutional level. The PNC came to government claiming that 1,431 (Stabroek News placed the number as closer to 410) of their mainly African supporters lost their lives between 2002 and 2009 in the Guyana ethnic ‘troubles’ under the PPP/C, and so it was clear to me that the PNC had no intention of allowing the PPP back in government: at least not alone. I supported the final PNC’s conclusion but blamed Guyana’s ethnic context for the loss of lives and have persistently over the last 10 years advocated the establishment of a shared governance (SG) regime that the PNC promised in both its 2011 and 2015 manifestos but did not seriously attempt to accomplish.

Some say the PNC promise was merely a ruse to win support and this may have been so. However, this in no way delegitimizes the need for such a regime for history has shown that when a sufficiently large ethnic minority does not want to be ruled by the majority and vice versa, force or negotiations that result in SG are the only democratic way forward! Indeed, after a few very brief historical snapshots to make this point, I shall argue below that there is a fundamental disjuncture between the wishes of such groups and Westminster-type majoritarian constitutionalism.

In 1960, when Guyanese were struggling for independence from the British so were Cypriots, with a population of about 572,696: 442,363 Greeks, 104,333 Turks and 26,000 others. Ethnic political conflict broke out and as in Guyana, the British offered shared governance to the warring factions, but this did not last long in Cyprus and was refused by the PPP in Guyana. The ethnic conflicts that followed caused the loss of 5,000 and 176 lives in Cyprus and Guyana respectively but did not solve the ethnic problem. By way of Turkish armed force, Cyprus is now physically divided into Greek and Turkish areas and the ethnic problem is getting worse in Guyana.

Cyprus was nothing like the killing field the former British colony of Sri Lanka was to become. In 2009, Sri Lanka had a population of about 20 million: Sinhalese 74% Sri Lankan Moors 7.2%; Indian Tamil 4.6%; Sri Lankan Tamil 3.9%; unspecified 10%. The Tamil minority reside largely in the north of the country and the conflict began because many Sinhalese believed that the Tamil minority had enjoyed a privileged position under British rule and that the balance had to be shifted in favour of the Sinhalese. The Tamils claimed that they had become a harassed minority: the victims of frequent acts of communal violence and calculated acts and policies of discrimination directed at them. Thus, in 1972 the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam - once described as arguably the most lethal and well organised terrorist group in the world - began its campaign for a separate Tamil homeland, but the armed struggle started in earnest after Black July in 1983 when 13 Sinhalese soldiers were killed by the Tigers, and by the time it ended in 2009 with the rout of the Tamil Tigers by the national army, the former had lost some 20,000 fighters and the United Nations estimated that some 100,000 people had lost their lives in the course of the debacle.

Then there is the story of Fiji, where the decades-long political quarrel between the ethnic Fijians and the Indians who were brought to the islands as indentured labourers was being expressed as early as the first constitutional conference held by the British in 1965. Indians were brought to the country in sufficient numbers to conjure up notions of ethnic dominance and the Fijians became determined to safeguard their political and land rights. In 1970, the islands were given political independence and a series of coups based largely on the above mentioned fears began in about 1987 and only ended in 2006. One of these in 2000 removed the first Indian prime minister, Mahendra Chaudhry, the head of the Indian dominated Fiji Labour party that won the majority of parliamentary seats in the 1999, 2001, 2006 elections. However, in 2014 amidst widespread condemnation by national, regional and international bodies of human rights and electoral violations, Rear Admiral (Ret.) Frank Bainimarama – who had taken power after a coup in 2006 - and his Fiji First Party won the first ‘democratic’ election since that coup and is still in office today, having claimed to have broken the back of ethnic voting. Indian emigration and the harassment of Chaudhry, who was prevented by the regime from running in the 2014 elections contributed to his party winning no seats in those elections or, after his retirement, in the 2018 elections.

Yet, when intransigence gives way to reality the story of countries like ours is not always hopeless. With a population of about 12 million in 1970 – 52% Malays, 35% Chinese and 7% Indians - in Malaysia there was a sharp division between the Malays, who were relatively poor, and the Chinese, and this resulted in racial conflicts. When the results of the 1969 elections began to show a large setback for the ruling Malayan Alliance coalition and media reports suggested that ethnic Malay rule was in jeopardy, riots erupted in which according to official reports 196 people were killed, although Western diplomatic sources put the toll at closer to 800. To deal comprehensively with ethnic insecurity, in 1971 the Alliance introduced a New Economic Policy that spelt out the twin objectives of the eradication of poverty irrespective of race, and the restructuring of society to eliminate racial economic predominance. Perhaps its culture of negotiations and alliance adopted during the British colonial period to help combat communists insurgents also allowed it in 1973 to easily add new coalition partners and change its name to the Barisan Nasional (BN) that ran the country from 1957 to 2018. In 1960 Malaysia had a GDP per capita that was identical to Guyana (US$300 to US$299) but was 4 times that of Guyana by 2000 (US$4020 to US$944). As late as 2005, Karen Hughes, the US Under-Secretary of State for Public Diplomacy and Public Affairs, could recommend the Malaysia model in power-sharing to countries like Iraq ( Xinhua: 2005).

And of course there is the case of Northern Ireland where the ethnic conflict appeared interminable until the Good Friday Agreement put an end to the 30 year ‘troubles’ between the Protestants and the Catholics that had cost some 3,600 lives. After difficult negotiations between mortal enemies, the shared governance agreement that was hailed by some as a ‘a work of surpassing genius’ but was not unlike that proposed by the British to the Cypriots and Guyanese in the 1960, brought an end to the decades-long conflict and is still operational today.

There are other examples such as the so-called ‘ethnic democracies’ like Israel to be noted, but I chose examples from former British colonies with Westminster-type political experiences like Guyana because there is a fundamental disjuncture between its constitutional arrangements and the wish of such groups to be governed by their own representatives. For example, imagine that the coalition government did diligently attempt to fulfill its mandate and introduce shared governance and the PPP/C maintained its opposition to it and stymied the regime’s efforts to acquire the two-thirds majority required to make the necessary constitutional changes! Even if sufficient, an appeal to a referendum may not have been helpful for referenda are majoritarian instruments. We would have been right where we are today so: what is to be done?

As it is, we are still fiddling with Westminster-type majoritarian constitutionalism that is only one way of doing democracy.