British Guiana: Calling for Help

All week long, raging mobs of Negroes surged through British Guiana’s Georgetown capital, looting stores, mercilessly beating any East Indian in their path. What started as a peaceful strike by British Guiana’s Negro-dominated unions against Marxist Prime Minister Cheddi Jagan’s highhanded government became a bloody fight with ugly racial overtones. It pitted the East Indians (49% of the population), who loyally follow their countryman Jagan, against the Negroes (45% ), who regard him as a dangerous Communist.

Jagan’s reaction to the conflict served only to inflame it. When a crowd pelted his car as he was leaving Parliament, his bodyguards opened fire, wounding four demonstrators. As the rioting grew worse during the week, Jagan’s riot police, aptly nicknamed the “Bongo Boys,” hurled tear-gas grenades, waded in with truncheons, and finally started shooting. Scores were wounded, hundreds arrested. Food supplies ran short, and at one point hundreds of children joined the demonstrators, rattling spoons and empty plates and chanting, “We want food, we want food.” At the Georgetown docks, where the Russian freighter Kirovsk was loading 30,000 bags of rice sold by Jagan to Communists, an angry mob stoned police and smashed windows of the government’s Rice Marketing Board. Soon after, nearly 100 sticks of dynamite were found, some with the fuses sputtering. The Russian ship sailed for Castro’s Cuba.

So serious was the situation that Jagan was forced to accept a strange sort of aid for a man who describes himself as an “anticolonialist nationalist.” He called on the British Governor, and for the second time in 16 months, let British troops protect his tottering regime. In battle dress, weapons at the ready, a contingent of Coldstream Guards stationed in the country quick-timed through Georgetown to lay barbed wire around Parliament House and take up positions at key power and water facilities. In London, the Colonial Office watched the situation closely. There was talk that Britain might suspend British Guiana’s constitution and temporarily revoke self-government if Jagan cannot maintain law and order.