BRITISH GUIANA: Liberty Deferred

With 1,600 Marines and Royal Welch Fusiliers aboard, four British warships sped to British Guiana a year ago to enforce London’s decision to suspend the South American colony’s seven-month-old constitution and thereby stifle its Red-infiltrated government. Since then, restive British Guiana has remained under a state-of-emergency rule by Crown-appointed Governor Sir Alfred Savage.

In London last week, the British government made public the report of a four-man commission appointed to study the Guiana crisis. Its conclusion: “Conditions for sound constitutional advance do not exist in British Guiana today.” The report was harshly candid (said the Manchester Guardian: “To read it is like walking into a lamppost in the fog”), and argued that the colony’s dominant political organization, the Red-ridden People’s Progressive Party, was bent on destroying the constitution after first using its privileges to win unlimited one-party rule. For their activities protesting London’s steps against the P.P.P., its leader, Cheddi Jagan, served five months in jail and his Chicago-born wife Janet is still in jail.

The Churchill government agreed with the commission’s report, announced in Commons that the state-of-emergency rule will continue in Guiana for at least three more years.