Reflections of Moses Nagamootoo on Janet Jagan's Legacy
INTERVIEW BY CAPITAL NEWS TV
SURVIVAL DEPENDS ON WHETHER OR NOT WE HAVE A FIREWALL BUILT BY THE PEOPLE - A SOCIAL FIRE WALL OF COHESION.
Source
Mr. Gordon Mosley: You worked with Ms. Jagan for many years in politics and journalism. What do you remember best of her?
Mr. Moses V Nagamootoo: Well, the first thing I would recall is about going after the truth. I worked with her for an unbroken period between 1970 and 1992 - those twenty-two years, unbroken, until I became Minister of Information.
I can tell you one thing is that she had a legend that reads never knowingly tell a lie. She would vet the stories and use the old, almost worn out, but old and tested guide in doubt find out. It is an amazing thing that Mrs. Jagan who has been a consummate politician, a very hard taskmaster when it comes to making political compromises, that when she was with the MIRROR she would ask us all to exclude any personal hatred for our opponents so that if I wrote an article that is disparaging of someone, because there was a perceived political bias, she would quickly cross it out.
I recall once, when Richard Nixon, the President of the United States, died. (I would usually write the Headlines for the newspaper and I would invariably read all of her Editorials for the political line. We shared our political views and we were both in the leadership of the party and I have had this position of being the party's chief spokesperson; I would not like to say propagandist, and so I have always insisted on the line being kept in terms of the party politics.) And I had a headline NIXON KICKS THE BUCKET and I remembered that she was highly offended by that.
Now here was a woman who would have been writing scathing attacks on Nixon, because of the War in Vietnam and after the Watergate scandal, et cetera, and still could not countenance her co-worker, her Editorial Assistant, using an insolent headline, because she had stuck to her guns that you must be respectful of your opponents. Maybe her opponents were not respectful of her, but I know that as a journalistic standard that she kept to that.
We ran into trouble occasionally with libel. There was a story I wrote PM's Cow Electrocuted (and that was the infamous libel suit where Mr. Burnham, then Prime Minister, sued us). It was my article. Burnham once told me in Parliament in creolese “boy is wah a do you” that you wrote that story. In substance there was in fact a dead animal. Burnham once told me that it was not a cow, it was a Zebu bull and we joked about it, but in terms about the story itself, it just goes to show that you had to be accurate to the facts; you have to revisit the facts.
I do not think Mrs. Jagan was then at her post; the late Vincent Teekah was then acting as Editor and that story slipped past him. I doubt whether it would have slipped past Mrs. Jagan because she did not like to take these risks to make … you know, the sensational side of the story - a mighty story. It was just a little blurb - a sensational blurb over a cow. But for her, a cow might not have been important enough to get at the headlines of the newspaper.
Mr. Gordon Mosley: Up to a couple of years ago, she was still writing articles about press freedom. She wrote articles in the MIRROR; Letters to the Editor of STABROEK NEWS. As a press freedom fighter, how do you see Mrs. Jagan's role in the media?
Mr. Moses V Nagamootoo: For many years we battled with the term whether we were reporters, whether we were journalists or propagandists. I remember Ricky Singh and some others, whenever we met in the Caribbean, they always would look a little at us as propagandists, because the MIRROR had been seen as an organ of the PPP, which it was not.
But really and truly, in a particular historical frame, [the importance of] the MIRROR, the CATHOLIC STANDARD and later with the advent of the STABROEK NEWS and organs like DAY CLEAN, had come about as part of the unfolding drama of the denial of human rights, the denial of press freedom particularly between the 1973 and 1979 period. There was in fact a very intense period for those six/seven years when we saw journalists being victimized; we saw the closure of the newspaper - the MIRROR; the restrictions on CATHOLIC STANDARD; denial of newsprint; the use of libel as a political weapon and the harassment of these broadsheets; so that Mrs. Jagan had a ring-side view of the political fight. And we felt that the fight for the defence for press freedom was in fact the fight for civil liberties in Guyana and was part of the larger struggle for the restoration of democracy.
So her struggle as the editor of the newspaper had to be seen in that context of the wider struggle that had culminated in 1992 in the first free and fair elections in the post independence period.
Now as the Editor of the THUNDER, which she became periodically, and which post she held up to her last breadth, she was in fact articulating the party's ideological position, because THUNDER was quarterly; it was the theoretical and political journal; it was meant for discussion; it was meant for the party's rank to look at how the party was interpreting events and sometimes, Gordon, when you hear people talked about why the PPP supporters remained steadfast to the PPP and people tend to say it was probably because of the ethnic pattern and cleavages in Guyana, (of course that may have part of the explanation, because of the evolution of our politics along ethnic lines), but what is missing is the fact that the PPP has almost a tradition of educating its members ideologically and making them conscious.
So part of the pattern of loyalty came about because of this kind of education of its ranks and a consciousness started to develop along certain lines. And the THUNDER was seen in that light. In fact, just before Mrs. Jagan fell ill - in fact she was ill - she wrote me a note telling me that she had a fractured arm and her shoulder was in cast, but that she was still writing me the note. I have that note asking my permission to use an article I had written on the death of Dr. Jagan in the THUNDER. I know she was considering very highly a speech made by the Speaker of the National Assembly, Mr. Ralph Ramkarran, who delivered a lecture on Cheddi Jagan - “At Home with Cheddi Jagan”.
This is a masterful piece, it is a profound analysis of the times and how Dr. Jagan would have seen the financial melt-down; how he would have taken a Marxist view of the crisis and what he might have done in the context of the situation. And so Mrs. Jagan was looking at that for inclusion - my article plus the Speaker's speech in the current edition of the THUNDER. So she died at her post trying to put out the THUNDER. In fact, in more recent times the THUNDER came out only because of Mrs. Jagan's insistence that it should be kept alive.
Mr. Gordon Mosley: Now pointing to the Jagan's legacy, would the party want Guyana to follow that political ideology. What does this mean or what could this mean to the party? Do you think that the party stand firm on this?
Mr. Moses V Nagamootoo: Well, the loss of the Jagans - Cheddi and Janet Jagan - would in fact create a void and I do not think it will be easy for anyone to fill that void. What the Jagans had done was to blend a tradition of political struggles rooted in the working people, which we call the working class, not into a kind of orthodoxy, an ideological orthodoxy, because we have evolved, and over time the PPP has moved from a position where it was advocating a socialist development that was based on centrally controlled economy to a mixed economy. So it has evolved into incorporating a capitalist mode within the general scheme of things.
And so in this partnership model, you find that it has evolved a political tradition and it is this tradition that has to be maintained if we want to speak about the Jagans' legacy, and the tradition has to be the way we empathised with the poor; and the way we carry forward their struggle for national unity.
I know even though I had disagreements at the political level with Mrs. Jagan, in fact I felt that she had made some bad judgment, but I do not hold it against her; I consider her to be a very remarkable fighter; a very heroic woman fighter; a third world leader who stuck to her guns in the main. But tactics is a different question. What I am talking now is how to try to promote that legacy that one day will see us have a State of national democracy. And the concept of the national democracy that was enunciated by Cheddi Jagan is that it must be a multi-racial, a multi-party and a multi-class State. In other words, you must have inclusiveness rather than exclusiveness, and the governance that we are talking about must now require the fullest bi-partisan cooperation between the major political parties, because that is how we will bring about unity between the major races or amongst the major races.
So that having or not having the Jagans, (in fact we will be better off if we have the Jagans, but unfortunately life does not go on forever) and so we have to now build on their political legacy and that legacy has to be carried forward in a methodological and a serious way. It must be qualitatively different from what we have seen in the past, because if we have a mandate from the Jagans, the singular mandate would be to unify this country to bring not only stability, but also to bring peace. Because you may have perceived stability, but at the bottom you will still the schisms among our peoples and we do not want that to persist, because in the crisis that is rocking the world and that will have an impact on Guyana, one thing would be clear: It is that we survive or we do not survive depending whether or not we have a firewall built by the people - a social fire wall of cohesion.
And I would think that Mrs. Jagan would be remembered for her contribution towards that. Even though a native born American, she came into what is literally a “jungle” in South America; she was a Caucasian white in a native black or brown country and she sought to use her political skills, talent, struggles to cement us into one nation. And so I think that the PPP would best serve the legacy of the Jagans, first of all, to unify the leadership of the party; to ensure that those who have in fact been part of that tradition play their fullest role in the leadership of the party so that we can in fact realize in the shortest possible time those dreams and visions of the Jagans from whence they started in the 1940s.
Thank you.
(Extracts aired on March 30 and April 2, 2009)
INTERVIEW BY CAPITAL NEWS TV
SURVIVAL DEPENDS ON WHETHER OR NOT WE HAVE A FIREWALL BUILT BY THE PEOPLE - A SOCIAL FIRE WALL OF COHESION.
Source
Mr. Gordon Mosley: You worked with Ms. Jagan for many years in politics and journalism. What do you remember best of her?
Mr. Moses V Nagamootoo: Well, the first thing I would recall is about going after the truth. I worked with her for an unbroken period between 1970 and 1992 - those twenty-two years, unbroken, until I became Minister of Information.
I can tell you one thing is that she had a legend that reads never knowingly tell a lie. She would vet the stories and use the old, almost worn out, but old and tested guide in doubt find out. It is an amazing thing that Mrs. Jagan who has been a consummate politician, a very hard taskmaster when it comes to making political compromises, that when she was with the MIRROR she would ask us all to exclude any personal hatred for our opponents so that if I wrote an article that is disparaging of someone, because there was a perceived political bias, she would quickly cross it out.
I recall once, when Richard Nixon, the President of the United States, died. (I would usually write the Headlines for the newspaper and I would invariably read all of her Editorials for the political line. We shared our political views and we were both in the leadership of the party and I have had this position of being the party's chief spokesperson; I would not like to say propagandist, and so I have always insisted on the line being kept in terms of the party politics.) And I had a headline NIXON KICKS THE BUCKET and I remembered that she was highly offended by that.
Now here was a woman who would have been writing scathing attacks on Nixon, because of the War in Vietnam and after the Watergate scandal, et cetera, and still could not countenance her co-worker, her Editorial Assistant, using an insolent headline, because she had stuck to her guns that you must be respectful of your opponents. Maybe her opponents were not respectful of her, but I know that as a journalistic standard that she kept to that.
We ran into trouble occasionally with libel. There was a story I wrote PM's Cow Electrocuted (and that was the infamous libel suit where Mr. Burnham, then Prime Minister, sued us). It was my article. Burnham once told me in Parliament in creolese “boy is wah a do you” that you wrote that story. In substance there was in fact a dead animal. Burnham once told me that it was not a cow, it was a Zebu bull and we joked about it, but in terms about the story itself, it just goes to show that you had to be accurate to the facts; you have to revisit the facts.
I do not think Mrs. Jagan was then at her post; the late Vincent Teekah was then acting as Editor and that story slipped past him. I doubt whether it would have slipped past Mrs. Jagan because she did not like to take these risks to make … you know, the sensational side of the story - a mighty story. It was just a little blurb - a sensational blurb over a cow. But for her, a cow might not have been important enough to get at the headlines of the newspaper.
Mr. Gordon Mosley: Up to a couple of years ago, she was still writing articles about press freedom. She wrote articles in the MIRROR; Letters to the Editor of STABROEK NEWS. As a press freedom fighter, how do you see Mrs. Jagan's role in the media?
Mr. Moses V Nagamootoo: For many years we battled with the term whether we were reporters, whether we were journalists or propagandists. I remember Ricky Singh and some others, whenever we met in the Caribbean, they always would look a little at us as propagandists, because the MIRROR had been seen as an organ of the PPP, which it was not.
But really and truly, in a particular historical frame, [the importance of] the MIRROR, the CATHOLIC STANDARD and later with the advent of the STABROEK NEWS and organs like DAY CLEAN, had come about as part of the unfolding drama of the denial of human rights, the denial of press freedom particularly between the 1973 and 1979 period. There was in fact a very intense period for those six/seven years when we saw journalists being victimized; we saw the closure of the newspaper - the MIRROR; the restrictions on CATHOLIC STANDARD; denial of newsprint; the use of libel as a political weapon and the harassment of these broadsheets; so that Mrs. Jagan had a ring-side view of the political fight. And we felt that the fight for the defence for press freedom was in fact the fight for civil liberties in Guyana and was part of the larger struggle for the restoration of democracy.
So her struggle as the editor of the newspaper had to be seen in that context of the wider struggle that had culminated in 1992 in the first free and fair elections in the post independence period.
Now as the Editor of the THUNDER, which she became periodically, and which post she held up to her last breadth, she was in fact articulating the party's ideological position, because THUNDER was quarterly; it was the theoretical and political journal; it was meant for discussion; it was meant for the party's rank to look at how the party was interpreting events and sometimes, Gordon, when you hear people talked about why the PPP supporters remained steadfast to the PPP and people tend to say it was probably because of the ethnic pattern and cleavages in Guyana, (of course that may have part of the explanation, because of the evolution of our politics along ethnic lines), but what is missing is the fact that the PPP has almost a tradition of educating its members ideologically and making them conscious.
So part of the pattern of loyalty came about because of this kind of education of its ranks and a consciousness started to develop along certain lines. And the THUNDER was seen in that light. In fact, just before Mrs. Jagan fell ill - in fact she was ill - she wrote me a note telling me that she had a fractured arm and her shoulder was in cast, but that she was still writing me the note. I have that note asking my permission to use an article I had written on the death of Dr. Jagan in the THUNDER. I know she was considering very highly a speech made by the Speaker of the National Assembly, Mr. Ralph Ramkarran, who delivered a lecture on Cheddi Jagan - “At Home with Cheddi Jagan”.
This is a masterful piece, it is a profound analysis of the times and how Dr. Jagan would have seen the financial melt-down; how he would have taken a Marxist view of the crisis and what he might have done in the context of the situation. And so Mrs. Jagan was looking at that for inclusion - my article plus the Speaker's speech in the current edition of the THUNDER. So she died at her post trying to put out the THUNDER. In fact, in more recent times the THUNDER came out only because of Mrs. Jagan's insistence that it should be kept alive.
Mr. Gordon Mosley: Now pointing to the Jagan's legacy, would the party want Guyana to follow that political ideology. What does this mean or what could this mean to the party? Do you think that the party stand firm on this?
Mr. Moses V Nagamootoo: Well, the loss of the Jagans - Cheddi and Janet Jagan - would in fact create a void and I do not think it will be easy for anyone to fill that void. What the Jagans had done was to blend a tradition of political struggles rooted in the working people, which we call the working class, not into a kind of orthodoxy, an ideological orthodoxy, because we have evolved, and over time the PPP has moved from a position where it was advocating a socialist development that was based on centrally controlled economy to a mixed economy. So it has evolved into incorporating a capitalist mode within the general scheme of things.
And so in this partnership model, you find that it has evolved a political tradition and it is this tradition that has to be maintained if we want to speak about the Jagans' legacy, and the tradition has to be the way we empathised with the poor; and the way we carry forward their struggle for national unity.
I know even though I had disagreements at the political level with Mrs. Jagan, in fact I felt that she had made some bad judgment, but I do not hold it against her; I consider her to be a very remarkable fighter; a very heroic woman fighter; a third world leader who stuck to her guns in the main. But tactics is a different question. What I am talking now is how to try to promote that legacy that one day will see us have a State of national democracy. And the concept of the national democracy that was enunciated by Cheddi Jagan is that it must be a multi-racial, a multi-party and a multi-class State. In other words, you must have inclusiveness rather than exclusiveness, and the governance that we are talking about must now require the fullest bi-partisan cooperation between the major political parties, because that is how we will bring about unity between the major races or amongst the major races.
So that having or not having the Jagans, (in fact we will be better off if we have the Jagans, but unfortunately life does not go on forever) and so we have to now build on their political legacy and that legacy has to be carried forward in a methodological and a serious way. It must be qualitatively different from what we have seen in the past, because if we have a mandate from the Jagans, the singular mandate would be to unify this country to bring not only stability, but also to bring peace. Because you may have perceived stability, but at the bottom you will still the schisms among our peoples and we do not want that to persist, because in the crisis that is rocking the world and that will have an impact on Guyana, one thing would be clear: It is that we survive or we do not survive depending whether or not we have a firewall built by the people - a social fire wall of cohesion.
And I would think that Mrs. Jagan would be remembered for her contribution towards that. Even though a native born American, she came into what is literally a “jungle” in South America; she was a Caucasian white in a native black or brown country and she sought to use her political skills, talent, struggles to cement us into one nation. And so I think that the PPP would best serve the legacy of the Jagans, first of all, to unify the leadership of the party; to ensure that those who have in fact been part of that tradition play their fullest role in the leadership of the party so that we can in fact realize in the shortest possible time those dreams and visions of the Jagans from whence they started in the 1940s.
Thank you.
(Extracts aired on March 30 and April 2, 2009)
