We live our lives in a certain pattern, from day to day, and there are institutional realities which we take for granted. We assume these realities are etched in stone, but they are not, not really.
Everything we see is based on the commitment of human beings. If that commitment fails, for whatever the reason(s), then a vacuum is created. In a vacuum, any number can play.
In July of 1919, a rebellion led by British Honduran soldiers who had returned from the Middle Eastern campaign of World War I, destroyed the authority of the institutional realities here. The Governor, the Chief Justice, the Commissioner of Police, all these traditional authority posts in the colony lost their power. They became mere titles. Real power lay in the streets of Belize, the capital of the colony.
When they managed to recover power, the expatriate establishment basically pretended, apart from sending people to jail, that what had happened, never did. There was no written history of the 1919 rebellion. After a while, it became as if it had never occurred.
On May 29, 1972, a demonstration in Belize City organized by UBAD became violent in the night. The violence began with the stoning of the Guatemalan Consulate, which was on Albert Street (between Church and Bishop Streets) at the time. The evidence in Supreme Court five months later indicated that a UBAD officer and two UBAD members had taken matters further than Albert and Regent Streets, where mass violence against stores and commercial establishments had taken place. Norman Fairweather, Edwardo Burns and Michael Hyde (deceased) were acquitted by jury of attempted arson and damage to public property in the October 1972 session of the Supreme Court. The Crown prosecution charged, among other things, that the UBAD trio had attacked and battered Radio Belize transmitting equipment on Princess Margaret Drive.
Because of this newspaper, May 29, 1972 has remained as a memory in the consciousness of Belizeans. But those Belizeans who participated in that outburst had absolutely no knowledge of what had happened in July 1919. Because they knew not history, they were condemned to repeat it, as it is said.
A night or two before the state of emergency was declared on Thursday, April 2, 1981, a group of Belizeans who had been demonstrating in the streets outside the Radio Belize broadcast studio and offices, gained access to the inside of the building and found themselves inside Radio Belize proper. This is a story which has never been told. I have never read it in a newspaper or heard it discussed on radio or television.
My sources have said that two of those people who were inside Radio Belize were Nuri Muhammad and Sandra Coye. There was normally security at the entrance to the Albert Cattouse building. The Radio Belize section was on the third floor, if I remember correctly. Ordinarily, the security was minimal, token. But one assumes it would have been strengthened at the time, because this was during the Heads of Agreement uprising, and the streets were angry. Everyone knew that Radio Belize was a favorite target of anti-government demonstrators.
I suppose, technically speaking, that there was a crime involved with (forcibly?) entering the Albert Cattouse building and the Radio Belize section. Perhaps that is why no one has ever spoken. But there is no public record, to the best of my knowledge, of the security’s having been overpowered. The place was open for the taking. Remember now, I am speculating. And what I keep wondering about is why the principals have never said anything about what happened that night at Radio Belize. Personally, I am curious.
Over the weekend, I was thinking of those things, and of some personal experiences over the years, because I am sensing that Belize is becoming unstable in different ways. Consider this, for instance. When we think of the problems some African states are having, such as the Congo and the Sudan and Somalia, and when we remember what Liberia and Sierra Leone and Rwanda and others have been through, we know that we have heard and keep hearing of “child soldiers.” We read books and see movies about the children who are murdered and become murderers in those countries that some scholars refer to as “failed states.” You never stop to think, Belizeans, that we have child soldiers right here in Belize City. And they murder and are being murdered. They carry guns almost as big as themselves.
Belize appears to be a functional and successful parliamentary democracy, but we are actually not that far away from an abyss. You don’t know me as a crywolf. The things I say are the things that are real, and the things that are proven real. The people at the top of our social pyramid, those who represent institutional authority, have been almost totally corrupted. And the people at the base of the pyramid, the masses of the people, have known this for some years now. The corruption never gets any better: it always gets worse.
And then, there are the warlords. Drug dons. Missing people. Unidentified, decomposed and decomposing bodies. Bales drifting in the sea. Planes in the jungle. Terrified witnesses. How about disappearing containers? And foreign soldiers in civvies with unlicensed guns?
It just gets scarier and scarier. But still, Belizean, you trod on with your 9 to 5. The children have to eat. This is the only way you know how. Stop a while. You must fight for the power. Your power. You must.
All power to the people.