27.2 C
Belize City
Friday, March 29, 2024

World Down Syndrome Day

Photo: Students and staff of Stella Maris...

BPD awards 3 officers with Women Police of the Year

Photo: (l-r) Myrna Pena, Carmella Cacho, and...

Suicide on the rise!

Photo: Iveth Quintanilla, Mental Health Coordinator by Charles...

Three anniversaries

EditorialThree anniversaries
Belize should have marked three important anniversaries this year. The first was the Heads of Agreement of March/April 1981; the second was the thirtieth anniversary of Belize’s political independence in September of 1981; and the third was the fiftieth anniversary of Hurricane Hattie on October 31, 1961. 
   
There is no doubt now, with the surety of hindsight, that Kremandala should have, on its own, made sure that the events surrounding the Heads of Agreement were given the anniversary importance due them. We should have known that neither the ruling UDP or the Opposition PUP would have cared to sponsor or encourage public conversation about the Heads. We allowed all the energy to build towards the independence anniversary in September. This energy swept away everything before it, because there is money to be made by the private sector in September, the PUP can choose to recall those celebration moments they want to highlight from the independence ceremonies, and the UDP, as the government, can orchestrate the whole of the September celebrations to suit its agenda and emphasize its authority/mandate.
   
In the midst of the September celebrations, on Friday, September 9 at the Holy Redeemer Parish Hall, this newspaper is sponsoring an all-day conference of Belizean writers, artists, musicians and intellectuals. This is a first of its kind, and the purpose of the conference is more towards contemplation and conversation than celebration. The importance of the conference will be that some historical and other issues will be discussed in a public forum which the electoral politicians have been assiduously avoiding.
   
Perhaps the third named anniversary, that of Hurricane Hattie, will enter the September 9 conference conversation, because all of us Belizeans can see now that Hurricane Hattie changed Belize in dramatic and irreversible ways. In 1961, we were totally innocent in little Belize. We knew very, very little about Jim Crow segregation in the United States, nothing about Mandela and apartheid, and we were ignorant of the fact that a very bloody conflict called the Caste War had been fought to the immediate north of British Honduras between 1847 and 1903. We knew almost nothing about the Mexican Revolution, which began in 1910. There was no television, a single, government–controlled radio station, and, overall, a small, intimidated media. A lot of important things began to change after Hattie.
   
Today, however, we want to consider again why both the UDP and PUP politicians don’t want the Heads of Agreement to be discussed. The main reason, we submit, is probably the fact that the Heads of Agreement are not dead: some of the Heads are very much alive, and the others are only in a state of suspended animation, so to speak. The Heads of Agreement, you see, represented exactly how the United States of America and the United Kingdom wished for the Guatemalan claim to Belize to be “resolved.” When you speak about the United States and the United Kingdom, you are speaking about very, very big people. Belize is small, and Belize is weak. These are the power realities.
   
Belize was really nothing much in this region until oil fields were identified here a few years before Hattie. Belizeans were a small population in a colony with a lot of fertile land; rivers, waterways and seas teeming with fish and other marine life; and the largest Barrier Reef in the Western Hemisphere. British Honduras was virgin, because the British had been the world’s most powerful empire for much of the nineteenth century and during the first half of the twentieth. British Honduras, for the British, was like a lush farm which an absentee rich man maintains, but visits only infrequently.
   
When the Guatemalans began to press a claim to the colony in the late 1930s, claiming that the British had violated a treaty signed in 1859, the concern of the majority, black population in British Honduras was, in the first instance, an ethnic concern. They considered Guatemala to be “Spanish,” and were fearful of such a rule. In their wars with Germany (1914-1918 and 1939-1945), the British, in their understated and an unpublicized way, had reached out to their “colored” possessions, including British Honduras, for fighting bodies, especially in 1940 and thereafter. In 1950, however, living conditions in British Honduras were so bad that the majority of our people rose up against British colonialism.
   
In 2011, the Belizean fear of Guatemala is not a question of raw ethnicity, because Hattie reduced the blacks from a confident majority to a dwindling minority. The issue in Belize today is ideological, or sociological. The promise of the nationalist revolution in Belize was a more fair and egalitarian society, with Belizean sovereignty and territorial integrity. Since independence, however, a wealthy elite class has clearly emerged, and the division between that class and the masses is stark. In Guatemala, that is precisely the nature of their society. There is a First World standard of living in Guatemala enjoyed by the oligarchs, generals, industrialists, businessmen, latifundistas, and professional classes, while the Guatemalan masses, mostly indigenous people, are crushed by frightening levels of poverty.
  
The United States and the United Kingdom, on behalf of their oil companies, would not wish for Belize to become a revolutionary problem on Guatemala’s eastern and southern frontiers. They want Belize to maintain a society just like Guatemala’s – oligarchical, free enterprise, and indifferent to the suffering of the masses. At the leadership levels of both the UDP and the PUP, there is no real problem with the plans of the “Friends of Belize.” It is only the people who have a problem with these plans. That is why it was the people who fought against the Heads of Agreement in 1981. And, that is why the thirtieth anniversary of the Heads came and went, and nothing was said at Independence Hall or BelChina Bridge. Only the people can save the people.
   
Power to the people. Power in the struggle.

Check out our other content

World Down Syndrome Day

Suicide on the rise!

Check out other tags:

International