On New Year’s night thirty-eight years ago, a group of young university graduates carried placards and demonstrated on North Front Street in front of the Eden Cinema. The Belizean graduates and intellectuals – including Assad Shoman, Said Musa, Evan Hyde, Lionel del Valle (deceased), Derek Courtenay, Ronald Clarke (deceased), and others, said that they were objecting to the showing of an American movie named “The Green Berets,” which extolled the United States’ war effort in Vietnam.
Six years later, in 1975, the United States gave up and admitted defeat in Vietnam. By that time, Messrs. Shoman and Musa were standard bearers and officials within the ruling People’s United Party of Belize.
The people of Belize had a good idea of what the PUP stood for, what it represented, but in 1969 the masses of the Belizean people were surprised, quizzical or skeptical about the demonstration of the so-called “Ad Hoc Committee For The Truth About Vietnam.” It was the first time in the colony’s history that university graduates had taken to the streets to make a political statement. Looking back, the Ad Hoc Committee ushered a more modern, more sophisticated kind of politics into Belize.
But, the most important thing about the Ad Hoc Committee, in retrospect, is that it marked the political debut of the man who is the Prime Minister of Belize, Rt. Hon. Said Wilbert Musa. At the time of the Ad Hoc Committee, the man who was the moving force and leading figure in the group was Assad Shoman, Said Musa’s best friend. Assad Shoman withdrew from electoral politics in 1984 after he lost his Cayo North seat to Dito Juan. But Musa, who lost his Fort George seat in 1984 to Dean Lindo, remained in politics. He regained his seat in 1989, was elected PUP Leader in 1996, and then became Prime Minister in August of 1998 after leading the PUP to the most overwhelming general election victory in Belize’s post-independence history.
It may be that Said never shared all of Assad’s flamboyant militancy and scientific socialism. Perhaps Said was more a friend to Assad than a fellow traveler of Assad’s. The thing is that as we look at eight plus years of Said Musa’s leadership of Belize, none of us Belizeans could have foreseen that this would be the way he would lead when we considered what he stood for on New Year’s night in 1969.
Politics is many things, but it is certainly not religious, and it is definitely not truth. So this essay is not a morality trial. What it is, is an attempt to encapsulate and juxtapose the Said Musa of 1969 and the Said Musa of 2007.
Many thousands of Belizeans have been born and have grown up in the thirty-eight years since 1969. It appears to us that those younger Belizeans are not Said Musa fans. Would the Said Musa of 1969 be a fan of the Said Musa of 2007?
Men grow, and they mature. And yes, they change. But there are some fundamentals in a man’s life he holds sacred. As Mr. Musa prepares for general elections which he is likely to lose, and lose disastrously, this year of 2007 will be a year when he looks within himself and does serious soul searching. The Catholics call it an “examination of conscience.” Who am I and what do I stand for?
Two months ago, the Society for the Promotion of Education and Research (SPEAR) released the results of a poll which showed that Prime Minister Musa’s popularity among the Belizean people is alarmingly low. The SPEAR poll must give the Prime Minister pause, because that was their second poll, and the results of the first poll were vindicated by the statistics in the March 1 national municipal elections of 2006.
There is an irony here. SPEAR was founded in 1969 by the same Ad Hoc Committee group we referred to earlier – Shoman, Musa, Hyde, del Valle, etc. In a sense, then, it is as if a voice from Mr. Musa’s past has spoken to him. Yesterday when we were young …