British Guiana: Terror in the Sugar Cane

Near British Guiana's capital of Georgetown last week, East Indian terrorists attacked sugar-cane cutters with acid bombs and rifles. In the capital, city officials decided against holding the customary public ceremony as Sir Richard Luyt, the colony's new British-appointed Governor, replaced Sir Ralph Grey, who is moving on to the Bahamas. To prevent riots, the swearing-in ceremony took place on a Georgetown wharf only a few feet from the Canadian ship that brought Sir Richard from Trinidad. Once again, the fuse was lit in British Guiana, and holding the match—as usual—was Marxist Premier Cheddi Jagan.

In 2½ years, as head of the self-governing South American colony, Jagan has developed into a curious combination of Castroite and racist, preaching Communism while leading some 290,000 East Indians against 330,000 anti-Jagan Negroes and whites split between two major parties. Full independence was expected this year or next. But last October, after eleven weeks of strikes and violence, Colonial Secretary Duncan Sandys indefinitely postponed complete freedom for the tiny, strife-torn land. Sandys ordered new elections by the end of 1964, and decreed that they would be held under proportional representation instead of the simple majority rule that Jagan prefers. Sandys' obvious hope is to encourage party coalitions, thus weakening Jagan's power. Jagan's response has been to cripple the country's economy and bring British Guiana to the verge of civil war.

Partly to force Britain to call off the election and partly to force sugar producers to recognize his two-year-old Guyana Agricultural Workers Union, Jagan sent his union out on strike at the beginning of February. Though the GAWU is smaller than the anti-Jagan Manpower Citizens Association, which speaks for 60% of the colony's 25,000 sugar workers, it makes up in terror what it lacks in size. Its men dynamited irrigation aqueducts, pay offices and watch posts on 41 cane properties, put thousands of acres of unharvested cane to the torch, and bombed 33 homes of anti-Jagan Negroes and East Indians. Gangs of strikers waged pitched battles with nonstriking workers, injuring more than 50.

Last week, as more and more sugar workers stayed home out of fear, only six of the colony's eleven sugar factories were still grinding, and those six were only operating part-time. If the strike goes on much longer, there will be no hope at all of producing the usual 300,000 to 400,000 tons of sugar that represent a large part of the colony's foreign exchange. "So far, our strike has been partial," said a Jagan union leader last week. "From now on, it is a general strike."