Tributes to Janet Jagan
President Jagan goes: end of era in Guyana politics
by Rickey Singh
GEORGETOWN, CANA - An era of more than half a century in the robust politics of Guyana comes to an end Wednesday (August 8, 1999) with the resignation of President Janet Jagan and swearing-in of her 35-year-old Finance Minister, Bharrat Jagdeo, as the nation's new Head of State and Government.This dramatic development, of which the Guyanese people will officially learn Sunday evening (last night) in a nation-wide broadcast by the President, resulted from a mild heart attack the 78-year-old widow of President Cheddi Jagan suffered last month, and amid lingering doubts about her physical fitness to maintain the heavy responsibilities of public office.
President Jagan, speaking to CANA in a telephone interview ahead of her broadcast to the nation, said that her "great hope for the future of Guyana is for peace, unity and progress".
She said she was "confident that my colleagues in Government and the party (People's Progressive Party) will be guided by what is the best at all times for the people of our beloved nation, and I sincerely hope that they will receive the cooperation from all sectors of the Guyanese society".
The American-born Jagan was one of four founding members of the PPP, one of the oldest of parties in the Caribbean, and has had a long history of struggles in the social and political life of Guyana.
She also served in previous governments as Minister of Health and Labour, Minister of Home Affairs and after editing the Mirror newspaper for some 20 years, became Prime Minister following the death of President Cheddi Jagan in March 1997 from heart problems.
She led the party to a bigger victory in terms of popular votes at the December 1997 election for the PPP/Civic to retain control of the 65-member parliament. But has had to face constant opposition, including violent protests, from the main opposition People's National Congress.
To fulfil relevant constitutional requirements of resignations and appointments for a smooth transition from Jagan to Jagdeo, Prime Minister Samuel Hinds of the CIVIC component of the PPP/Civic administration, will tender his resignation Monday as Prime Minister to the President. She will then appoint Finance Minister Jagdeo, who has previously acted as Prime Minister, as the new Prime Minister.
By Wednesday, when Jagan tenders her resignation to the Speaker of Parliament, Derek Jagan - who happens to be her brother-in-law- she would have appointed Jagdeo as the country's new President and, consequently Head of State, Head of Government and Commander-in-Chief of the armed forces.
President Jagan said that the choice of Jagdeo was "fulfilment of a public pledge of our A-team, with the Finance Minister identified as a successor should it become necessary during this term of the PPP/Civic Government".
What happens for the next general election expected in 2001 is a matter for the party to determine when choosing the leader of its list of candidates.
The four most prominent names as presidential candidates for 2001, according to party insiders are: Jagdeo, Ralph Ramkarran, a leading lawyer who chaired the Constitution Reform Commission, Dr Roger Luncheon, Head of the Presidential Secretariat and Cabinet Secretary; and Moses Nagamootoo, Minister of Information.
The process of changing the presidency this week, President Jagan explained, "had the full backing of the PPP's Central Committee and the group of Civic representatives in the Government with whom the issues were fully discussed and agreed upon".
Jagdeo, an economist, whose political career started with the PPP as a 16-year-old high school student, will then re-appoint Hinds, a senior Minister of the Government, as Prime Minister and subsequently consider new cabinet appointments and changes.
As Finance Minister Jagdeo, who as President will be the youngest head of state in the entire Western Hemisphere, was a principal negotiator for debt reductions and soft loans and grants.
He said yesterday he would prefer to withhold comment until his inauguration on Wednesday, but felt "very humble and very honoured at the prospect of serving the nation for whatever period as President".
"It has been my good fortune to have grown up, like a lot of my leading cabinet and party colleagues at the feet of Cheddi and Janet Jagan and together we intend to build on the foundation laid".
Janet Jagan is a political pioneer
by C. Majeed
Please allow me some space in your valued columns to express my view.
At this historical juncture when we are observing significant milestones, it behoves us to pay tribute to the doyen amongst our womenfolk, namely Ms Janet Jagan.
She was instrumental in the formation of the first political women's organization in Guyana (WPO), having been one of the founding members and its first head. Due to the positive impact of her numerous achievements and contributions on the lives of her fellow Guyanese, she can best be described as the most influential women ever to have graced the political landscape of her adopted homeland.
Since the early days she, along with her world-renowned husband Dr C Jagan were viciously persecuted and harassed by the colonial regime because of their progressive ideas and for advancing the cause of the colony's independence.
The ruling party (PPP) which had been founded in 1950, by Cheddi and Janet among others, was robbed of political office in 1964. Subsequently a puppet clique was arbitrarily installed by traitors and their foreign paymasters.
During the PPP's celebrated term in office as the democratically-elected government of the people (1957-1961), Janet Jagan excelled in her portfolio as Minister of Labour, Health and Housing, which helped propel Guyana towards the zenith of its prosperity and potential.
Nine years ago on October 5, 1992, the PPP recorded a major victory, when the PPP/Civic coalition won the first free and fair polls since 1964. Through the preceding years, Ms Janet Jagan had proven herself to be not only a tireless fighter for furthering the cause of women's welfare and social upliftment, but also for the restoration of democracy which had been blatantly raped in the 1968 general elections, by the minority opposition.
In the run-up to the polls when Janet Jagan took over as Head of State following the 1997 elections, she was constantly vilified and ridiculed on account of her country of origin and ethnicity and declared unfit to be President by her notorious opponents; but this outstanding woman never lost resolve and continued the struggle successfully, thereby carving an indelible niche in the chapters of the nation's history for herself.
Veteran fighter and seasoned politician that she is, it is high time that we show due recognition, respect and gratefulness to her for her pioneering role in the political life of our country.
by William Steif. Aug 4, 2005At 85, former president Janet Rosenberg Jagan is still going strong.
Janet Rosenberg Jagan, an 85-year-old Jewish grandmother born and raised in Chicago, is an unlikely power broker in this remote country of 740,000 on the northern rim of South America, yet voters in Guyana are asking repeatedly who she will support in the presidential election set for early 2006.
Janet Jagan was elected president in 1997, shortly after the death of her husband, former President Cheddi Jagan, a lifelong Marxist. She resigned from office after less than two years after suffering a heart attack, and despite her worsening diabetes, she’s up and around these days, attending to business at her central Georgetown office.
"My allegiance is to my party," Jagan said. "It will decide who my candidate is."
She and her husband founded the People’s Progressive Party (PPP) in 1950, when Guyana was still a British colony known as British Guiana. Her office is on the second floor of PPP headquarters, a wooden building called Freedom House.
Jagan ducks a straight answer to the question of her support because some speculate that her son, Cheddi Jagan Jr., also known as Joey, will be a candidate. That would pit him against current President Bharrat Jagdeo, 41, who was Janet Jagan’s finance minister, and took over when she retired. Jagdeo was elected to a five-year presidential term in March 2001.
Family history
The odds of Jagan heading Guyana figured about a billion to one in 1920, the year she was born on Chicago’s South Side. Her father, Charles Rosenberg, was a plumbing and heating salesman. Both anti-Semitism and the Great Depression took its toll, Jagan says.
"Business was awful. My father could not make a good living," she recalled. But he did her an important favor. "He took me to the public library once a week. He got me reading a lot."
The family moved to Detroit during the Depression, enabling her to go to Detroit University, Wayne State and Michigan State, and in 1942 she was a nursing student at Chicago’s Cook County Hospital. She was a stunning brunette, and at a party one night, she met a handsome dental student from Northwestern University. He was a young man from British Guiana named Cheddi Jagan.
They fell in love and married, despite opposition from both sets of parents. In 1943, Cheddi returned to British Guiana to set up his dental practice. Janet stayed in Chicago, earning money as a proofreader for the American Medical Association and joining Cheddi in late December 1943.
They quickly became involved in politics. Plantation workers "always called on Cheddi" when they had problems, Jagan said, and soon they found themselves involved in the trade union movement. By 1947 workers came to her husband in hopes that he run for Parliament. He ran and won. Together, they helped sugar workers and bauxite workers in long strikes and after founding the PPP, Janet Jagan edited the party’s newspaper and was the first woman elected to the Georgetown City Council in 1950.
Politically active
In 1953, Rosenberg Jagan was elected to parliament and her husband was chief minister. The British "kicked us out after four and a half months," she says, "the Constitution was suspended and British marines were brought in."
Cheddi, of East Indian heritage, felt the heavy restrictions slapped on by the British rulers in early 1954. He was jailed for six months for traveling out of town. The day he was released, his wife was imprisoned "for attending a Hindu religious ceremony. The British called it a political meeting."
She spent almost six months in jail, though that did not shake her convictions.
"Cheddi and I always have believed in socialism. To us, that meant getting rid of oppression so the poor man can get out of this poverty and enjoy the fruits of the country," said Jagan.
The former head of state is one of the few white people in a country dominated by racial issues. About 48 percent of Guyana’s population is of East Indian descent. Another 36 percent are Afro-Guyanese, descendants of slaves brought by the Dutch before the British takeover. About 7 percent are Amerindian and the rest are Portuguese, Chinese or mixed.
In 1992, a quarter-century after Guyana achieved independence, Cheddi Jagan won a free and fair election as president, and Janet was named Guyana’s ambassador to the United Nations. When he died five years later, she became president — making her the first Jewish head of state in South American history.
Jagan believes there has been "lots of improvement" in Guyana in the last decade, though she notes "heavy migration" tends to hurt the country. "But we have to live with it," she says, referring to the Guyanese diaspora in which educated Guyanese go for "better jobs" to Canada, the United States and the Caribbean’s English-speaking islands. Proudly, she notes that the Guyanese are "99 percent literate."
She is especially proud of one of Cheddi Jagan’s programs, under which the government has provided about 60,000 housing lots for the poor at US$300 to $400 per lot. She noted that "education has improved tremendously" in recent years, the infant mortality has dropped and the country’s water supply is much safer.
Meanwhile, her 56-year-old son Joey — a dentist like his father — is starting his own political movement, the Unity Party. If the party takes off, Guyana could once again have a Jagan as its head of state, though Janet Jagan declined to speculate on her son’s chances of winning the next election.
"My son and I do not discuss these things at all," she said with a smile
GUYANA yesterday (Tuesday) cremated in an ordinary village cemetery its most famous adopted citizen--Janet Rosenberg Jagan--who had stoically defied all odds for some 66 years in the country's turbulent politics, from colonialism to republican, status, to become its first woman Executive President. She was 88.The warm tributes that flowed across political, religious and cultural boundaries, recognised the sterling contributions of a life deeply interwoven with the nation's social, economic and political developments.
Yet she managed to live comparatively simple, in and out of government, as she became increasingly identified with its arts and culture but always reflecting a dominant and unique political profile.
Fondly hailed, across Guyana, often by young and old, simply as "Janet", the widow of Dr Cheddi Jagan died early Saturday morning, within hours of admission at the state hospital in Georgetown.
That was the institution where Guyana's first Executive President, Forbes Burnham, had also passed away in 1985 following a throat operation. Janet's husband was to die 12 years later at the U.S. Walter Reed Hospital after heart surgery.
Symbolised as a personality of tremendous courage and endurance, the side of her character which had cherished privacy was allowed to prevail yesterday in a relatively low-key state funeral arranged by the government, in consultation with family members.
The funeral arrangement honoured her wish against public viewing of the body in the casket and the restricted official ceremony of tributes at Parliament Building before her final journey to the place where her husband, the late Dr Cheddi Jagan, was cremated--approximately 90 miles east of Georgetown, at Babu John in Port Mourant, Corentyne, following his death in office as Head of State in March 1997.
Babu John is now regarded as a shrine for remembrance of the Jagans -- the husband and wife team whose lives and politics are integrally woven into the history of Guyana for generations to come.
In life she was most unkindly treated by opponents whose political opportunism, depending on the political season, would extend to exploiting her ethnicity (whiteness) and original (American) nationality; and even her gender with some grotesque display of "white dolls" at one point of an emotional campaign during her presidency.
Nevertheless, even her most formidable opponents came to recognise her resilience to remain engaged, as she repressed bitterness in preference for dialogue in the national interest
Puzzling matter
Why Janet Jagan was never invited to be a recipient of the CARICOM Triennial Award for Women -- established in 1984 to recognise women of the region who had distinguished themselves in various leadership roles --remains a puzzling matter and one for which an explanation by the Community's decision-makers may be appropriate.The region's leading women's organisations could also reflect on this glaring oversight -- if indeed it was just that! She, of course, held no grudges against those Caribbean women in public life who have been so honoured by CARICOM. Indeed she had joined in recognising their contributions, including as long-serving editor of the PPP-aligned ‘Mirror’ newspaper.
This was the region's unique woman politician who had sacrificed almost two years of her presidency under a so-called "Hermandston Accord" that was to result from CARICOM's initiative to broker a post-election impasse between her government and an opposition then led by the now late Leader of the People's National Congress Reform, Desmond Hoyte.
On reflection, that CARICOM "accord" was seriously flawed in unfairly seeking a reduction of her government's legitimate five-year term, considering the controversial 28-year-long one-party rule of the PNC. The PPP went on, nevertheless, to retain power at the succeeding 2001 general election.
To the mass of rural Guyanese of East Indian descent, Janet Jagan was the charming, blue-eyed white "bhowgie" (sister-in-law) as wife of the dentist/politician "big brother", Cheddi Jagan, they had come to enthusiastically embrace following the couple's initial foray in the politics of colonial British Guiana in the late 1940s.
For the rest of the country, and across ethnic boundaries, she was to later emerge as a breath of fresh air in a huge struggle against colonial oppression and grave social injustices, fighting alongside icons who have long passed away -- such as the veteran trade union leader and National Hero, Hubert Nathaniel Critchlow.
Political prisoner
But within ten years of her marriage in 1943 to Cheddi Jagan at age 22, the young United States-born nursing assistant of Chicago, Illinois, who had given up country and parents to follow her heart of love and share the political passion of Cheddi Jagan, was to be branded a "communist" by the colonial power and jailed for six months.Like her husband, and Guyana's most famous poet, Martin Carter, she was imprisoned and later placed under curfew by the British Governor for unsubstantiated allegations of involvement in an international “communist conspiracy” to disrupt the rule of law.
It was a spurious excuse for Britain's suspension of the first-ever popularly elected government, led b the People's Progressive Party (PPP).
That was the party she had helped to launch in 1949 and which was to become a virtual life's work for this remarkable woman politician of the Caribbean region for almost 66 of her 88 years.
During the very painful, challenging, turbulent political years, Janet Jagan stoically suffered the slings and arrows of opponents as she kept scaling hurdles to set a unique record of firsts in the politics of Guyana.
Finally, she was to reach the pinnacle as first woman Head of State in December 1997, following the death in office of her husband on March 6, after first serving as Prime Minister.
Yesterday, after two days of mourning, and consistent with her wishes, Janet Rosenberg Jagan, the once petite Jewish girl who became the symbol of woman's power in the land of her adoption; a founder-matriarch of the PPP; mother of a daughter and son and grandma of five, was cremated.
She has left behind a governing party, currently in its fourth consecutive term, to face a future without the dominant presence and influence of either herself or its patriarch that had prevailed for the past half century of the PPP's existence.
