Forbes Burnham

Forbes Burnham was the ruler of Guyana from 1964 until he died in office in August 1985, prime minister from the last colonial election and president from 1980. He was the barrister whom the British and the Americans put in place of Jagan because Jagan was a Marxist and Burnham could be relied on. He then took the country further to the left than Jagan would have dared and kept it there by rigging every election he held. The rise was the split of 1955. He had been Jagan's chairman in the People's Progressive Party that won the first universal-suffrage election of 1953 and was removed by British troops after a hundred and thirty-three days. When the party divided he took the African half and founded the People's National Congress. It could not beat Jagan's Indian majority until the British changed the voting system to proportional representation in 1964, at American urging. Burnham governed in coalition and then, from the election of 1968, with ballots cast by overseas voters who did not exist, alone. The state was the cooperative republic declared in 1970. The bauxite was nationalised in 1971 and the sugar in 1976. The state owned four fifths of the economy. There were the paramountcy of the party over the state written into the doctrine, and the constitution of 1980 that made him an executive president. There was the referendum of 1978 that approved it with a turnout the churches put at a seventh of the claimed. There was the non-alignment that took him to Havana and made Guyana the staging post for the Cuban troops flying to Angola. There were the ban on imported wheat and the flour queues, the emigration of a third of the population, and the House of Israel cult he used as a militia. There was the Jonestown settlement he had welcomed, where nine hundred and eighteen Americans died in November 1978. There was the historian Walter Rodney, his sharpest critic, killed by a bomb in a walkie-talkie in June 1980. A commission in 2016 said the state had done. He was born in Kitty, Georgetown, the son of a headmaster. He won the Guiana scholarship to London, took his law degree and was called at Gray's Inn. He came home in 1949 to Jagan's movement. He died on the operating table at Georgetown hospital during a throat operation by Cuban surgeons. He was embalmed in Moscow and laid in a mausoleum in the botanical gardens. The election of December 1985 that his successor Hoyte held was, the observers said, as rigged as his own.

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