‘Ironfist’ rule over Guyana *

‘Ironfist’ rule over Guyana *
Published on Mar 27, 2016, 2:00 am AST
By Andy Johnson


DURING the turbulent years of the late 1960s and the first half of the 1970s, Caribbean supporters and sympathisers of Communism cited the Baltic state of Albania as one such country to be emulated.

In a biography soon to be published about the life and times of Albanian leader Enver Hoxia, he is painted as a ruthless dictator who killed many of his closest friends and associates, or drove others to suicide.

A journalist interviewed last week by the BBC about the book, and the times it describes, said thousands of Albanians suffered severe hardships and privations, but had no choice but to support the regime.

They were too terrified to complain.

At the height of Hoxia's rule, it was revealed that two-thirds of the population worked for the security forces in some way or the other.

“Everybody was spying on everybody else,” the BBC interviewer heard.

Hoxia is said to have died in 1985 as an “incomparably severe” autocrat who practised a “particularly brutal brand of Stalinism”.

The book, by Albanian journalist Blendi Fevziu, is subtitled The Ironfist of Albania.

THE internationally acclaimed Guyanese historian and poli­tical activist Dr Walter Rodney was killed in Georgetown on June 13, 1980, in circumstan­ces shrouded in controversy, and claims of a government conspiracy and cover-up.


After 34 years, a commission of enquiry was launched in 2014.


In a report delivered to the Guyana president in February 2016, the com­mission con­clu­­ded that the tragedy was indeed the result of a govern­ment conspiracy and cover- up, with questions leading all the way to the then president of Guyana, the late Linden Forbes Sampson Burnham.


The 196-page document is laden with gripping details about what witnesses testi­fied to as the making of a repressive state, the politicisa­tion of the civil service and the police, the militarisation of the society, and the subjection of trade unions to the paramountcy of the ruling party.


This is the second in a four-part series on the report.