Imagine that the High Commissioner of the former slave holding empire, the United Kingdom, essentially threatening the descendants of the people they enslaved for centuries in Guyana with sanctions if they do not capitulate to their desire to have a man categorized by one of his own as an ideological racist and the most racist leader to emerge in the world in the 21st Century, ordering their lives over the next five years. I mean, they knew that he was, at the very least, criminally negligent in not living up to his legal responsibility under the UN charter to ensure that every citizen was entitled to due process and the presumption of innocence. That is a crime of omission, and ignored by the International Community, and sadly, the irrational and backdoor cutting political commentators in Guyana because of one and only one reason. The victims are black and black lives in Guyana as they are in the US and all over the world, really do not matter.
Imagine the US Ambassador, and the Republican associated Mercury interference entity opposing a legal remedy to an electoral controversy in Guyana that they embraced and defended in the US following the 2000 Presidential Elections. The Democrats challenged the vote count in Florida, which was incidented by “hanging chads” and the Information Technology Firm Choice Point removing tens of thousands of African American and other low income voters from the list. The count went in favor of the Republicans, and after Democrats succeeded in getting the Florida Courts to approve a recount, the US Supreme Court voted in favor of the Republicans and stopped that recount. The grounds for the stoppage was, if I remember correctly, that the recount would disadvantage the Republican Presidential Candidate. What hubris, what hypocrisy!
My question is why is the Government unwilling or afraid to allow the voices of overseas based Guyanese who are not afraid to publicly say these things to the International Community in the letter columns in the Chronicle. I mean we were blacklisted from, as Malcolm X said, making it plain in the Chronicle and other print media in Guyana when the PPP was in power, and some of us, sadly, are having the same experience today even though the PPP, ostensibly, no longer control the Chronicle. But then again, what do I know.
The PPP has enjoyed the teflon benefit of manufactured false equivalencies in the examination and analysis of Politics and social interaction in Guyana. Kwame Toure and Charles Hamilton in their work “Black Power – The Politics of Liberation in America” observed that “……when a group of people over a considerable period of time have enjoyed the privilege of power, of accumulating prestige, of defining right and wrong, of determining who should eat and who should not, after a while they come to believe that privilege is theirs by some form of divine right….”. Or words to that effect anyway.
This observation describes the collective mindset of the PPP leadership to a T, and perhaps the most tangible manifestation of that is the PPP’s arrogant forming and equipping of vigilante squads to carry out the kind of lynching of black men that has no historical precedent in this Geographical region. In fact one would have to go back to the racist savagery of the Tulsa Oklahoma riots referred to as the “black wall street massacre”, to find a close precedent to what unfolded in Guyana between 2002 and 2006. If one computed what the 400 or thereabouts victims of that pogrom was proportionally representative of in the African Guyanese Population, and then applied that proportion to the black US population, it would number in the tens of thousands. The question is, would the response in the US and around the world be as tepid as it is in the case of Guyana. I seriously doubt it.
Finally let me say this. I do not temper my views in order to win friends and influence people, or to pander to those who believe that in order to promote social cohesion one has to “go easy”. I believe that the PPP based on the ideological and administrative performance of its leadership is essential a racist political organization. I mean we can debate this, and I will argue that if that organization was white led and the circumstances, the performance, the positions and decisions in terms of its administration of the affairs of the state was the same, there would be no challenge to my conclusion.
Guyana cannot change as long as Bharat Jagdeo continues to enjoy teflon treatment in Guyana. As long as the narrative continue to position his place in the politics of Guyana as rational, as normal. The Leader of any nation is obliged by the oath of office they took, and under international law to respond in a certain manner to situations as those that unfolded in Guyana between 2002 and 2006. It matters not what the level of crime is in the society. Only the duly authorized Courts of Guyana is empowered to visit disobedience against the law, determine the kind if punishment that should be imposed, and to impose that punishment on the accused or defendant. And any organized usurping of this authority should be strongly and publicly condemned by the national leadership, they should publicly demand its cessation and exhort law enforcement to go after the perpetrators. Anything short of this by such leadership would be seen by the perpetrators as an endorsement of, or support for, that which they were engaged in. Anything short of this would amount to, in terms of the laws of the land and the laws of international order, criminal negligence at best, and criminal conspiracy at worse.
