propaganda press! freedom in Guyana

I hear the words of Martin Carter echo in shadows of death!

By Rickford Burke

President, Caribbean Guyana Institute for Democracy (CGID)

The history of civilization is mottled with catastrophes and carnages which have placed entire peoples in peril of extinction. Slavery or the “Maafa” is the most evil atrocity known to man. Scholars of African history instruct that 50 to 100 million Africans were killed or abducted in the slave trade; the majority being men. This decimation of the African civilization was a manifestation of inhumanity and hate; symptoms of which have today burgeoned into other evils. Racism, ethnic cleansing, ethnic torture and genocide have gained primacy as apoplectic winds of hate fuel a recycling of history.

Hitler’s odium of the Jewish people led to a pogrom. Nazi Gestapo squads killed 6 million Jews in the Holocaust. On Kristallnacht (crystal night) , N ovember 9-10, 1938 , 30,000 Jewish men in Germany and Austria were eliminated. Besides, the Ottoman Empire (modern Turkey), from 1915 to 1923, methodically annihilated its Armenian population. One million people, mostly men, were slaughtered. Hundreds of thousands were made stateless refugees. By 1923, the Armenian population became extinct.  

Genocidal ethnic cleansing, a corollary of hate, has been ravaging modern civilization. Ethnic cleansing of the Tutsi tribe, by Hutu guerrilla terrorists, exploded into genocide in Rwanda . According to the UN, between April and June 1994, 800,000 Rwandan Tutsis were massacred. Men were especially targeted for dismemberment and executions. By 1995, 1.7 million Tutsis were displaced. As it was in slavery, the world watched on in apathy. It was “just” Africa !

In the Balkans in 1992, then Yugoslavian President, Slobodan Milosevic, led Bosnian Serbs in a systematic slaughter of 200,000 innocent muslims and other minority ethnicities, in the ( etnicko ciscenje) ethnic cleansing of Bosnia, Herzegovina, Croatia and Kosovo. Men were summarily executed.  NATO

 Forces eventually invaded and ended this carnage. Milosevic has since died in jail. This was Europe , so the world acted decisively.   

Currently, Darfur , Sudan , submerged in genocide, makes a bloody splash on an ambivalent world, predisposed to the “It’s just Africa“ syndrome. Government Militias in Western Sudan have summarily executed over 500,000 innocent civilians, and have razed and depopulated entire villages and towns of the Fur, Masalit and Zaghawa ethnic tribes. Over 2.4 million people have been displaced. The tribesmen have been decimated. This torrid manifestation of ethnic hate persists in spite of a universal clamor for international military intervention. However, the intransigent world looks away from the people of Darfur because “It’s just Africa .

Ethnic cleansing is the deliberate mass killing, depopulation, imprisonment, isolation or torture of an ethnic group, in order to engineer a homogeneous ethnic population.  In most cases, that State becomes despotic and practices ethnocracy;   where the government usurps the resources of the state for the sole benefit of a single ethnic or racial collectivity.

Guyana today is becoming a mini - Darfur . It is at the precipice of despotism and ethnocracy. Its People’s Progressive Party (PPP ) government is a repressive, East Indian-triumphalist regime, with Marxist leanings. Since it assumed office in 1992, it has engulfed the nation in racial supremacy, ethnic exclusion and racial triumphalism. The resources of the state have been utilized almost exclusively for the sole benefit of its East Indian political base.

The government services are being systematically cleansed. Blacks are in a state of ethnic insecurity and servitude. The regime has withheld subventions and union dues from African constituted and controlled labor unions. There is an ongoing campaign to dismantle black labor unions, like the Guyana Public Service Union (GPSU) and the Guyana Labor Union (GLU), and to demonize their leaders. There has been no substantial wages increase for the African dominated mid and low level government employees, members of the GPSU, as opposed to workers in the sugar belt.    

The PPP government characteristically subverts the law for political expediency. It has removed the black Chief Magistrate from office on account of race, blocked further appointments of blacks to high judicial office, and has, with audacity, politicized the judiciary.  Africans have no confidence in the judicial system. They can hardly acquire state lands. Lands leased to blacks are being seized.  Black-owned enterprises are virtually excluded from business, commerce and government contracts.  Their towns and villages are being impoverished into subjugation. Africans are treated like “Tutsis” as the PPP ethnic cabal attempts to recycle history.  

The PPP has become so entrenched in State-power and control of the political society, that it has cannily shifted enforcement of its ensconced philosophy of “Apan Jhaat” (vote for your own race) from the ballot box to the politics of demographic engineering, so as to gerrymander the nation into an ethno-political sanctuary. Since 2004, the PPP has been distributing housing in and resettling ethnic supporters from areas of overwhelming concentration to or surrounding, black enclaves. This population reengineering is designed to offset constitutional changes to the formula for the allocation of parliamentary and regional council seats, as can be gleaned from the 2001 general election results.  

Further, faceless gangs, like the “Phantom death squad,” with alleged ties to government operatives, have verifiably executed well over 400 young black men, with impunity. Like the Ottoman Empire , there has been no investigation of these murders. The government, in 2005, obdurately blocked a US forced Commission of Inquiry from investigating these killings. It restricted its terms to inquiring only whether then Minister of National Security, Ronald Gajraj, was involved in extra-judicial killings. Nevertheless, the Commission established a relationship between Gajraj and an operative of the “Phantom death squad.” Gajraj was forced to resign after the US threatened to review aid t o Guyana . The government’s intransigence still rings like a guilty verdict.

Moreover, secret KGB-like agents comb through black Villages, identifying youngsters of a radical pedigree, whom they classify as “criminals.” Many subsequently turn up dead; their bullet riddled cadavers litter streets, trenches and swamps. This is a new normalcy. Others are unjustly, without evidence, tagged with unsolved crimes and classified as “Wanted.” The Army and Police are then coerced to, without probable cause or warrant of a court, break-in their homes and gun them down in cold blood, in the presence of their wives and children. What is even more horrific is that women with children are killed in the process, with impunity, and labeled collateral damage.  

A particular demographic of these young men are undeniably subjected to domestic rendition and torture. They are rendered to the backlands of certain enclaves and to military camps, where they are tortured about presumed knowledge of weapon stockpiles and the existence of a resistance force. In an article in the Stabroek newspaper on November 9, 2007 , titled “Police did not torture Buxtonians,” Police Commissioner, Henry Green, is reporting as saying ” The police had nothing to do with the beating of Patrick Sumner and Victor Jones and that it was members of the Guyana Defence Force (GDF) who had tortured the men.” This is a stunning admission from a Police Commissioner, whose US visa has allegedly been revoked.

On November 28, 2007, the Stabroek Newspaper, in an editorial titled “Common enemies of all mankind,” declared “If the allegations that Patrick Sumner, Victor Jones and David Leander were tortured can be proven, some members of the Guyana Police Force and the Guyana Defence Force are likely to be in big trouble. Patrick Sumner and Victor Jones were arrested by members of the police and defence forces during Operation Ferret last September. They were taken to defence headquarters in Camp Ayanganna , police headquarters in Eve Leary then to another military camp where they said they were tortured.  David Leander, arrested later, met his attorney only after a successful Habeas corpus application before a judge who, on seeing the victim’s condition, ordered him to be taken to the hospital immediately.’

The cruelty and inhumane treatment of Leander invoked, in Guyanese, sentiments of the Abu Ghraib torture scandal in Iraq . The severity of his burns and other injuries had rendered him so incapacitated, that Justice Jainarayan Singh was, on November 2, 2007 forced to leave his courtroom to see the victim in a vehicle in the court yard. Justice Singh then ordered that he be taken to a hospital, where he was admitted.  There has been no official condemnation of or inquiry into these tortures. The matter is expected to be taken to the International Criminal Court and Inter-American Human Rights Commission.   

I or no one else who expresses outrage at the denial of social justice and human rights, in Guyana , condone criminal conduct. However, there are settled procedures enshrined in law which apply to persons who engage in criminal conduct, to which the State must conform. It is appalling that Caricom, the EU and the American, British and Canadian (ABC) Ambassadors remain silent in the face of such terrorism.  

The Caribbean and the international community must know that the PPP regime has an insidious “noose” around the necks of African Guyanese, and that their Villages and towns are under subjugation. The historic African village of Buxton has become Guyana’s “crystal night” and Jena, Louisiana . Police/Army extra-judicial killings and executions by the “Phantom persecutors of persons” death squad, have become indistinguishable. This deluge of massacre and mayhem bring fountains of blood flowing daily into the streets of Buxton.  Beleaguered villagers go to sleep at nights with images of terror and the haunting words of poet, Martin Carter’s “This is the dark time, my love,” indelibly splattered on their subliminal minds. It is their clarion cry:

“This is the dark time, my love. It is the season of oppression, dark metal, and tears. It is the festival of guns, the carnival of misery. Everywhere the faces of men are strained and anxious. Who comes walking in the dark night time? Whose boot of steel tramps down the slender grass? It is the man of death, my love, the stranger invader.”

Recently, Ambassador Ronald Austin, a distinguished foreign policy expert and former Ambassador to China , in an article titled “Genocide,” characterized the systematic execution of young black men in Guyana as a silent genocide. This should not pass for a fleeting exaggeration. Who has another explanation?  

The atrocities of the “Middle Passage,” ” Crystal Night,” Armenia , Rwanda , the Balkans and Darfur , were iniquitous manifestations of hate, an insidious brand of which is symptomatic of the hate that inspires ethnic exclusion and demographic engineering in Guyana today. A mutual dynamic of the atrocities that have imperiled civilization was the attempt to kill new generations by executing men. Is history being recycled in Guyana? The answer is menacing.

As the nefarious designs of the PPP hegemony throbs the subconscious, it must invoke pulses of outrage and revive lessons leant from history. As we hear faint cries for freedom betwixt the ballyhoo of the “festival of guns” in Buxton, it must summon-up our revolutionary passions as a people, and rekindle the spirit of resistance and resilience bequeathed to us by our indomitable ancestors.

The blueprints for such struggles are indelibly etched in our history. They are fundamental lessons which we must learn if we are to survive the reinvention of the Middle Passage, Crystal Night, Armenia , Rwanda , the Balkans and Darfur . Freedom loving people of Guyana , the Caribbean and the world must resolve to join forces to wage war on torture, bloodshed and ethnic cleansing in Guyana and fight to preserve the right to be African.