COMMENTARY: TORTURE, BLOODSHED AND ETHNIC EXCLUSION IN GUYANA
By Rickford Burke
Caribbean Net News
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Dec 11 2007
Cayman Islands
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.
Rickford Burke, President of the Caribbean Guyana Institute for
Democracy 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) , November 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. .