Guyana Observer News

Democracy and Justice under assaukt from the Regime in power in Guyana

Monday, 27 July 2009

The recent and mysterious death of a murder suspect while in State Custody, and just weeks after his so called confession statement was justifiably thrown out by the presiding Magistrate in his case, adds to and extends the ominous circumstances under which justice is being dispensed in Guyana in these days. We can recall when another suspect, one whose statement after his arrest was that he was drinking milk under the current regime as opposed to black tea under the former, also died under mysterious circumstances while in the custody of the state. When things like these occur in other countries, the press gets to digging and never stop until they have unearthed the skullduggery that contribute to these kinds of unbelievable coincidences. In Guyana however, the victims are seemingly cursed by being naturally imprisoned within a skin and ethnicity that does not carry a hell of a lot value in Guyana today under the current order of importance and priorities. When Law Enforcement brutally beat Rodney King in Los Angeles and President Bush 1 was asked for a reaction, his retort was that it made him feel sick. When members of the current administration are asked to react to evidence of brutal torture inflicted on black bodies, they describe it as a little “roughing off”, or facetiously explain that Guyanese are more interested in the contents of barrels than in these gross violations of The United Nations declarations on Human and Civil rights.
Article 7 of the UN’s Universal Declaration of Human Rights unambiguously proclaims that quote, “All are equal before the Law and are entitled without discrimination to equal protection of the Law. All are entitled to equal protection against any discrimination in violation of this declaration and against any incitement to such discrimination”. The ominous circumstances that obtain in Guyana currently is that those who are committing the violations broadly enunciated under this article seem to be enjoying the protection of the Law at the expense of the victims of the violations. A man who is found to have been brutally beaten and tortured is taken to one of the highest departments in the Police institution in Guyana, and they refused to have anything to do with the issue. Let’s just for the sake of clarity stipulate that they had recognized that something was wrong or illegal with the circumstances under which the man was brought before them, wasn’t it then their sworn duty to detain or arrest the persons in whose custody the man was at the moment, and immediately convey him to a hospital for medical attention? Isn’t that the procedure required under the Laws of Guyana, the Constitution of Guyana, the Police Act? And even more frighteningly ominous is the obtuse disinterest being shown by the Political Authority to clearly written and unambiguously explained, clauses and provisos in our Laws on how the execution of justice is supposed to unfold.
About a year ago, one of the so called Independent Newspapers penned an editorial in response to callous spectator apathy in front of a night spot while some young women were being abused and assaulted. The newspaper at the time opined that the events that transpired that night amounted to Guyana “crossing the Rubicon” in terms of our compassion, our empathy, our collective psyche as a society, or contextually to that effect. The question today that screams loudly to the curious and compos mentis mind is, what is so different in the apathy exhibited by the turds who stood by while the human and civil rights of those women were being violated, and the deafening silence of civil society today when exhibitions and examples of the worse kind are being paraded continuously before our very eyes? The individuals who have accorded themselves the symbolic description of Civil Society in Guyana seem to have developed a very narrow definition or understanding of what and who comprise a human, and what amount to violations of such rights. Obviously they would have been screaming in moral and ethical agitation, if but for one inarguable fact. And that is, the victims of these abuses are unfortunate to be naturally confined in a skin and ethnicity that happen to be outside the scope of interest of the current guardians of Guyana’s so called democracy.
About the most revealing and disappointing aspect of the constructed psychology in Guyana over the past decade or thereabouts, is its obvious symbiosis with what existed and continue to exist in societies, groups and individuals that are considered to be abhorrent due to their hereditary intolerance and persecution of minorities, their intolerance and persecution of people who are ethnically or racially different to their group, and the venom with which they attack defenders of universally acceptable principles and standards for human behaviors and interaction. Bantu Stephen Biko was tracked by agents of the apartheid regime in South Africa because of his activism for equal rights and justice, until they captured, tortured and executed him. For the indigenous South Africans confined beneath the booth of an unequal political and social system, Stephen Biko was martyred in a struggle for the rights of all who inhabited South Africa. For the enablers and beneficiaries of the establishmentarian system, it was good riddance to bad human rubbish. They proceeded to their houses of worship on the ensuing Sunday and blasphemously paid homage to a doctrine they were unwilling to practice. Could there be any closer approximation with what is unfolding today in Guyana with respect to the current threat under which Social Philanthropist and Activist Mark Benschop is living? Is this Guyana or South Africa circa 1980?
Defenders of the Jim Crow unequal system in the Southern US labeled Martin Luther King and everyone associated with the civil rights struggles as communist or fifth columnist who hated America. For these defenders, the current system that accorded them rights because of the skin and race they were born in was fair and just. It was thus because it paid lip service to, and pandered to, an inverse proportional cultural belief system that ranked them on the human scale above those dark people marching and crying out for justice. These denizens of the current system were appalled that people could not be satisfied with their establishmentarian defined rights and dues, and indignant over this kind of rejection of a status quo with which they were quite comfortable.
Everyone who raises a voice against Police Brutality, Racial Profiling, or the Criminal Justice System’s unfair targeting of minorities in the US, elicits the antagonism of right wing and like supremacist individuals and groups. That psychology has taken root in Guyana today, couched in some of the most iniquitous and insipid forms of arguments. They are arguments that equate a bystander’s censuring of parental abuse with encouraging and advocating delinquency and other bad behavioral attitudes in kids. It represents the last and most idiotic of refuges for those for whom truth has become an inconvenient and uncomfortable consideration. There was a time in our country when national conversation on right and wrong, Lawful and Unlawful, Legal and Illegal, was carried on at a level comparative with any other literate society in the world. Today it has devolved into a synthesis of political thought patterns that are confused, irrational, and pandering to a nauseating degree of absurdity.
Whether someone is guilty or not guilty of a crime, or whether there should be sympathy for the victims of crimes, have absolutely no impeaching influence over arguments for justice to be carried out in the manner in which it is inscribed in the Laws and Constitution of the land. I sometimes wonder what it will take to disassemble the palisades of ignorance and obduracy that have been assembled over the past seventeen years to resist unadulterated truth and commonsense. Truth and commonsense that screams to anyone who cares to notice, that advocacy for democracy, for the rule of law, for equality of justice, for the presumption of innocence, and the concern and empathy with victims of crimes, are not mutually exclusive principles or value sets. Cognitive development that exceeds the concrete stage of contemplation will bring everyone to the same place on this one.
When the individuals who are being subjected to torturous inquisitions, and are being presented before the courts with hideous physical disfigurements, appear to be from one distinct group in a nation with decades long history of ethnic divisions, passing this off as roughing up is poignantly disingenuous. 18 years ago the people who are seeing things in this light did not perceive of them so charitably. So the question has to be pondered. Are the responses from the state and civil society being influenced by the skin and ethnicity in which the victims of these abuses are naturally confined? There is little doubt that there would not be a need to ask this question if the political situation in Guyana today was reversed. And that in itself loudly and eloquently answers the question.
By Robin Williams

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The Mark Benschop Foundation was officially launched in March 2008 by its founder and chairman Mark Benschop and other concerned Guyanese and well wishers in the United States of America. What started as a small operation geared toward helping those in need has grown so large that they were forced to move their offices to a whole building in East Street where the vast amount of people responding to their generosity could be accommodated.

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