Evidence of the dead society

Apr 24, 2013 Features / Columnists, Freddie Kissoon

Quite often, and I mean quite often, people from the lower economic ranks would come up to me and ask me to investigate situations of terrible wrongdoing. Some complaints would be of mild obnoxiousness. There are instances of citizens from the middle strata asking for journalistic investigations.
I would assume that people like Glenn Lall, Adam Harris, Enrico Woolford, Julia Johnson, Denis Chabrol and the journalists from the Stabroek News, would get their fair share of similar requests. It is because of these encounters, that I have become very disgusted with the existence of the Guyana Human Rights Association (GHRA).
Because of the number of requests for help one media operative alone gets, then you know that victims either do not know, or care to know, about the functions of an organization named the GHRA.
I remember the mother of the youth the policeman is charged with shooting to death in Agricola came to the People’s Parliament with a plea to help. She said the police were trying to intimidate the main witness. We took her statements, made some investigation and decided to call a press conference. We took about twenty minutes in deciding which organization we should call to ask them to lend us a room to hold the press briefing since the People’s Parliament was shut out of the public park that it originally occupied.
We decide we would ask Red Thread for their office or Nigel Hughes to use Sidewalk Café or the office of a sympathetic lawyer. But no one from the People’s Parliament thought of the building of the GHRA. I believe none of them ever thought of the GHRA because for them it didn’t exist.
Of course when you write these things you are resented by the people named. One is expected to criticize the government only. That has never been accepted by this columnist and it never will be. Of course, if you take your plate to those you criticize, then expect to hear Martin Carter whispering in your ear that the mouth is muzzled by the food it eats.
These incessant complaints tell a sad story of a sad country named Guyana. A diplomat from one of the ABC countries in Guyana (please readers, take note that ABC countries in Guyana are not Argentina, Brazil and Chile as Neil Kumar, our director of sports publicly proclaimed but America, Britain and Canada – to think President Ramotar has retained this guy in his government and party) once told me, “Freddie, people in Guyana have to speak out; my government cannot do that for them.”
What is tragic about Guyana is that a majority of these people who plead for help are afraid to be identified and go to lengths to ask you not to name them or let anyone know that they talked to you. I am willing to bet my media colleagues that they receive the same exclamations.
It is a tragic reminder that this may be one of the world’s most sheepish nations. I remember last year, a middle class woman kept a rendezvous with me. She shared a number of documents with me about a high level conspiracy by some powerful politicians to ruin her husband based on what he knows about a scandal in a major financial house.
So desperate were they to do away with him that he was charged with several counts and placed before the High Court. Before she left she begged me not to let her name be known. I became irate.
I asked how could these people try to destroy your family and you are afraid to openly fight to save your family. She was embarrassed by my frankness, but I was disenchanted. One night she appeared with her husband at the public park to talk to members of the People’s Parliament and I just walked away.
She is not alone. Most people who have endured serious human rights abuse behave exactly in this manner. At the time of writing there are other complaints that I am investigating and all the participants are afraid of the consequences if it is known that they came to the press.
I was amazed that not one person wrote in support of my friend Leonard Craig when he affirmed in the press his conviction that the Guyana Bank for Trade and Industry cannot arrogate to itself which governmental document it will ask or reject in the submission of a customer’s address. Surely, as Craig asserted, these documents are backed by law.
I honestly believe this Faustian, Kafkaesque nightmare of fear and trepidation cannot and should not go on for much longer. This is incredible fear that does not exist elsewhere.

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