Mr. Ramsaroop’s suggestion

Nov 17, 2008 Features / Columnists, Freddie Kissoon

Mr. Peter Ramsaroop of Vision Guyana has placed a full-page advertisement in the newspapers asking people who have been victimized by the Government of Guyana to call a certain telephone number to report their sad story.

This course of action was prompted by the statement of Adam Harris that he has been waiting for sixteen years to collect payments due to him as a public sector employee. Though one cannot disagree with that format of Mr. Ramsaroop, it would be better if he designs a more structured approach to human rights violations by the Guyana Government.

I do admit that there is an existing human rights organization that has been around for more than twenty-five years, the Guyana Human Rights Association (GHRA) headed by Mr. Mike Mc Cormack. This body has done excellent work the past two decades and played no small role in the fight for free and fair elections.

But it has a different mandate to what Mr. Ramsaroop’s advertisement seeks to do. Since the PPP has come into power, the record of violations has been mountainous. It is only from around 2002, we began taking note of egregious decisions by the PPP Government. Before that, the PPP Government got away with some unbearable wrongs. There were a number of reasons for this.

No one in the society had the stomach to go fighting for the employees of the previous government. The perception was that it was a time for the guards to change after the 1992 election. But what the society meant by the guards were the ruling politicians. What the PPP did, is that it used the goodwill that greeted it in October 1992 to dismiss more than just the guards but a number of senior public sector employees.

The PPP’s thinking was that these people worked for a PNC Government for so long that they must have been PNC ideologues so they had to go. Dozens and dozens of genuine non-political white-collars workers were fired without due process of law and without natural justice. These people were just thrown to the wolves.

Secondly, people did not know about these nasty violations because the media at that time felt that it should allow the PPP some breathing space. Thirdly, the society stayed mum because it felt that the PPP needed time to settle in and good things were coming so why make a fuss to fight for these sacked employees. Fourthly, the PNC was consumed with infighting and failed to fight for these victims.

Unfortunately, no good things came from the PPP and the dismissals and refusal to pay pensions and gratuities have continued onto this day with only two white-collar employees taking the plights to the courts. Both won – the late Professor Cedric Grant and Mr. Keith Austin.

My suggestion as a response to Mr. Peter Ramsaroop’s endeavour is that if he could afford it, set up a complaints organization with at least three full-time research staff. The format will include telephone calls to the complaints desk, but the researchers will also go out in the fields and look for the victims of the PPP Government.

They could speak to the opposition parties, the media, the GHRA and other sectors of the Guyanese nation. This writer would be happy to assist the centre and provide the researchers with hard data. Most of us in the media have had complaints about traumatic victimization. I am in receipt of sad stories often.

The majority of Guyanese people do not know it, but the dismissals and other forms of injustices go on unabated in this tragic land. Teachers, civil servants, semi-autonomous institutions all are visited with an authoritarian hand. The situation is particularly depressing at Guyana Water Incorporated.

If Mr. Ramsaroop can finance such a venture we can present hard evidence to foreign governments and international human rights associations about what is taking place in Guyana. I cannot begin to tell readers some of the grievous wrongs that have been done to many innocent public sector employees by a government that, when it came into power in 1992, looked like it would have taken the people of this land to a liberated horizon.

Today, dashed hopes, shattered dreams and miserable lives are pushing people to leave this territory in record numbers. Little Barbados cannot take any more fleeing Guyanese. Mr. Ramsaroop has started in the right direction with a laudable notion. He must take his idea to its logical climax.

I urge him and others that it is time we start the data collection. When we go abroad looking for sympathy, we will have the evidence on which we can indict the Government of Guyana.

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Mr. Ramsaroop’s suggestion

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