Send them home to vote!

Jan 27, 2009 Features / Columnists, Freddie Kissoon

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On the accession of the Baltic countries – Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania – to the European Community, then British PM, Tony Blair asserted that there will be no automatic entrance of these citizens into Britain to live and work. Italy restricts the entry of Romania’s gypsies. The EU regulations do not deny member states their right to regulate their own economy. Caricom’s CSME was bound to cause alarm in Barbados because of the maddening exodus of Guyanese which has continued unabated since the Burnham days. As Guyana’s people continue to view their country with rising angst and deepening pessimism, Barbados will be a target for those fleeing these shores, especially East Indians.
Barbados has two problems which will destroy the optimistic venture of Guyanese migrants. First, it is one of the world’s most congested nations bursting at the seams that literally cannot take in more people. Guyana’s population is more than double Barbados’. The University of Guyana has five thousand students armed with a passionate desire to leave after graduation with Barbados being on their radar screen. Two friends I know recently left for Barbados and have found work there. One was a senior engineer at GWI, the other a business degree graduate who was the manager of the privately owned UG book store. The second factor relates to the first. Where are you going to put five hundred thousand persons on a piece of land that is a 166 square miles? Barbados is too small to facilitate the constant influx from Guyanese.
Recently, Guyanese journalist, Rickey Singh who supports the PPP in Guyana but absolutely refuses to return home, lamented (a favourite theme of his) the constant rounding up of illegal Guyanese migrants on the island. Why a journalist would choose to criticize any government for doing so is strange. Guyana deports illegal visitors all the time. Singh and others have become alarmed at the subtle and not so subtle attacks in blogs and in the mainstream media on Guyanese East Indians living in Barbados.
One academic, Dr. Randy Persaud in Washington, D.C. exclaimed in a letter to the newspaper here that these castigations have become racist and xenophobic. He urged me to intervene with a particular Indian-bashing media house that quotes my KN article quite often.
I have no intention of doing so because the contents of this corner in KN are critical reflections of the debasing of democracy in Guyana including shameless discrimination against certain communities. There isn’t anything in these columns that are not within the realm of fair comments. I find Dr. Persaud impertinent to tell me to advise a certain media house in Barbados to stop their fulminations against Guyanese Indians in Barbados while he remains silent on the very process that he accuses certain Barbadian commentators of doing – acts of discrimination of one group against another. Dr. Persaud cannot tell me that we do not have discrimination being practiced by the Government of Guyana.
The question that Rickey Singh and Dr. Randy Persaud ought to ask themselves is what are the Indians from Guyana doing in Barbados? Guyana is huge with a potential of wealth exploitation that is fantastic. All Barbados has is tourism and a service sector. There are complications of course with the Indians in Barbados. We can identify two irritants that upset the Barbadian commentators. Why after sixteen years of an Indian Government in Guyana that Indians voted for, do they run away from their homeland to a little island?
Secondly, after settling on the island they remain an enclave that instinctively support the very party they ran from. This has to be an explosive situation in Barbados. If one reads the commentaries (I do not read anonymous blogs; only Freudian monsters cuss out people behind a mask; I truly hate such insects) in the mainstream media in Barbados, this is the problem that lies at the core of Randy Persaud’s cry of xenophobia.
There are other types of Guyanese in Barbados that resent Indians’ enduring embrace of the PPP even though they are finished with Guyana and have chosen Barbados as their home. But more importantly and here we enter into dangerous waters, many of these Guyanese critics of the Indians in Barbados are incensed that these Indians refuse to denounce racial discrimination in Guyana by an East Indian Government.
Rickey Singh and Dr. Randy Persaud do not make it easier for the Indians in Bridgetown. They are both self-proclaimed admirers of the PPP Government. Sadly, they cannot see that they are unwittingly contributing to the condemnation of Indians on the island. Let the Indians come home and vote for change the ways the Americans did last year. Send them home now!

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