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Minorities all
Not unexpectedly, the Report of the UN Independent Expert on Minority Issues has generated some controversy, locally. Any analysis that touches on our fractious politics can be counted on, as if magnetically, to align our touchy partisans along two widely separated poles – those whose positions appear vindicated and those who feel misunderstood. However, there is an a priori matter that is being ignored and which has the greatest relevance of the findings of any analysis: the model or conceptual tool that forms the basis of the examination.
We take a look at this issue in this editorial and will comment on the substance of the report later. We take all statements from the official “Commentary of the Working Group on Minorities” issued in 2005 that should have guided the Independent Expert (I.E.) in her work here.
The “Declaration on the Rights of Persons Belonging to National or Ethnic, Religious and Linguistic Minorities” is a comparatively new initiative, having been adopted by the UN General Assembly only in December 1992, only months after the present government took office.
The Declaration extends the rights under article 27 of the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights (which has inspired the Declaration) by adding “national minorities” to the already defined “ethnic, religious or linguistic minorities”. And in this inflation we may discern the concerns of the framers and decide as to whether the framework is applicable to Guyana.
The focus of the Declaration is to build and add “to the rights contained in the International Bill of Human Rights and other human rights instruments by strengthening and clarifying those rights which make it possible for persons belonging to minorities to preserve and develop their group identity.”
In view of our stated national goal, as summarised in our national motto – “One People, One Nation, One Destiny”, there is an inherent tension in the notion that an external agency should be promoting the entrenchment of separate group identities in our country.
At the very minimum the Independent Expert would have had to take a more nuanced approach on the implications of such an approach in our country. Over the years we have worked out a credible (and still evolving) but delicate balance between group and national identities as we strive towards our national motto that must be nurtured rather than undermined.
The Commentary accepts that “The word “minority” can sometimes be misleading in itself. Outside Europe, and particularly in Africa, countries are often composed of a large number of groups, none of which make up a majority.”
The Independent Expert seems to have overlooked this insight and ignored her own stated figures as she strove mightily to fit our societal complexities into her preconceived Procrustean bed. “Indo-Guyanese make up 43.5 per cent of the population and Afro-Guyanese 30.2 per cent.
Some 16.7 per cent of the population identify as being of mixed race. There are nine indigenous peoples in Guyana (known as Amerindians in Guyanese legislation since the 1950s)… constituting 9.2 per cent of the population.”
The expert focuses on political participation. She could gather the background information to disaggregate the Amerindian population into “nine peoples” but could not obtain analogous information that could have shown that much of the “mixed race” identified culturally and politically with the self-identified African section.
If these are aggregated, as several studies have shown it generally does in voting behaviour, for instance, then this would have cast the entire political dynamic into an entirely new light.
One that is much more positive than the grim spectre that is projected by the Independent Expert.
It would mean that political competition should be informed by the fact that, from an ethnic perspective, there are two dominant minorities in Guyana that approach each other in size – with the Amerindians holding the balance.
If, and this would not be contested by most serious commentators, the core of the two major parties (while not monolithically so) are ethnically based, then their mobilization strategy should be based on obtaining either cross-over ethnic votes or, more feasibly, the Amerindian vote.
Not the reification of ascriptive ties.
This would take us towards our national goal rather than away from it as implied by the premises of the framework of the Independent Expert.
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