Wake up Guyanese, your nation needs you now more than it ever did

Dec 18, 2009 Letters

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Dear Editor,
As help begins to pour in for the lad who was tortured horribly, at the hands of law enforcement officers and who are now before the court, I wish to personally commend Mark Benschop for taking the point in petitioning financial help for this lad and his family.
Allow me to make it plain that despite their economic state, I never heard the mother or father of this boy ask for anything beyond justice for their son. However, many of us who joined Mark for his ‘Straight Talk’ evening internet radio show were moved by the anger in his voice over the atrocious experience to which this lad was subjected.
But our hearts and minds were also invigorated with renewed hope and faith in the conscience of our national collective, by Mark’s pleadings that this lad’s experience should not be used as political fodder, while ignoring the economic circumstances of the family.
What we were witnessing was a Guyanese activist with the capacity to marry his activism for democratic change and equal justice, with empathy and compassion for those who, because of their social stratification level, were falling by the wayside for want of representation.
Mark Benschop is walking in the moccasins of civil and human rights activists whose concerns for the poor, the down trodden and oppressed, became the organising agency of their existence. The paths they choose for their lives were and still are always fraught with danger, as they exposed the sins of the connected and the powerful.
We saw this manifested in living colour when Mark Benschop chose to stand in the corner of the 15-year-old lad who was being sexually exploited by a powerful member of the ruling hierarchy. He presented evidence that irrefutably established this exploitation, and which in any other nation in the world would have resulted in prosecution, or at the very least departmental sanction against the perpetrator.
But this situation occurred in a Guyana where more and more it is being demonstrated that wrong and right has nothing to do with ethics, with morality, with law and legality. This situation occurred in a nation where morality, ethics, fairness and equality under the law have become subjected to the kind of cockeyed interpretations and reasoning that are so ludicrous and off the wall, it would have been hilarious, but for the pain and suffering of the victims being rendered thus by this Machiavellian political administrative system. Carter G Woodson, in his book “The Miss-Education of The Negro”, opined that that those who dared to champion the cause of the oppressed in the society of reference had to expect the worse from the agency of oppression and its enablers, or words to that effect. Mark Benschop and many others who have dared to emulate the honesty of the little boy in Hans Christian Anderson tale of the vain and naked Emperor, rather than being co-opted into praising what did not exist, are experiencing the truism of Carter G Woodson’s keen observation.
As Woodson had observed, so too must Guyanese of conscience recognise that security, freedom from harassment, death threats and threats of personal injury, frame ups, run the gamut, are not compatible with speaking truth to power in the Guyana of today. This is a manifestation of the kind of society that exist, that has been created, and that has been deliberately and consciously structured into being.
If you are poor, if you are not connected to the towers of political power, if you are a member of a certain minority group that do not traditionally cast a ballot for those in the towers of power, your experience at the hands of torturers is considered as “a little roughing up”. Your kids can be Sowetocized under the rationale that they represent the kind of kids who are likely to become criminals or terrorists. Your communities can be invaded and fatally culled for criminal suspects by vigilantes whose hands are dirty from criminal involvement, while the only response from officialdom comes in the form of the proverbial “Nelson’s Eye”.
Where are the Christians, the religious leaders who stand before the pulpits on Sunday mornings and read from a scripture that says, “in as much as you failed to raise your voice when your neighbour was being taken, you are failing to live up to the tenets of your faith?”
How can a nation that produced Hubert Nathaniel Critchlows, Cuffys, Jainarine Singhs, Walter Rodneys, have become so bereft of a large supply of human and civil rights activists with like intolerance for the corrupted excesses that are in plain sight every day before our very eyes? Must Mark Benschop, Freddie Kissoon, Lincoln Lewis, Norris Witter, Peter Ramsaroop, Tacuma Ogunseye, Eric Phillips, and the few more time and space prevents me from naming, walk this dark journey alone? Is it too much to call on the masses to share this watch with them, cognizant that its purpose is to change Guyana into the kind of society where justice and equality, fairness and balance, are attainable entitlements for all, rather than privileges reserved for a few? Wake up Guyanese, your nation needs you now more than it ever did before.
Robin Williams

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