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The Final Solution for Africans?

May 22, 2010 Features / Columnists, Freddie Kissoon

“The Final Solution for Indians?” was the title of Ravi Dev’s KN column for April 18, 2010. I planned an immediate response but as all (yes all) would know you cannot keep a columnist schedule in the newspaper because this country is like a huge waterfall with issues cascading tempestuously every conceivable day.
What you plan to write on in three days’ time gets lost in an ever-flowing vortex of emerging exigencies. Do you know that on five occasions, I planned to analyse some interesting remarks President Jagdeo made on September 9 last year at the ceremony to mark international certification of the Ogle airport?
Everything, I repeat everything, you set out to publish within a timely context gets washed away by the frenetic flow of scandals, political nastiness, and fascist overtures in this land. Now my schedule has been pushed back by some peculiar circumstances surrounding an allegation made against Peter Ramsaroop by a friend of President Jagdeo.
I should have rebutted Mr. Devi the very next day because his piece was an egregiously inciting advocacy. I penned today’s article after I was jolted by what a group of African trade unionists told the Ethnic Relations Commission (well really Juan Edghill and two others) last Tuesday.
So let’s examine “The Final Solution for Indians?” by Ravi Dev. Mr. Dev traces the recent analyses of some African rights activists and some of my commentaries on the East Indian mind (he does one article per month on this topic in which yours truly is always attacked). His list takes in Lincoln Lewis, Kean Gibson, Abu Bakr.
Mr. Dev’s essential repetitive theme is that these writers have shaped their theories, paradigms, statements in such a way that the resulting picture sits in an anti-Eat Indian frame. Mr. Dev, without diplomatic language, concludes that when taken in their totality, these statements amount to incitement against East Indians of Guyana.
Every conceivable question asked of the role of Indian people since the PPP came to power in 1992 by these African rights advocates is given an anti-East Indian interpretation by Mr. Dev.
The gentleman is not prepared to debate East Indian voting patterns, East Indian reticence over extremist policy pursuits by the PPP Government, East Indian silence over political atrocities that saw them take to the streets in thousands when those very atrocities were perpetrated by an African Government during the PNC’s reign.
The judgement, then, of Mr. Dev is that there is an African conspiracy, with the intellectual support of this Indian columnist that is heading in a direction of a call to action against Indians of Guyana.
One must understand that in Dev’s configuration the community under siege in this land is not Africans but Indians. This is where one can use harsh terms to describe the contents and the arguments of “The Final Solution for Indians.”
One is a hundred percent correct if one says should an alien come from outer space and read “The Final Solution for Indians,” that alien would believe the Indians are a scared race of people in Guyana and these African activists want to drive them into the ground.
The alien would not know that it is an Indian party that has been in power since 1992; that over 99 percent of large scale investments in Guyana come from Indians; that there has been a meteoric rise of Indians in every sector of the public realm; that Indians have moved in almost en masse in public sector areas that one would never ever have imagined if they lived in Guyana twenty years ago.
Our alien would die of a heart attack when he/she hears that allover Guyana, Africans are shouting, claiming and crying that the African people are being marginalized and in years’ time may not have any place of substance in Guyana. In other words, the final solution is not facing Indians but Africans.
Mr. Dev’s article in this context is egregious as I have written above. If Dev was present at that meeting of the ERC, then he would have come face to face with the reality of who really is facing the final solution.
Politics is one thing, intellectual research is another. Cries of marginalization should not be accepted because it is being promulgated. Research ought to be done to see if policy-making in Guyana has in fact contributed to African marginalization. The research bears out the cry.
This columnist will not be scared away by Dev’s stratagem to paint the victim as the aggressor. I will be more emboldened to continue in the same vein that I write in.

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