The year in which the country stood still

Jan 11, 2011 Features / Columnists, Freddie Kissoon

I did state in a just gone column that I will remember 2010 for three pressing reasons; the physical attack on me with a miasmic substance; the near physical attack on me in the National Library during an academic conference, the presidential libel and my incarceration in the Brickdam lock-up.
These were impulses from the society that impacted on me as a human being. But there was a plethora of political repugnancies that left personal bitterness in my mouth.
If there was any year in which I felt lonely (even though Mark Benschop was a willing participant in any request) it was 2010. I will regard it as the year Guyana stood still. I have endured hypocrisy in politics my entire life.
Even in the unique culture of the Working People’s Alliance, I was frustrated with some encounters of double standards. But one expects young countries to get more mature, freer and more modern, less scared and more honest as they grow. Guyana continues to be an exception.
I was not impressed with the energies directed against a medical doctor at the Georgetown Hospital who was convicted of having violated a child in the US.
I don’t think for a moment there should not have been a vexation with his employment. But the hypocrisy was too much to take when those who were silent on far greater excesses saw an opportunity to achieve some badly needed publicity.
These were people who said not one word about a school that disrupted the lives of young children by immediate expulsion on the discovery of a cell phone. When that news came to me, I could have sworn that the children were found with guns or cocaine.
But peremptory expulsion for possession of a cell phone is an act of viciousness that no modern society should tolerate. This is where class structure came in. I suspect that the anti-pedophile crusade against the doctor was led by middle class persons who have no interest in condemning Mae’s School.
The same argument applies to those in the Rights of the Child Commission. Guyana’s class structure has always taken on revolting shapes and ugly dimensions.
If this country produced any social caricature in its forty-four years of independence it was the Ethnic Relations Commission (ERC) in 2010. Words are not there in the English dictionary to describe the social dirtiness that permeates this nation.
The ERC is a statutory commission that consists of twelve members. These twelve persons are the ERC. Nothing more nothing less! For two years now the ERC has been three persons – Mr. Carvil Duncan, the TUC representative, Mr. Peter Willems, the Private Sector delegate and its chairman, Juan Edghill.
I have been to more than five meetings in 2010 where the ERC met with Guyana’s main stakeholders and not even a whisper ever came out of the mouths of Messrs. Duncan and Willems.
From a body of 12 the ERC is now three and this society that has a parliamentary opposition, a business class, a Council of Churches, a thriving NGO network, a press association, and an academic community is totally oblivious to this farce.
The New Year has begun and this three man masquerade will continue with business as usual.
Countless human beings will always wonder what makes the human mind tick. Why do people undertake tasks for which they will never perform? In 2010 was there a Guyana Bar Association? The answer is no. But it exists as a shell and even as a shell, lawyers will seek to becomes its president. Indeed you wonder what makes the mind tick.
Why would an attorney want to become the president of an organization that does not have physical existence? One hopes that 2010 was the very last year for the tenure of those who comprise the Guyana Consumers Association (GCA).
Surely, there comes a point in the life of a human being when some shame has to be shown and felt. Do the executives of the GCA have any shame? They do nothing. Absolutely nothing! People do not know of their existence.
Finally, what has become of Mike and Merle Mc Cormack. This husband and wife combination has administered the Guyana Human Rights Association since its birth in the seventies. That is a long time in office. You would think that by now they are so experienced in the struggle for rights, freedom and justice that their name would be household items.
Mrs. Mc Cormack is on the prison committee. I have to tell her about the uncivilized pen that the Brickdam lock is.

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