A street vendor led to the Tunisian Velvet Revolution

Feb 04, 2011 Features / Columnists, Freddie Kissoon

In Guyana, over three hundred street vendors were forcibly removed from their selling base one evening. No one in the Government of Guyana gave them warning or notice. The bulldozers came and demolished their livelihood. There were screams and tears. Single mothers lost their means of living, but no one created a Velvet Revolution out of this unjust act.
Across in Africa, it was a different story. An unemployed young man was refused permission to sell his tomatoes. The rest is now history.
It just goes to show how different are the cultures under which countries live. If three hundred street sellers were uprooted in Tunisia, what would have happened? We know the answer because the tomato vendor’s mistreatment sparked a Velvet Revolution that toppled the government. Here in Guyana, naked power does what it wants.
The Le Repentir dumpsite (it was really horrible to refer to that place as the Mandela dumpsite; what a terrible insult to a great human being) is closed, but will we ever know the consequences it will bring to the citizens who live next to it?
There are bound to be pathological implications. At that place, private hospitals threw their waste there. I saw that with my own eyes during the time Mark Benschop and I were there. If you think that the Arab Velvet Revolution will come to Guyana, think again, and cast your mind to the silence that greeted the protest by Benschop and me. Not one citizen from the area came out to join us. Not one citizen stood outside the Brickdam lock-up with a placard.
Yesterday I wrote that if the Velvet Revolution should have come to Guyana, it was after the repression that visited the small sellers at the Stabroek Market Square three weeks ago. But even before that fascist episode, the people of Georgetown should have converged at the Square of the Revolution and other parts of Georgetown, and confronted the Government on the continued use of the Le Repentir dumpsite.
It didn’t happen. Benschop did a solo act and got arrested. No one showed solidarity. I went back with Benschop, we both got arrested, still no solidarity. What happened next? Nothing!
You would think that after the dumpsite madness, the Government would have gone into a dormancy mood. The next two weeks, naked power was on the move again – three hundred vendors were just arbitrarily displaced and the silence of the nation continued. One is tempted to ask ‘where next would elected dictatorship show up?’
There is no doubt it will. One thing is certain – election or no election, elected dictatorship is going to demonstrate its Mubarak-like hold on power through the use of force. It is funny and ironic that I should use the term “Mubarak-like hold on power.”
It is over for Mubarak. Will it soon be over for the Guyanese Mubaraks? I doubt it very much.
Here briefly are some reasons why the Arab Velvet Revolution isn’t coming to this land.
First, it is important to analyse class structures before you predict the advent of revolution. Egypt has a large intellectual class. That stratum consisting of academics and students was crucial in the formation of the protest movement in downtown Cairo. Secondly, the middle classes are always important in the raising of human rights consciousness among the population.
Guyana does not have an intellectual class. It is not that it is thin. It is non-existent. In terms of the middle class in Guyana, you can count on your fingers who its vocal members are.
Thirdly, a Velvet Revolution can never succeed without the huge participation of civil society. What we are witnessing in Egypt at the moment is a poly-class attack on the Mubarak power base. It involves classes that are alive and active in the Egyptian society. Fourthly, in Guyana there is no intolerance to the Mubarak-like dictators by opposition organizations.
If the combined opposition had spearheaded resistance to the violent eviction of the Stabroek Square vendors, it could have galvanized widespread protest.
This I am convinced of. If the opposition parties had organized citizens in South Georgetown to oppose the Le Repentir dumpsite, they would have come out.
One man (Mark Benschop) cannot do it alone. If the Egyptian Mark Benschop had gone alone in Tahrir Square calling for Mubarak’s ouster, the police would have picked him up and thrown him into the Nile River. Instead, thousands of Mark Benschops filled the square. This is the lesson we must learn from Egypt.

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