Guyana has paid an incalculable price for festering instrumental malice

Apr 26, 2011 Letters

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Dear Editor,
Rhetoric, in whatever form and in whatever style, is always an attempt to persuade, to influence, to produce identification and signification, to move its recipients to attitude and to action.
Consequently, rhetoric is generally constituted with a specific audience in mind, seeking to adopt a form of address which will engage people of a particular kind, in a particular situation, in a particular context. In order to be effective, any rhetoric must first create recognition, connection, engagement and identification on the part of its audience.
Its audience must recognise its concerns and interests, be familiar with its language, text and nuances and feel themselves to be specifically addressed by the speaker, and so on. So even though a rhetoric sets out to transform an audience in some way or other, the envisaged audience and its characteristics maybe crucial in shaping the general form which the signifying practice will adopt.
In March 2011, in the County of Berbice, at the site where many Indian Guyanese especially and indeed Guyanese of all races, make a yearly pilgrimage to celebrate and in equal measure to threnodise the Guyanese icon Cheddi Jagan, the veneer of contrived avuncularity and placidness gave way to un-statesman-like incivility, underpinned by crude covert aggressive manipulation. The Indian Guyanese president of multi-ethnic Guyana chose the most racialised context to launch into a diatribe worthy of the political homunculus against an African Guyanese contender for the presidency.
While the text of such manipulation was political, the subtext was unmistakably racial, carrying with it an imprint of colonial statecraft‘s most potent implement, divide-and-rule. During the 1970‘s there had been Indian Guyanese officers in the command structure of the GDF, but Jagdeo chooses not to blame them for the illegitimate use of the GDF resources in aiding and abetting the illegal seizure of central government power by fraudulent elections and other egregious excesses committed by the PNC during that time and in the 1980‘s.
The indecorous and squalid covert aggressive manipulation of Bharrat Jagdeo squats uncomfortably in a juxtapositional contrast with the urbaneness, finesse and patrician elegance of David Granger.
The issue of contention has been the 1973 elections when two PPP activists were regrettably killed in the Number 63 Village by soldiers of the GDF. Much of the veracity about what had happened on that fateful day in July 1973 in the County of Berbice has been obscured by the mist of PPP-contrived canard. In July 1973, Lieutenant Joseph O. Henry was a 21-year -old commanding officer of a contingent of GDF soldiers tasked with policing duties, in providing aid to civil power i.e. the collection of ballot boxes at the Number 63 Village polling station.
Soldiers had been used in the Number 63 Village in 1973 because in relation to the police, they have greater latitude in the use of legitimate force and when they use force on behalf of the state they are more likely to be indemnified from the consequences.
Lt Joseph O. Henry, a rising star of the GDF and a graduate of the now defunct Mons Officer Cadet School in Aldershot, Hampshire, was a bright, assertive, confident and self-assured young man.
Contrary to PPP canard, when the soldiers arrived at Number 63 Village they were confronted by an extremely hostile and implacably baying mob, not a peaceful crowd at all. As the soldiers attempted to enter the polling station, they were heckled, jostled and obstructed by men armed with machetes, sections of metal pipe, rocks, bottles, lengths of wood etc.
Sections of the crowd spat at the soldiers; taunted them as Burnham stooges; hurled racist invectives and racial epithets at them and chanted cacophonously, kill them! kill them!
The situation further deteriorated as the soldiers attempted to exit the polling station with the ballot boxes. Sections of the crowd, which by then had been aggregated by people from neighbouring villages, started to hurl a sea of missiles at the soldiers while at the same time blocking their exit. On a point of pedantry, the soldiers did not indiscriminately open fire on a large peaceful crowd. The contrary is indeed a statement of technical fact. Lt Henry, who hailed from the County of Berbice, spent more than adequate time remonstrating with the armed sections of the crowd, pleading with them, and after sensing their intractability sternly ordered them to cease the missile throwing and to retreat. Given the intensity of the provocation this was indeed noble of him.
As a prelude to ordering his men to open fire on the two victims, shots were fired into the air to disperse the hostile crowd, and other non-lethal methods were used, but that hostile crowd on that fateful day of July 1973 had been largely primed into obduracy, implacability and bellicose polarisation by PPP activists who had been in Number 63 Village during the week preceding the elections.
There is absolutely no doubt in my mind that the people who gathered at the Number 63 Village polling station on that fateful day of July 1973 had as their primary objective, the seizing and destruction of the ballot boxes, but the soldiers stood in the way of such objective being achieved.
So in order to achieve their primary objective the hostile crowd was hell bent on eliminating that which inhibited the realisation of the primary objective. The soldiers did not attend Number 63 Village in a truculent and offensive mode; instead their strategy was wholly defensive.
Given the intensity of the provocation, had the soldiers responded proportionately, thereby creating a field of fire, large numbers of civilians would have been killed. The two men who were regrettably killed had been armed with machetes and rushed the soldiers. The aim of the soldier is to eliminate the enemy, who is usually definitively foreign but when the ‘enemy’ is domestic citizens, even when domestic citizens become ‘combatants’.
The remit of soldiers performing policing duties ought to reflect the constraints in use of force within the context of citizenship. Today with the frequent use of soldiers in policing duties, moreso in the context of tackling drug trafficking, soldiers’ use of legitimate force against citizens remains a contentious and largely nebulous issue in certain countries. It is my opinion that the soldiers should not have been used by the PNC to collect ballot boxes, given their relative lack of specialism in crowd control techniques. Instead, the police should have been used, because however heavily armed they may be, the police do not, as their principal objective seek to kill their adversaries, who are still citizens, even if they are also armed criminals.
In fact in the case of the police, once resistance is overcome, further use of force is not only redundant but also illegal. Policemen/policewomen are individually liable for their actions in use of legitimate force. Soldiers are not individually liable for their actions because they can claim they were acting under superior orders.
Lt Henry had undoubtedly averted a blood bath in July 1973 in the Number 63 Village due to his prudent thinking and almost stoic equanimity in the face of overwhelming provocation. Lt Henry was a hero of mine then and remains a demiurge today. At the Commission of Enquiry in 1973, Lt Henry comported himself well before the formidable jurist, JOF Haynes, as he eloquently expounded on the challenges of that fateful day in July 1973 when two persons regrettably lost their lives.
The Commission of Enquiry found in favour of the soldiers’ actions, that they responded with proportionate use of force, commensurate with the provocation they had faced on that fateful day in July 1973.
Many states neglect addressing the social issues underpinning civil disorders and instead plump for a quick resolution, hence the use of the army to eliminate the ‘trouble makers’
For a people to move forward, they must first let go of historical baggage-appendaged malice which can hinder social development. One cannot move forward when contemporaneously harbouring intense intrinsic and instrumental malice.
In the 1990‘s, I saw a young man running through the streets of Freetown, Sierra Leone, with the bleeding decapitated head of a man stuck to a pole. When I asked the young man why he had the human head on the pole, he chortlingly, with a touch of schadenfreude, said when the man was alive, he had victimised him and many people and he (the young man) had waited a very, very long time for that day to seek reprisal and revenge. He later told me he had hacked off the hands of his victim‘s wife and children.
When I lived in Peckham, South London, during the 1990‘s, I witnessed quotidian clashes between continental Africans and African Caribbeans over the contentious legacy of slavery and the slave trade.
There is absolutely no love lost between the two groups. Ostensibly, some African Caribbeans blame Africans for the role of our forebears in the slave trade and some Africans in turn, for the best part, view Caribbeans as being obsessed with victimhood. This conflict dubbed as the Elephant in the Room, although shaped by the socio-economic and cultural framework of the West, (Africans and Caribbeans see each other through the prism of Western normativity) is largely underpinned by malice.
I find People who harbour instrumental malice as the most dangerous of sociopaths, largely because instrumental malice as the binary other of envy/jealousy-induced resentment often segues into murder. In fact, instrumental malice underpins many violent offences if not all.
In Guyana the institutional navel-gazing, best exemplified by the quotidian sport of Burhham-bashing, carries with it the most salient diagnostic markers of instrumental malice. Given the excessive vehemence with which the PPP has been criticizing the PNC for what they did and didn’t do, one would think Guyanese had been experiencing nirvana since 1992.
Today Jagdeo and company preside over a country where chaos and order are very difficult to tell apart, in much the same vein and tradition as the PNC in the 1980‘s.
Guyana has paid an incalculable price for festering instrumental malice, in the assassination of Walter Rodney. It is my opinion that Forbes Burnham‘s visceral antipathy towards Walter Rodney, had much to do with Burnham‘s frustration rooted in his inability to respond with legitimate tools to such intense, unrelenting and sustained superlative intellectual interrogation from the greatest most versatile and formidable intellectual there has ever been on this planet. A finer intellectual will never walk this earth. Charismatic, eloquent, articulate, youthful, vibrant, dynamic and full of verve, blessed with boundless and fathomless talents and gifted beyond imagination, that was Walter Rodney and he was killed because Burnham harboured envy/jealousy-induced instrumental malice towards him. People who harbour instrumental malice are more likely than not to use thuggery and violence as means to realise their goals, one of which is the elimination of their enemies.
Instrumental malice is a very dangerous pathology, with an intertextuality linked to the social axes of self-hate; envy, bitterness, jealousy, low self esteem; a failure to take responsibility for one’s actions, hence a proclivity for blaming others for personal failings. Bharrat Jagdeo‘s remarks in March in the County of Berbice were reckless and dangerous in a multi-ethnic society.
Joseph B. Collins

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