Missile Crisis

Aug 21, 2011 Features / Columnists, Ravi Dev

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Mr Kwayana has concluded that I have constructed “a kind of standing missile defence system around the PPP to save it, the PPP from attack.” And just what is this missile system? It “…is made up of words and the concept that if you attack the PPP you are anti-Indian since the PPP represents its supporters, who according to him – “are generally Indians.”
And how does Mr Kwayana arrive at this conclusion? He ekes it out from a statement in a recent article where I said the massacre of scores of innocent citizens by the Norwegian Anders Breivik brought to mind a debate I participated in a couple of years ago.
“In Guyana the debate involved opposition elements that insisted the PPP government was a fascist, racist, ‘elected dictatorship’ and that the party supporters, who are generally Indians, were directly responsible for the claimed excesses of the government.”
From this, Mr Kwayana concluded: “…if you blame the PPP for acting in a certain way and deem its actions to be an ‘excess,’ Mr Dev will find as follows: that the PPP’s actions you complain of were in defence of its supporters, “who are generally Indians” and that the comment also means that the supporters are responsible. This is so whether the comments mention the supporters or not.”
What I find astounding in this conclusion is not simply its illogicality but its studied refusal to place the reference within the context it was made. My original argument was in the form of a syllogism: If daily you use apocalyptic language to describe the government’s actions (as in Norway) and you explicitly blame the supporters of the government for those (“racist”, “fascist”, “genocidal” etc) actions (as in Norway) then there is the possibility that someone might be aroused (as with Breivik) to take matters in his own hands. I pointed out that the local polemicists explicitly blamed the supporters of the PPP for its “excesses” – not “whether the comments mention the supporters or not.”
My fears in 2008-2009, when I cautioned the polemicists to “take care” that their incendiary language do not trigger violence against PPP supporters, were not aroused in a vacuum. It is not that I was being an alarmist as Mr Kwayana is suggesting. The stench of the massacre of Lusignan was fresh in the air and that from the sustained wave of violence against Indians from 2001 by “freedom fighters” based in Buxton had not yet dissipated.
The executions of the children Mervyn Barran (11), Christine Sukra (9) and the old, the wheelchair-bound Haroon Rasheed doused with kero and set ablaze while mourning the death of his wife were yet fresh. In point of fact, Mr Kwayana himself was driven from the village by the gunmen that had been influenced by the rhetoric of those he dubbed “political sophisticates” and who he said were from outside Buxton.
The child soldiers of Buxton, trained by the “masterminds” are just five years older; the AK-47s that were stolen from the army have not all been recovered, have they? Why is it that Mr Kwayana and the others that spouted the inflammatory rhetoric against supporters of the PPP, are morphing my expressed fears of new attacks, into “a missile system” to defend the PPP?
Mr Kwayana also defends the opposition’s insistence on treating the PPP as a “dictatorship”. He ignores my caution in an earlier exchange with him on the local context shaping our view of such a political aberration: we have all been educated by Dr Walter Rodney.
“In my estimation once a government has achieved the status of a “dictatorship”, its removal is justified “by any means necessary”, including armed insurrection. But I also believe that before we arrive at that point we have to ensure that all peaceful means have exhausted. It would be interesting for someone to repeat Mr Kwayana’s exercise, which demonstrated that the Burnhamite government could not be removed through the ballot boxes, in our present circumstances. I do not have to lecture Mr Kwayana of how easily Guyana could slide into racial war. My own experience in the ‘60s as a boy in the mixed village of Uitvlugt have made me very apprehensive of the consequences of polemics on “dictatorships” in an atmosphere of heightened tensions…
It is my contention that the accusations of  “dictatorships” elected or otherwise, has served to steer opposition strategies away from the tedious, mundane task of utilising the existent democratic institutions to effectuate regime change towards the easier, but ultimately far more dangerous one, of shouting in frustration, “Dictatorship! Dictatorship!””
In an earlier response to my fears, Mr Kwayana noted: “Mr Dev seems to be inviting me to give an opinion whether the post-elections violence starting in 2001 by what I prefer to call certain supporters of the cause of an opposition party has helped the PPP to secure its base. This is like asking whether heavy rainfall leaves the earth wet.”
Guyana does not need more “heavy rainfall”: we may all drown this time.

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