Understanding the motives of the racist editorial

Jul 17, 2012 Letters

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Dear Editor,
Despite growing condemnation of the fear politics conceived, Parvati Persaud-Edwards penned, Guyana Chronicle published racist editorial there are those who believe that a mountain has been chiselled from a molehill. There are those as well – as we have seen in the comments in various sections of social media – who are of the conviction that Mrs. Persaud-Edwards was in fact in good order and, in some ways, is a victim. Mrs. Persaud-Edwards herself has not been shy in commenting on facebook and, without the slightest hint of remorse, has been belligerent in doing so.
Most repugnant about Mrs. Persaud-Edwards’ editorial is that she uses her personal experiences and selective other incidents to daub an entire ethnic group into criminality. She purposely chose not to even pause to consider the thousands upon thousands of outstanding examples of Afro-Guyanese successes in every sphere of life. Needless to say, these far outweigh the minority criminal elements who are not confined to any single ethnic group in Guyana.
There is though, a further salient lesson for the nation in this editorial abhorrence. All is not well in the republic and there are unmistakable and undeniable signs that what is ahead is not necessarily the best of times. To ignore what is at play here, the background to this editorial and the end game of the protagonists, is to flirt dangerously with national instability and (re)commit Guyana to an entrenchment of the politics of fear.
At the core is that violence profits only one political entity in Guyana.
There is expanding evidence of the notion that there is, among the upper echelons of a certain political party, the unwritten creed, that – hand selected tokenism aside – Afro-Guyanese must never be entrusted with leadership in Guyana and measures must be taken to ensure that this be prohibited, whatever the costs. This group has managed to prevail upon their supporters that this rancid thinking is worthy of embrace. And so it has been for election after election.
They have perpetuated a shallow, stereotypical argument as a convenient teaching aid in their syllabus of racist rottenness administered to their electoral subjects. They exploit the fact that some Afro-Guyanese young men have been caught in a cycle of crime. They magnify this, package it and distribute among their legions of the willing. Of course, they conveniently overlook, that these men are often forced into crime through lack of economic opportunities, marginalization and discriminatory practices. It does not suit their purposes to inform their people of the orchestrated reasons for Afro-Guyanese young men being involved in crime. Neither have they bothered to educate their followers that the proceeds of crime perpetrated by Afro-Guyanese are infinitesimal in contrast to the officially endorsed, white collar crimes, mainly perpetrated by those of another group who remain untouchable by the law.
There is yet greater depth to this foul editorial.
Following November 28, 2011 that party recognized that whereas it once was able to exercise absolute control over its followers through group think, that segments have and are becoming disentangled from the bête noir it preached with fastidious zeal. That fear has become diluted and is being annulled in the minds of the people who have found shards of enlightenment through various means. It has been through media, wider access to information via the internet and the tireless work of the third political force, in particular, that such numbers of the previously indoctrinated have been disabused of their defective doctrine.
The party of power has recognized that not only has it lost its way as an electoral force but its once battle-hardened fear formula for victory has become faulty. It scraped through by the skin of its teeth, registering its weakest results at the polls since its inception and formed a wounded minority government.
The party knows that it must rekindle the flame of fear. The party knows that it is this self-inflicted fear of leadership by Afro-Guyanese which had galvanized its supporters into pouring in the votes for the famed drinking utensil. The party knows that it must therefore create the conditions to allow this fear to be palpable to herd the flock home en masse; that those gone astray and those thinking of going astray must be cowed into reinstating the rule which allows the party to run rampage across the land.
Never has the party been bashful in exploiting the fear factor. It is what caused the results to be what they were in 2001. The parading of the suffering and stories of the Indo-Guyanese victims of the post-Mash Day jailbreak crime wave accrued into the landslide of 2006. There was a concomitant effort to repress and diminish news of the hundreds of Afro-Guyanese young men who, for nearly two years, were rounded up like cattle never to be seen again. It remains a gross travesty that no inquiry has been commissioned into this national tragedy.
November 28 was different. By then the fear had subsided and what was now at the forefront of the nation’s collective mind was the executive corruption gone mad. The incremental evidence suggests that the party now thinks it is time to kick into reverse and take the nation back into the treacherous unenlightened times when it was able to rule through the manufacture, imposition and exploitation of fear.
And so the editorial is not to be taken as the maverick writings of a lone crusader. It is by design, not coincidence. Mrs. Persaud-Edwards’ miscalculation has been that in willingly allowing herself to be partied to a conniving plan she did not understand that she is easily dispensable. But where one is removed another will soon surface in her place to incite and enrage. They are playing a perilous
game of light-the-fuse. The strength and salvation of the opposition will be in unrelenting militant political pressure but with restraint and a single-minded focus.
The regime will exploit the slightest hint of hostility as they preposterously attempted to do in advertisement with the APNU Green Wave March to City Hall on Nomination Day. What the regime itself dreads is political pressure the likes of which have been applied through the budget cuts, through activism in Linden, through non-violent protests around the city and the sporadic peaceful uprising of oppressed peoples all across Guyana. It is this concerted non-violent action which renders the regime weakened, vulnerable and fractured. The dividends of this strategy are already evident.
By every means necessary, violence must be condemned and rejected by every soul engaged in righting the wrongs wrought upon Guyana.
Our Indo-Guyanese brothers and sisters who do not subscribe to racism and the politics of fear must also stand in unwavering solidarity with our Afro-Guyanese brothers and sisters as we, together, seek to advance our nation in a state of mutual respect, justice and equal opportunity for all races, creeds, religions, political persuasions, sexual orientations and differences of all kinds. Any other course of action will leave Guyana wounded, divided and disgraced.
Imran Khan

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