Kissoon is highlighting the fact of racism

Feb 01, 2013 Letters

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Dear Editor,
I refer to the story in the Stabroek News “Kissoon Cites Stats to Support Position on Jagdeo Presidency” (SN 29 1 13), and would appreciate the opportunity to comment.
Guyana appears now to be awakening to a reality of stupendous proportions. This is good for the national conscience, and we used the words of Professor Davies on page 1 of the online article “Greed, Genocide … and now ‘Green’: Corruption and Underdevelopment in Guyana” (http://www.scribd.com/doc/17958657/ Greed-Genocide-and-now-Green-Corruption-and-Underdevelopment-in-Guyana   ) to illustrate that these issues must be confronted, not hidden or avoided.
Racism in every form must be condemned … or else we are all living a lie! We are all safe in a social-policy space delineated by a respect for fact, truth, detail and evidence!
It is in anticipation of the slew of hate-mail against Kissoon that will now appear in the local press that this comment is offered.
It is also paradoxical, and a testimony to this stupor-like “awakening”, that the words and work of Frederick Kissoon … and not, say, Lincoln Lewis’ graphic outline of “economic genocide”, or Ronald Austin’s tragic essay on the killing of young Blacks in “Genocide”, or Dr. Kean Gibson’s “Cycle of Racial Oppression in Guyana”  … that has now captured the public eye while the issue of “ideological racism” is contemplated.
Even more paradoxical is the fact that it is now happening in court!
We remember, too, the many attestations of the then GPSU that what Frederick Kissoon is now detailing was indeed happening in post-1992 Guyana … and the studied and callous silence that accompanied national and regional observers.
Nowhere was this silence and callousness more obvious than in the hallways and dungeons of the Guyana’s own Ethnic Relations Commission which somehow over time managed to produce many “studies” saying that all was well even in issues like scholarship allocation.
As the national conscience kicks in, the authors of those “studies” may yet be less “cooperative” than the prosecution expects, and illustrate just how the “results” were determined within the walls of the ERC.
In that not-too-distant and cataclysmic event-paradox, Bharrat Jagdeo’s efforts to ruin Frederick Kissoon become the instrument of his own exposure!
Former President Bharrat Jagdeo may well rue the day that he forgot that Satya Meva Jayate (“Truth Alone Triumphs”) and that even the most hardcore of the “jati” in Guyana would one day come to the inescapable position that the level of overt and covert racism heaped upon Afro-Guyanese post 1992 was unsustainable and wrong!
Kean Gibson started an honest debate on this issue in “The Cycle of Racial Oppression in Guyana” and Frederick Kissoon has obviously (and to his credit) been “transformed” since.
While he is delicately trying to side-step the core sociological/cultural premises of the racism Gibson outlines by characterizing the (same) racism as “ideological”, one senses that there is no significant distance between their analyses and conclusions.
What he mentions in this short Stabroek News story and in the similar story in the Kaieteur News (https://www.kaieteurnewsonline.com/2013/01/29/kissoon-continues-to-detail-reasons-for-calling-jagdeo-ideological-racist/  ) is already summarized in brutal frankness in Dr. Gibson’s small book and its sequel “Sacred Duty:”
The article in David Granger’s Guyana Review of July 1999 “30,012 Gun Licences” illustrates that the rot preceded Jagdeo.
What is mysteriously absent from Kissoon’s presentation thus far is the reality of the unprecedented killings of hundreds of Black youths in post-1992 Guyana, a tragedy that informs the eloquent and painful essay “Genocide” by former Guyana Ambassador Ronald Austin.
Kissoon’s detractors will be hard-pressed to find another instance in Guyana’s history when killings on this scale occurred or deny that such killings speak to the “ideological racism” that Kissoon is articulating.
It is an equally compelling tragedy that this article by Austin is being systematically removed by persons unknown from every online berth, and Mr. Austin should publish it again.
Kissoon’s unanswerable expose’, like the events outlined in part in the online article “Greed, Genocide … and now “Green”: Corruption and Underdevelopment in Guyana” (http://www.scribd.com/doc/17958657/Greed-Genocide-and-now-Green-Corruption-and-Underdevelopment-in-Guyana   ) illustrate that this terrible convergence of overt and covert social-policy degeneracy is unprecedented in Guyana’s history, and a slap in the face of all those who cherish the words and intent of the National Motto: “One People, One Nation, One Destiny”.
There is still time for us to forgive each other, and live out the true meaning of that creed!
As Professor Ali Mazrui once said, it is fortunate indeed that for a sizeable portion of Guyana’s population, their memory of hate is not great!
Roger Williams

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