Guyana: Metaphysical wasteland and parched terrain of empty nowhere

Mar 05, 2013 Features / Columnists, Freddie Kissoon

The report of the Commission of Inquiry (COI) into the shooting to death of three protestors in July 2012 has displaced all other topics of conversation in Georgetown and perhaps all over Guyana.
A particular section of the COI has reduced this country to the metaphysical wasteland of Zabriskie’s Point, the Michelangelo Antonioni’s avant garde movie on the hippie counter-culture of the sixties.
In the 21st century, a human life in Guyana is worth one million dollars which is less than a third of what a minibus costs if you want to buy one to bring in a steady income. The COI has assigned three million dollars to the relatives of two of the dead men and one million to another.
There can be no greater insult to the people of this country than this descent in Dante’s Inferno. (the one million dollar award has since been corrected to two million dollars)
The two Jamaican and one Trinidadian Commissioners are gone. They probably were glad to leave and perhaps left with the same measure of cynicism that Caricom nationals view this country.
What is irredeemable is the position of the two local Commissioners; retired Appeal Court judge, Claudette Singh, and former Judiciary Chancellor, Cecil Kennard. The same former Chancellor will preside in the next two weeks on a horse-racing competition where the prize money is twenty million dollars.
How can any human being in this world, after deciding that the police shot and killed three unarmed political protestors, award their families the sum of three million Guyana dollars and in the case of another, a mere million?
But this is a nihilist land of permanent twilight where life is worth less than what it was thousands of years ago. Justices Singh and Kennard will resume their conventional life where they will be the honoured guests at official openings, guest speakers at prestigious occasions, and will be surrounded by others on the cocktail circuit, people who will be glad to shake their hands.
For all you know, Singh and Kennard may have been congratulated already by many who thanked them for a superb job on the Commission.
It reminds me of the man who played a strategic role in the assassination of Walter Rodney and years after became a darling of the business community and the government and since that has accumulated more money than a successful Wall Street banker would earn in ten years.
No one cares about what he did in 1980 when Rodney lost his life.
This is Dante’s Inferno where life is the least valuable commodity around. Go to any magistrate court and you will see bail carries a large sum if the charge is theft of money, clothes, electronic goods and other consumer luxuries.
If the charge is death (yes DEATH) by dangerous driving the bail is easy (as they say in loose lingo). Kill a woman in the most bestial way, plead guilty to manslaughter, and you are out in less than ten years. Life is meaningless in Guyana.
It is not that magistrates and judges are brutal people by nature. No they are victims of a one-dimensional society in the words of the great 20th German philosopher, Herbert Marcuse where money and goods are more important than people.
In the coming weeks, the dust will settle on the COI report, Justices Singh and Kennard will continue to enjoy their elevated status as retired justices and the wasteland will sink deeper into its nihilistic miasma.
Maybe in the eyes of many, when you are poor you don’t understand the importance of money, you don’t know how to spend it so it would not be wise to give to you.
Maybe the five Commissioners took too seriously the line in Andrew Lloyd Webber’s fantastic musical, “Jesus Christ Superstar, when Jesus said Judas
“Surely, you’re not saying
We have the resources to save the poor from their lot
They will be poor always
Pathetically struggling
Look at the good things you’ve got”
Finally, there is one asinine remark in that report that makes the report looks stupid. The Commissioners opined that opposition politicians should take some responsibility because of the illegal occupation of the bridge. So once an illegal act is committed that gives the police the right to shoot people dead?

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Guyana: Metaphysical wasteland and parched terrain of empty nowhere

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