Bisram’s derogative view that we should “move on” from the Linden tragedy is insufferable hypocrisy

Mar 11, 2013 Letters

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Dear Editor,
Your edition of March 8th carried a Vishnu Bisram letter in which he made the arrogant and partisan appeal for parliament and the public to “move on” from addressing the tragic July 18, 2012 shootings in Linden. Writing in response to the the COI report on the fatal shootings of three protestors in Linden, Bisram suggested that parliament, before it moves on, “may wish to consider sanctioning” its two members the report blames for failing to stop protestors from blocking bridges and using other universally recognized and accepted protest tactics that helped free India from colonialism, South Africa from Apartheid, and America from legalized racial segregation.
So Bisram shamelessly believes that our National Assembly should not discuss that the COI found the police responsible for the three fatalities or that the compensation recommended for the three fatalities is nothing but monetary insults and a total disregard for the value of human life or that the government must implement the COI’s recommendations. Having made his own self-serving peace with an event that occurred less than a year ago, Bisram wants our nation’s intellectual and financial resources to be focused on worthier or other pertinent causes. Not so fast. This tragedy must be officially memorialized and is deserving of as much extended attention as any other of our nation’s socio-economic/political protests that resulted in injuries or deaths.
Bisram’s derogative view that our nation should “move on” from the eight-month-old Linden tragedy also turns out to be insufferable hypocrisy when it is contrasted with his inability to forget to agitate about the sufferings he claims he and his comrades endured during the PNC’s 28-year rule, which ended nearly 21 years ago.
Yes, world, Bisram wants our nation to “move on” from investigated and confirmed injustices that occurred less than one year ago even as he and the replacement PPP dictatorship continue to holler, inside and outside Parliament, about alleged injustices they suffered under the PNC at least 21 years ago.
And of one thing we can be sure: Bisram will never tell himself or the PPP and its supporters that it is time to “move on” from accusing the PNC of committing this or that injustice at least 21 years ago. Bisram’s attitude gives rise to questions I have rhetorically asked myself a million times: Why do some people believe that their sufferings (real or imagined) are worthier of being talked or written about more than the real or imagined sufferings of others? And why do those same people consider the shootings that occurred during demonstrations under the 28-year PNC “dictatorship” to be more reprehensible than the shootings that have occurred during similar demonstrations under the numerically-growing 21-year ”replacement dictatorship” of the PPP?
And why do they believe that the PNC’s government’s use of House of Israel thugs was more reprehensible than the admission by Roger Khan and members of his Phantom Squad that they worked for the PPP government? Editor, our nation will never rise to its full potential if we do not expose or challenge the attitudes and hypocrisies of groups and persons  like Vishnu Bisram.
The PPP- and Bisram-peddled propaganda that more people have been injured or killed by gunfire during protests under the PNC does not stand up to factual scrutiny. That July 2012 Linden march increased the PPP record as the party under which the most persons have been injured or killed by gunfire during protests.
Despite all their claims about PNC atrocities during its 28-year rule, the PPP and Bisram can only name three persons who were killed during protests under the PNC: two male PPP activists were killed by the GDF in July of 1973 during a protest attempt to prevent the GDF from removing ballot boxes on the Corentyne and Father Bernard Darke, a Catholic priest, was stabbed to death by PNC thugs in July of 1979 while he was taking photographs during a protest on Brickdam in Georgetown.
On the other hand, seven  protestors have been killed and about 30 injured as a result of being shot by our security forces since the PPP came to power in 1992: one woman was killed in April of 2001; one man was killed in front of the Albion police station in June of 2001; two men were killed in front of a Berbice Anti-smuggling Squad office in Corentyne in August of 2001; and three persons were killed in Linden in July of 2012. This stark truth is one reason Bisram would like us to “move on”, and also why the PPP quickly released the COI report hoping that the country will “move on”.
Editor, our people should never, in deference to Bisram or anyone else, abandon their tradition of protests or their right to talk about the injuries or deaths that result from protests. From the days of slavery to these days of the replacement PPP dictatorship, the protest has been an effective liberating or messaging tool of the enslaved, the disenfranchised, and the marginalized.
But it has been viewed with suspicion and dread by dictators and their cohorts, who are well aware that a peaceful protest march can quickly change into a violent revolt for justice.
Thus the often unprovoked, aggressive, and deadly responses from rulers whose knowledge of history and own anti-colonial struggles should have informed them that revolts or protests against injustice are best quelled by the dispensing of justice rather than by the dispensing of violence. For the plain truth is that the will to oppress will always be overcome by the will to be free of oppression.
So the people of Linden and their representatives in parliament should have their peaceful say whenever, wherever, and for as long as it takes the replacement PPP dictatorship to implement all the recommendations of the commission.
Yes, unlike Mr. Bisram who suggests that the government should merely ”consider implementing the COI recommendations”, they should set the implementation of the recommendations as a precondition for any return to normalcy in Linden or any other part of Guyana.
After all, Guyanese have every natural right to march for their rights, without fear of being unjustifiably gunned down in the streets.
And they must not allow themselves be deterred by the subterfuges and hypocrisies of enablers of the replacement dictatorship or by the idle fulminations of delirious speakers at Babu John or any other place.
Lionel Lowe

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