Blood, Sweat and Tears

Mar 15, 2013 Editorial

March 13, last, marked the 100th anniversary of the “Rose Hall Riots’, as they were dubbed by the British officials. Fifteen indentured and ‘free’ sugar workers were gunned down by the Police in their housing quarters on Rose Hall, Canje, sugar estate and it was called a ‘riot”. Apart from the gruesomeness of the action itself, the incident serves as a background to understanding the orientation of the Guyana Police Force that survives to this day.
All of the contradictions of the indentured experience were highlighted in what were the largest official mass killings of indentureds out of the millions that were sent out of India during the 19th and early 20th century. First was the gap in labour conditions between what the immigrants had been promised in India (in writing) and the reality in Guyana. The Rose Hall killings were triggered when workers protested clear breaches of the indentureship contract.
Then there was the institution of the “Protector of Immigrants” that almost always – apart from the notable exception during the regime of James Crosby – never challenged the sugar interests. The aggrieved workers visited their office after they received no justice from the Manager of the Estate, but were turned away. Next in line were the courts, to which the sugar interests invariably turned when challenged by the workers for violating their terms of employment.
The system in the courts was stacked against the indentureds: the officials saw themselves as part of the system designed to ensure the success of sugar “on which the entire country depended”. Breaches of the labour conditions were treated as criminal offences, but it would be a rare indentured indeed who could bring a sugar official to court and get anyone to testify against him. The courts were a powerful armament in the hands of ‘King Sugar’.
In this instance, the courts ordered the expulsion of five workers from the ‘estate housing’ as punishment for their temerity to not do the manager’s bidding. The ‘housing’ was the self-same atrocious quarters from slavery that were filthy and insanitary. And this was where the Police came in. This institution had been formed directly after the abolition of slavery to protect ‘King Sugar’ and they were used as the ultimate enforcement arm of that most powerful group.
They had shot killed indentureds as far back as 1872 (Devonshire Castle, Essequibo) and again in 1896, 1898, 1903 and after the Rose Hall Massacre of 1913, they were to repeat their actions at Ruimveldt (1924, 14 killed), Leonora (1939) and Enmore (1948). But what makes the Rose Hall executions more egregious, was that the workers were not on any protest line or blocking traffic or breaking any law. The police actually went into the workers’ houses to eject the five expelled “agitators” and the workers felt this was the final straw.
They tried to defend their homes and honour but the police, with their commander armed with a machine gun, opened fire with abandon. In addition to the 15 killed, 42 were wounded: many were in their homes as the bullets penetrated the flimsy walls. It was a slaughter of the lambs. The authorities then proceeded with their standard response: the appointment of their own Commission of Inquiry. To no one’s surprise, the police and the authorities were completely exonerated.
However, through pure serendipity, at the time of the massacre there were representatives of the Indian Government in Guyana and their reports helped speed up the anti-indentured movement in India. Gandhi was to play an active role in this process which led to the abolition of indentureship in 1917.
In Guyana today, there have finally been steps taken to reform the police to move it beyond its telling label “Police Force” to being a “Police Service”. All Guyanese must support this movement towards reform. As the police action in Marudi only a few weeks ago demonstrates, the reflexive action of the GPF continues to protect the interests of the powerful against the aspirations of the powerless.

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