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Our descent into a dystopian existence
Jan 14, 2014 Letters
DEAR EDITOR,
A young man is lying in a bed in a hospital in Guyana suffering from severe intestinal injuries he alleges were inflicted by Law Enforcement. According to his and his mother’s revelations, his injuries were sustained back in November at Timehri, during a visit by officers stationed at Timehri Police Station to the home of his girlfriend.
It would appear that, as has become something of a standing operating procedure for some Law Enforcement Officers, they were trying to coerce him into confessing to some crime or offence, or supplying answers to things he knew nothing about. In this pursuit, they allegedly beat and tortured him into an unconscious state, and then used a baton to penetrate his rectum, producing the injuries referenced. That this occurred over two months ago, and the mother is still to receive any satisfactory response from the police is something that conforms with what has come to represent justice in Guyana today.
A similar incident came to light in New York in 1997, involving a Haitian Immigrant named Abner Louima. He suffered serious injury to his bladder when his rectum was forcibly penetrated with a broken broomstick by some members of the New York Police Department. It took Federal Intervention to bring justice to this matter, but absent any equivalent impartial and un-politicized Law Enforcement entity in Guyana, one wonders whether the young man, Colwyn Harding, and his mother, can expect to see an equivalent pursuit in Guyana.
I have absolutely no hesitation in stating, and emphatically so, that the dystopian and degenerative state our society has devolved into, is a product of the wicked and malevolent tenure of government, its practice of abuse of, or convenient adherence to the rule of law and the treatment of some Guyanese at the hands of Law Enforcement, and the laissez faire, inept, and intellectually laziness that describe the combined opposition’s approach to their electoral and Parliamentary obligations.
In no part of this world, this civilized world, would a 21-year exhibition of such venalities be countenanced. When in any society, hundreds of citizens could be summarily kidnapped, tortured and executed by vagrant bands of vigilantes, with no public expression of revulsion or condemnation by those charged with the responsibility of guaranteeing due process, the presumption of innocence, and equality in the enforcement of the Law, that society become a breeding ground for the horrible experiences of the Colwyn Hardings and the perpetrators of these kinds of ghastly abuses.
From the staggering rate of young people taking their lives over the everyday adversities that are part of one’s youthful experiences, the beastly and macabre violence and abuses being meted out upon women and children, to the now standard procedure of Law Enforcement using torture and brutalization as the main instrument to investigate and solve crimes, our nation seems to be plunging headlong towards an irreversible state of dystopia.
The horrible and odious are fast replacing those values and principles that were once an inherent part of our civilized existence, while the leaders on all sides of the political equation, like Nero, fiddle away disinterestedly, secure in their opulent and gated habitations. To paraphrase the words of Martin Luther King Jr., the appalling silence of the so-called good people in the face of what is going on in this country is complicity equivalent to the vitriolic words and actions of the bad people. And I refuse to be the one to hold my tongue with the illusion that I can seek redemption when the dust has cleared.
Mark A. Benschop
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