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How is suffering measured to endorse slave relief?
DEAR EDITOR,
It’s true that millions of slaves faced horrific brutality and the din to be compensated has its merits.
I have no problems with that. But Mr. Eric Phillips’s letter in the KN of 3-29 -14 titled ”To equate reparations for the genocide of millions with Wismar (1964) is not the divisive path to follow” is insensitive , completely wrong and most unacceptable.
For 1600 innocent Indo-Guyanese to be premeditatively massacred and brutalized for no other reason other than their race in the civilized 20th century makes it more despicable and inhumane. How is suffering measured to endorse and bring relief for some but at the same time does not apply to others?
Neither their religion nor humanity absolutely made any difference. Any good reason why the PNC held their party pioneering congress in that area, so confident those foreign interests had guaranteed their electoral victory with PR or later still, select that dreadful 26th May in 1966 for Guyana’s independence?
What path would Mr Phillips recommend to be followed in regards to the above?
The entire Caribbean real estate – lock, stock and barrel – was handed over to slave descendants and all emerging Caribbean black governments became the new primary gatekeepers for all when the colonials departed. Did automatic right of complete ownership ensue? What elevated governmental control had done was to lend initial courtesy to the myth of complete Afrocentric inheritance with subsequent total entitlement claims under the rule of law.
An evident ethnocentric scale arose which casually allowed such empowerment to define and decide who suffered more i.e. native Amerindians, Portuguese, Chinese and lastly Indians, but with Africans always impoverished by race, unlike the others.
Mr. Phillips again commits the same entitlement mistake by his dismissal of Wismar’s atrocities as a “small village incident” because the quotient numbers killed, he has decided, is not enough. Will we remain mired in a problem that has no immediate solution, especially being subjected more so by its media hypergraphia or more instigated Lindens and Agricolas?
How fair is Guyana’s continued pursuit of justified closure and atonement for the brutalities of slavery to dismiss the recent modern brutalities at Wismar in 1964?
Distribution of reparations to significantly remedy and improve the Afro-Caribbean dilemma should be speedily clarified, since Caricom’s mission is funded by all taxpayers, in effect a subsidy only to benefit one race, excluding all others.
Nowhere in Caribbean history has any other ethnic or race group operated on a similar praxis. Wrong is wrong regardless. The Indo Guyanese descendants of the 1964 Wismar massacre must get their due compensation from the slave reparations. Necessary justice by the same principle is what governs the inquiry surrounding the assassination of Dr Walter Rodney.
The offspring of ex-slaves who would have legitimately secured their monetary compensations sometime in the unknown future will certainly have much by which to be happy. In the meantime Federalism, not shared governance or even partition can best serve our divergent aspirations.
Vassan Ramracha
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