The ghost that wouldn’t die

Jul 11, 2014 Features / Columnists, Freddie Kissoon

---

Perhaps the ugliest and nastiest racist miasma to come off a keyboard, the tip of a pen or the tongue of a person, was carried in the Guyana Chronicle in July 2012. Written by a woman very close to Janet Jagan, it informed readers that Guyanese African youths have been historically, culturally and sociologically indoctrinated with hatred for Indians and that hatred finds its natural outlet in African youths seeing Indians as natural prey to be attacked.
The most disappointing response to that unspeakable descent into racist filth was the silence of the leadership of the security forces. The security forces cannot make political statements, but condemnation of bestial attacks on one’s race goes beyond politics – it is a crime against civilized thinking.
The leadership of the security forces had an opportunity to issue a statement because the abomination occurred in a state-owned media, the final jurisdiction over which rested with the Commander-in-Chief of the armed forces – President Ramotar. He was at the time and still is the Minister with portfolio for the state media.
The reasoning is simple – if African youths hate Indians and want to harm them, then, why did two African dominated organizations, namely the police and army, since 1992, accept an Indian dominated ruling party, and have not used the power of the security forces to harm the leaders of the PPP and Government?
The security forces consist of mainly young African men who have worked tirelessly to maintain law and order in Guyana. Surely to assert that these young men are indoctrinated with a racist hatred for their civilian bosses is the ultimate insult.
Now we may have another ultimate insult, this time not focused on African youths but on African women.
Every day you pick up the newspapers and you are confronted with the macabre yet realistic thought that Guyana has the most absurd governmental leadership in the world. I just cannot forget a Legal Affairs Minister once telling the media; “I thought y’all talking ‘bout me when you refer to a Minister who committed illegal things, because I is a man who like do illegal things.”
And that Minister kept his job. He was subsequently placed in a more sensitive job. A parliamentarian, justifying the government’s refusal to open the three publicly-owned swimming pools, told the media that people must understand that they must bathe first before they use a pool. A sitting president reportedly abused his common-law wife in the most heart-breaking manner and survived in office.
The latest in these horrible acts of moral bestialities is the invocation of the racial ghost by Gail Teixeira in the incident involving the atrocious behaviour of Priya Manickchand at the home of the US Ambassador. How any citizen can accept Teixeira’s miasmic and ugly interpretation of Guyanese revulsion against what Manickchand did, only shows that this is a dead society.
A human being goes to a function, engages in behaviour that is uncouth, obnoxious, ethically unrefined and morally crude.  When the society offers its protestations, the society is told by Gail Teixeira of the Office of the President that the critics are portraying a racial bias against Indian women. That is an acrobatic leap that is overflowing with manifestations of fetid rubbish.
People must be judged by the content of their conduct. But Teixeira has gone in a frightening direction. If you commit a crime, your accuser may not be morally offended in condemning you, but may be racially biased. So if in a working day, a security guard catches eight Indian shop-lifters and no Africans or Chinese, the guard is racist?
But what about the inherent genetic superiority in Teixeira’s logic? If we are racist in condemning Manickchand, then by Teixeira’s logic, Indian women may be superior to African women, because Teixeira has not accepted that her government was biased against African women when it targeted them.
An African mother of small children was remanded for two years on bogus treason charges. An African Chief Education Officer was refused confirmation before retirement thereby reducing her pension; three African women from the Energy Authority were among seven African employees who were sacked after supposedly failing an illegally administered polygraph.
My question to Teixeira is, if the critics of Manickchand were racially motivated, was Teixeira’s Government racially bigoted in the three cases I mentioned above?
What is playing out in this country by the PPP is the only card left to play – the race thing. That ghost is the only game the PPP can play. The racial poltergeist is the only survival string left for the PPP and that ghost will be kept alive once the PPP power looks like falling. And it is falling.

---

---