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The world has interpreted Guyana; the point is to change it

Dec 08, 2014 Features / Columnists, Freddie Kissoon

 
Last Friday evening, just after I finished my speech at the public launching of the TUC democracy rally at the Stabroek Market Square to protest the proroguing of Parliament, as I walked down the step from the podium, I received a call from the Kaieteur News office.
The voice at the other end of the line said that my Saturday column could not be located. I suffer bouts of trepidation whenever I have to approach my car parked in that vicinity outside of Parliament by the DEMICO area in Brickdam. It was right there on the stroke of midnight, August 15, 2012, that I was attacked and badly beaten after leaving the groundings group we called People’s Parliament.
To date, after the identification of the car my assailant jumped in, there has never been an inquiry. I never received a sympathetic message from Mrs. Patricia Rodney, wife of the Dr. Walter Rodney. Nor did I receive one from her when I was assaulted and miasma thrown on me in May 2010.
You would have thought that people like Mrs. Rodney would understand what Guyana has become and the circumstances that led to her husband’s death in 1980 are presently replicated in Guyana since Mr. Jagdeo came to power. But Mrs. Rodney was happy to secretly talk to the PPP Government (without consulting the WPA for which she should apologize; the WPA is on record as saying so) to get the Rodney Commission going and it turned out to be a huge political rally for the PPP’s race baiting habits.
I want nothing to do with the Rodney Commission and if for some illogical reason I am subpoenaed, I will risk contempt of court and refuse to go. I plan to do a column on Mrs. Rodney to ask her what the Rodney Commission has achieved so far. I will have more to say in that column. But back to last Friday night.
I never walk towards my car alone at the DEMICO/Parliament junction; a friend or friends always accompany me. Last Friday, I wasn’t taking any chance. I asked the security detail at the Office of the Opposition Leader to let me park there; he agreed. When I got the call from Kaieteur News, I decided I will go to my car and drive home and e-mail the column. I still had to pass Parliament on Brickdam. It was night so I will need company.
A long-standing friend from Wortmanville, Dexter Vanveen, the cousin of Kaieteur News Sports Reporter, Rawle Welch, walked with me. As we crossed over from the Stabroek Square to Parliament Building, we saw two men beating a homeless man. Dexter thought it was a robbery but as we reached the fight, the people told us that the two men were police who saw the man sitting on the pavement outside Parliament smoking a joint.
He resisted arrest so they began to beat him, trying to get him to the Police Outpost at the square.
My heart sank as I saw what they were doing to that poor fellow. This man wore tattered clothes and a broken pair of cheap Chinese slippers, the type that cost three hundred dollars and he was smelly. He was arrested and beaten for simply smoking a joint of marijuana. As I reached my car, Kaieteur News rang back to say they found the column. There was no need to go home.
To get the ugly picture of what I just saw out of my mind, Dexter and I went liming. Dexter drank strong; I don’t drink. We had a nice time roaming the entire Stabroek Market square.  I didn’t go back to the TUC rally.
The memory of that incident has stayed with me over the weekend. I am still pained by what Dexter Vanveen and I saw. This country has to change for the better. This country has to enter the modern era. Why in 2014 the police could cuff a homeless man repeatedly in the face because he lay on the pavement smoking a joint of marijuana while just across the road over at Demico, drunken men were behaving as in the days when troglodytes clubbed each other to death?
Interesting to note is just minutes before I saw the police in action, the bulk of my speech at the TUC rally was a denunciation of police unprofessional conduct in taking political directives. I called on the police not to use violence on political demonstrators and I urged the Opposition that if they get into government they must sack and punish police officers who acted in illegal ways. Guyanese have to democratize their country.

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