Mark Benschop confronts Donald Ramotar

May 09, 2016 Letters

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Dear Editor;
There are few experiences that are more nauseating than having to read the hypocritical and deceitful bottom house prattling of former President Donald Ramotar and his barefaced PPP colleagues, as they launch accusations against the current Government for doing what had become a standard feature of PPP governance and policy in Guyana. The PPP Government under President Jagdeo and Ramotar, patented a form of racial and ethnic discrimination that had no precedence in the British Commonwealth political Basin of nations. In fact, one would have to go to the most historically severe and atrocious examples of power being used in that context, to find anything that matches what Guyana experienced under the PPP. And since ‘Comrade’ Ramotar took the liberty of presenting his examples of what he described as racist occurrences under the PNC and present Government (keeping in mind that the daydreamers in the PNC, and this current regime can one day defend themselves, hopefully)
I crave your indulgence to respond with factual evidence that unambiguously demonstrate how selective and dysfunctional is the moral compass he uses to chart the course his perspective takes. I can point to my personal ordeal, where I was arrested (putting aside the dozens of arrests) and prosecuted on a fabricated treason charge under the corrupt PPP regime as an example that makes ‘Comrade’ Ramotar outrage over the justified prosecution of Kwame McCoy ludicrous. McCoy is being prosecuted for assaulting someone who is not a member of the Government or PPP. He is being prosecuted for assaulting someone who was a vocal and unrepentant critic of the PNC, AFC and APNU when they were in opposition, and who has continued to critique their performance now that they are in Government.
That this is where he has gone to find something to hang racism upon demonstrate how really sophomoric and undeveloped is his capacity for cogency in his examinations. Even further, I spent more than five years in prison because of racial and political persecution from the PPP Government of which ‘Comrade’ Ramotar was General Secretary. And even after an 11-1 division in favor my acquittal by a jury of my peers, the PPP regime vindictively kept me under lockdown as a political prisoner. Mr. Editor there is more evidence of Kwame McCoy’s violation of the law in the offence for which he was charged, than there was in the case the PPP regime brought against me. But this is in keeping with ‘Comrade’ Ramotar’s Orwellian equal and more equal way of viewing and examining issues in this world and especially in Guyana.
We can well recall the incident of his son knocking down the nephew of Freddie Kissoon, and driving away without offering him succor. Even more evident of the disfigured and Orwellian psychological incubator in which the thoughts and perspectives of ‘Comrade’ Ramotar are formed and shaped, is the fact that the victim of this accident was never contacted at the time by ‘Comrade’ Ramotar or his son, and the complete disregard they displayed for the life and well being of a Guyanese citizen who, clearly and unarguably, they consider as someone who had no rights which they, comfortably ensconced in their castle of political and ethnic power, had any obligation to recognized and respect.
Mr. Editor, I come now to the most glaring example and evidence of the PPP’s ethno/racial prejudice, and which, when there were similar occurrences in places like Peru and Liberia, Bosnia and Iraq, the leaders of those nations were held accountable, and some ended up before local or international courts, and were found guilty and sentenced to prison. If ‘Comrade’ Ramotar is allowed to provide his perspective on what he interpreted to be racist behaviors in Guyana, surely you must accord the same privilege to those of us who find his position to be an example of the most repugnant display of hypocrisy. Under the laws of Guyana, every citizen is presumed innocent until they are found guilty by a duly instituted Court of Law in the land.
We know and recognize that we have criminality in Guyana (some at the highest level under the PPP regime, including child molesters) and that even now it has reached proportions that appear unmanageable. But we also know and recognize that there is a stain on the face of this nation in which the PPP had a hand in painting. I refer of course to the hundreds of citizens who were murdered by vigilante gangs led by persons with links to the PPP.
I refer of course to the fact that the motive expressed by those gangs was that the citizens were criminal suspects. And I make link to the fact that the vast majority of those citizens were of African descent. When this is put together objectively with the fact that over the more than a decade duration of the PPP being power during this era, and no real effort ever being made by them to deal with has to be the greatest infamy in the post independent life of this country, one is left with no choice but to conclude that for the PPP regime, the victim of those killings had no rights which they felt duty bound to respect.
For your enlightenment Mr. Editor, I would advise that you investigate which crimes the PPP Government offered rewards for information. Surely one can assess the willingness of a Government to stop such happenings and to go after the perpetrators by examining the legal machinations they were willing to employ to get evidence against such perpetrators. Mr. Editor, under ‘Comrade’ Donald Ramotar’s failed Presidency, there was an editorial in the State controlled Newspaper, the Chronicle, in which it was argued that the parents of African Guyanese trained their kids to rob and kill Indian Guyanese. Nowhere in this civilized world would such an editorial be published in a periodical controlled by the state.
The PPP regime never condemned or took action against the Editor and Manager responsible for allowing that racist stereotyping of African Guyanese to be published. And we cannot separate this fact from the attitude and behaviors of the PPP Government in reaction to the murderous assaults unleashed on a specific group this country.
For the edification of ‘Comrade’ Ramotar and his assembly of uninformed, and Hitler like colleagues who seek to redefine the universal meaning and context of terms like racism and racist, racial or ethnic prejudice is a product of people making judgments about individuals and groups based on ill-formed and stereotyped negative allusions. At its foundation, is the notion that certain groups are inferior and that this is a condition that is unalterable and passed down from generation to generation.
One can always detect traces of this in the manner in which individuals or groups address each other, the behaviors they attribute to others. And when we examine the landscape of politics and social interaction in Guyana, the only political organization from which there are emanations of vile and despicable racist innuendos, and glaring verbiage that represent unambiguous pandering to the most visceral racist inclinations of people, happens to be the PPP. What we have to accept is that in the fractured and disfigured mindset of ‘Comrade’ Ramotar and others within his ethnic and political circle, a racist has been redefined from someone who does not like Indian Guyanese because their ethnicity, to someone who, some Indian Guyanese like ‘Comrade’ Ramotar and others, do not like. This is the immoral trajectory along which their thinking flow.
You see, ‘Comrade’ Ramotar and the backward thinking PPP leadership, as one of my friends describes them, represent the current day human replicas of George Orwell’s revolutionary animal farm porcine characters, down to the concept that some groups and individuals are more equal than others.
After 23 years of being in absolute power, where they could redefine every single positive moral and ethical principle that had influenced behavior in Guyana from time immemorial, ‘Comrade’ Ramotar and his morally bankrupt colleagues had come to the conviction that such privilege is theirs by some divine right. So any interruption of that privilege becomes racist, becomes undemocratic, becomes oppression.
Nowhere is this more explicitly obvious than in his assertion that David Hinds changed from a balanced activist when he opposed Burnham, into an African racist when he criticized the way that the PPP was governing the country. That is the way the racist mindset rationalizes its disposition.
So for ‘Comrade’ Ramotar and his coterie of like minded associates, the concepts of democracy and equality under the law, among other things, are developed within mindsets shaped by a sense of entitlement to rule, to enjoy privileges that are outside the reach of others.
Their psyches are inundated with arrogance and hubris, and these takes up so much space that there can be no accommodation of commonsense, or an appreciation for fairness and balance. They are what they are, and there is nothing earthly that one can do to alter or change that reality.
Mark A. Benschop
Former Political Prisoner
2002 to 2007

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