Visible people, non-existent voices

Apr 19, 2017 Features / Columnists, Freddie Kissoon

In 2014, on Emancipation Day, the Government decided to make financial donations to African cultural organizations in celebration of the event. Suddenly, there was an outpouring of these groups from all ten Regions of Guyana. You had to ask one basic question; where were they all the years. In the preceding years, there was a big issue involving the sacred history of Guyanese Africans – the location of the 1823 slave rebellion monument.
President Jagdeo had turned the sod on Parade Ground where the monument was to be. It was on Parade Ground that the captured slaves were tortured and executed. One of Jagdeo’s business friends wanted the Parade Ground for some commercial purpose, so they located the planned statute elsewhere. An organization of African rights groups formed a coalition to protest the transfer. Only one African rights group entered the coalition –ACDA.
So where were those African rights groups that turned up in their numbers to receive free money from the Government in 2014?
It is the same opportunistic, unpalatable situation with human rights in general. I read the other day, four delegates from youth groups represented Guyana at the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights in Washington DC. In their submissions, the group’s criticism of human rights in their country was scathing. They told the forum that young people’s rights in Guyana are constantly being violated.
I looked at the pictures of these four young people and the organization they belong to and wondered if I was seeing and reading about another country. I never heard about the organization they said they belonged to, I never saw any protest action from these people, even a letter of indignation to the press, on how young people are treated. I could only have concluded that these four young people are still living in that great empire that existed a few thousand years ago named Timbuktu.
Now let us say these four young Guyanese were lacking in human rights dynamism before they went to their conference, surely they must have had their Road to Damascus moment on their return. If they haven’t, then an opportunity is waiting for them to pick up their bodies, use their voices, and head off to the Georgetown Hospital. A ten-year-old girl was kicked in the stomach, went to the Georgetown Hospital, took an ultra sound, then, was sent home. She died four days after. The post mortem showed she died from ruptured organs which led to internal poisoning.
You will have to wait until Noah builds a second ark before those four young people display their voices. But you can bet a “Granger” (the green $5,000 bill) that next year, more young people from Guyana will travel to the human rights forum and tell their audience that Guyana violates the rights of young people. I know there is an organization named the Justice Institute. I honestly don’t know what work that entity does and I do not see its physical presence on the ground. The least said of the Guyana Human Rights Organization, the better.
I read a letter in yesterday’s edition of the Kaieteur News in which a woman of Guyanese origin from London expressed deep chagrin at the profusion of Caucasian faces in local advertisements. She intoned that this was not the Guyana she knew when she was very young. One solitary voice from London remonstrated against this cultural deformation that has been going on now for years and so far only one voice was heard.
The Council of the University of Guyana has increased fees. The Minister of Education has come out belatedly to say he disagreed with the increase. Not even one student has held a picket against the increase so far.
I will end with something Raphael Trotman told me in the studio of channel 6 in 2012. He said a lecturer on the Cave Hill campus at UWI in Barbados was dismissed and the entire student population came out in protest. This is small, conservative Barbados. Here in Guyana the university can bundle dozens of lecturers in a jeep and drive them over the highway into the Atlantic and if you go on the campus, the students would be preoccupied with their smart phones, totally oblivious to what happened to their tutors. A magistrate can sentence a baby to life imprisonment and the Guyanese people would happily go on their way and couldn’t be bothered.
Some engineers are predicting that because of global warming, and Guyana is below sea level and right next to the Atlantic, we may be overrun one day. Should that happen, who would miss a disappeared Guyana?

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