If this is my new life, then no regrets

Apr 08, 2018 Features / Columnists, Freddie Kissoon

An employee of a prominent business place and the law firm he sought assistance from contacted me to publicize a most abominable manifestation of the violation of workers’ rights. When both the lawyer and the employee described the repugnancy, I was sad and moved. This is the kind of human rights abuse a country and the media should never leave untouched.
I decided to write about this pathetic situation. While doing the investigation, my wife heard me on the phone. She knew what I was writing on. She asked me not to publish the story. This is the first time since I married Janet in 1979 that she has intervened in my praxis. I have been put in the lock ups, physically assaulted, received libel suits, had my UG employment terminated, victimized by Khurshid Sattaur and countless other powerful people, and my wife has never asked to me stop what I believe in doing. This time, after forty years of marriage, she has.
She told me the person I will write about is prominent and powerful and if he attacks me or my family it will be like all the other times – no one comes out and stands protectively behind me. She said she feels that if there is vindictive retaliation, I will be left in the wilderness as usual. My daughter was irritated. She heard what my wife was saying and she exclaimed, “Papa do not do it, you do it, you will end up alone as always, others must do it.”
It was with unlimited reluctance I called the victim and told him my family feels uncomfortable; I conveyed the same feeling to the senior partner of the law firm. I told them I am firm in my position, even though I know it is a terrible human rights violation. I told both of them that I am standing by the request of my family.
What I am about to express I believe deeply in my heart. After this is seen, I do not believe any individual, any human rights activist, any trade unionist, any Cabinet minister, any journalist, any lawyer will make contact with me and say, “Freddie, we will take it up from here; give us the names of the victims and violators.” No, they will not. Of course, I will get calls that go like this; “Freddie who is this maan bhai; wuh he do de employee?” They want to know. That is all. They just want to know. Curiosity will make them call me.
I would be abandoning every decent vein in my anatomy if I were to look family members and my close friends in their eyes and say to them that I don’t believe that I should stop my activism. I honestly think I have had enough of struggle for a better Guyana. Guyana’s moral, civilized fabric is not strengthening; it is getting flimsier rapidly. This is not a country where there is a right versus wrong culture.
In the discussion of this particular case, my wife and daughter just keep saying; “where are the other people to help?” I got a call from Mark Benschop, who lives in the US, three weeks ago, and this was my advice to him. Benschop has lots of friends, so it can easily be verified. I strongly suggest that he does not return to Guyana. When someone as brave as Benschop could tell me that fighting for rights in Guyana is a daunting task, then you could understand how dead a country this is. I say with profound sincerity, there is no other country in the world like Guyana where no one cares about how people’s rights are violated.
What this country needs is six more Giftland Malls, six more Splashmins, ten more fast-food outlets, ten more fancy foreign restaurants, twelve more Brazilian-styled nightclubs, twenty more Rupununi rodeo shows, thirty more Bartica regattas, so everyone can drink, eat, have sex, enjoy pleasure and leisure as if tomorrow will not come. It should be a society where la dolce vita is a frenetic preoccupation and every citizen wallows in decadent escapism.
The truth about Guyana is that we are like that, only we do not have the profusion of those sybaritic structures I just mentioned above. People in this country behave as if we are living in the dying stages of civilization and there is nothing more to live for, so just let your Freudian ID run wild and forget about all that jazz that philosophy gave the world about justice, obligation, rights, equality. This is in fact the true picture of Guyana.

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