The ethnic security dilemma from experience

Mar 17, 2019 Letters

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Dear Editor,

I would like to add a reference to the frequently mentioned Ethnic Security Dilemma discussion so often engrained on the parameters of political discussions; I am not a politician so my reference will not be tapered within the political language. The article on Monday February 18, by Dr. Baytoram Ramharack ‘Ethnic Security Dilemmas underline urgent need for Government of National Unity’. I accept the concept of a State of national unity, as I do not think that Guyana has evolved a system of managing all our human expertise, as we should. However, the effort towards such a State revolves around the simple consensus of ‘Honesty’ on our profound different worldviews, values and the inherited philosophies beneath the guarded language we use in public discussions. There must be an exorcism of constituency based slogans that cannot be sustained in the court of history, that are prevalent in that letter from Baytoram’s mind. To clarify, in rebuttal the only group that can seriously claim justified ‘ethnic security fears’ is the Afro-Guyanese community and Indo, Amerindian and all others not in agreement with the powers that be, under past and recent past PPP administrations, as I will clarify. It cannot be disputed that it was the PPP that launched a racial civil war from 1961-64 for power, exploiting the most vicious philosophies to justify murder and mutilations, more Afro-Guyanese died in that period that others. Dr. Clem Seecharan quotes Dale Bisnauth, “At the core of Indian attitudes to Afro-Guyanese were the malign vestiges of caste thinking” thus a ready religious belief based platform for Political manipulation especially at the provincial unexposed areas” The PPP nor the others outside of the PPP devoted to cultivating racist victimhood, could put together A ‘DOSSIER’ covering the extrajudicial deaths [unreal] linked to the [real] intensified campaign of sabotage carried out by the PPP in the Sugar Belt etc. during the years 1966 to 1992. To this, I will add the burning of the Guyana Rice Board. I worked there and was on leave in 1977. There were rumours before on that possibility, I could remember the anger of Davidson when he approached a senior official to intensify security and was told that GRB was a ‘working class safe zone’ and the latter sounds familiar doesn’t it?, They nevertheless burnt it down, and there were no arrests and disappearances of bodies from any of the West Coast Demerara villages identified as the origins of those suspected of that arson that threw thousands out of employment. The idea of the 1973 martyrs asserted by Baytoram has long been given clarity as the callous usage of youth in an illegal assault to seize guarded ballot boxes by senior political activists who would have anticipated the response from the DF ranks guarding them. Former Lieutenant and PPP activist Malcolm Harripaul and Mohamed Yusuf gave insights to that incident. Yusuf’s letter was allowed a response from Donald Ramotar that yielded obvious propaganda History but did not dispute the gist of Yusuf’s letter. In comparison to the 1961-64, then 1992 to 2010 period of PPP control, this country from 1838 to 2019 have not experienced outside of the periods of PPP control, such levels of internal racial strife. There is no alternative evidence for Dr. Baytoram to challenge that information.
In reference the Afro-Indo Security Dilemmas, this I have explored in several articles on Guyana post emancipation to the present. However other areas in defining the ethnic security dilemma are misrepresented in Khemraj’s column, chronicled outside of the experiences of the ‘other’ and I am surprised this escaped the editor, because Stabroek News was in the forefront of the struggle against extrajudicial killings. To say that the rogue elements of the police force trace their roots to the ‘kick down door bandits’ is erroneous and clueless. Many of those people who were the kick-down-door bandits fled in the late 70’s and 80’s to places like French Guyana when the GPF hunted them down killing many under the PNC. What manifested in the years leading up to 1992 were drug and backtrack dealers who supported the PPP and with monetary gifts and infiltrated the policing groups.
After 1992, these people usurped the police and recruited them offering them political protection. Many supporting criminals were even sworn in as rural constables. If you trace the firearm holders of that period, still active today, it would indeed be unexplainable.
None of the political academics, some 80 percent seeking to identify the root causes of socio-ethnic contentions have ever referred to our constrained economics, just politics, venom and speculations dominate, not one idea emerges to expand the ‘six sisters etc.’ The Copyright legislation proposal was thrown into the public arena, the Opposition leader denounced it, Stabroek and Chronicle supported it, the conversation ended there. A wider grass-root economy with protective legal frame works will address the Ethnic Security Dilemma. Our problems lie in the need for honest assessments and realistic initiatives. What we have now is what we have experienced. It is defined in simple language, the other comes in power; I lose my income, vice versa. Then there is the separate cultural platforms that define how we see things, the tainted ‘’Fat fowl’ no confidence vote and that one group is insisting we accept on its terms of normalcy, then the recent comparative utterances of the leader of the opposition, knowing and saying ‘this to be true’ at one time, and denouncing it little over a decade later, as demonstrated effectively by Imran Khan, televised and across social media.
Such a perverse callous declaration of deceit, of falsifications and no cultural cringe of guilt? This is beyond an Ethic Security Dilemma, isn’t it?

Barrington Braithwaite

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