Is Dr. Ali’s four-month old presidency violent?

Dec 11, 2020 Features / Columnists, Freddie Kissoon

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Kaieteur News – Dr. David Hinds in a letter to this newspaper (Dec. 7) wrote that I am, “totally silent on the violent governance of August-December (2020).” Despite his morbid incitement to racial mayhem during the five-month of election rigging and his similar gesticulations after the two cousins were murdered in Berbice, I still would not wish mental degeneracy on him or anyone that I disagree with politically.
But has mental decay stepped in? Dr. Hinds wants me to condemn “four months of violent governance.” In other words, he wants me to share his phantasmagoria. The Ali presidency has just passed four months and its balance sheet has to examine, within the context of five months of dangerous descent into evil captured around the world in vicious attempts to rig a national election that if succeeded could have resulted in the demise of Guyana and the breakup of the Caribbean integration movement.
Have the four-month old Ali presidency been violent? The answer for me is a vociferous no and it is fetid nonsense to so describe power in those four months as such. In fact, if I were to assess that period, I would say it was characterized by political cautiousness that is based on the need not to play into the hand of people like David Granger, Joe Harmon, Dr. Hinds and Eusi Kwayana.
It was Granger and Harmon who went to Region Five and incited African Guyanese, after two young men were beaten and killed in Cotton Tree. No one knew the reason for the homicides and the motives behind them but Granger and Harmon put a racial spin to it. Dr. Hinds called for protest against what he described as political killings.
To date, there has been no debate among scholars about the asininity of the racial accusation behind the murders. Why would Indians in Region Four, who waited for five months to see if their party would win, finally see that victory then create self-destruction? Your party won an election, your party is in charge of the state, your party can dish out resources to your villages but the Indian people of Region Five are so stupid that they captured two African youths, killed them and marked X on their bodies. To accept this ghoulish fiction is gross racial slander.
These Indian people are so idiotic that instead of protecting Guyana now that their party is in power, they go on a racial rampage hoping that African Guyanese would not retaliate. Does any sound mind believe this nonsense?
Let’s look at two alternative theories. One is that the boys were murdered in criminal circumstances and their killers imprinted political symbols on their bodies to deceive police investigators.
The other theory, borders on the nasty and ugly side of realpolitik. Why couldn’t anti-PPP, anti-Indian racists in the PNC and WPA, unable to accept the loss of power, decided to make the country ungovernable by sacrificing the two young men? Why isn’t such a theory possible? It becomes tenable when you think of what Granger and Harmon did. The second theory came close to becoming reality.
Granger and Harmon went to Region Five and used dangerously inciting language. Then Africans began to beat and rob innocent Indians. It was getting out of hand until Volda Lawrence stepped in. What Lawrence did was to back off from the agenda of Granger, Harmon and Dr. Hinds. She is a PNC and wanted the PNC in power but what was facing her was the destruction of Guyana. She had to choose between her party’s realpoltik or her country.
In choosing her country, her appeal to Africans in the Region was accepted. Now it is interesting to read the words of Lawrence when she went to calm down her constituencies. She used the vocabulary of Walter Rodney. How ironic that a protégé of Rodney, Dr. Hinds, was inciting race hate while Lawrence, no colleague of Rodney, did what Rodney did when Burnham charged an innocent PPP activist for murder.
Rodney at public meetings during the trial of Arnold Rampersaud told Black people that they must not trample upon their dignity as the descendants of slaves by going into court and sin their souls to kill an innocent Indian man. Lawrence in her address to Black Guyanese in Region Five told them that killing and hurting others is not in the DNA (my word) of Black people. She told them that what was happening in Region Five was not what Black people stood for. Instead of imagining four months of Ali’s violence, Dr. Hinds should denounce the two weeks of racial mayhem he, Granger and Harmon were responsible for in Region Five.

(The views expressed in this article are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the opinions of this newspaper.)

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