Grandchild, grandmother, violence and evil in 2020

Jan 26, 2021 Features / Columnists, Freddie Kissoon

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Kaieteur News – The stories of Guyana in 2020 is inexhaustible, many of which needs highlighting because they bring out the inner depths of moral depravities that humans embody. It is no exaggeration when I intone right now that after seeing how diabolical the mind was in 2020, I loved my three pets (two cats and a dog) even deeper.
How can humans write letters to the press in 2020 about the danger of Mike Pompeo’s visit to Guyana, Haitians detained by the police, and other subjects and penned not a word on what happened to a granddaughter and her grandmother, when David Granger and Joseph Harmon went to Region Five in the aftermath of the two cousins who were murdered in the backdams of Cotton Tree and incited PNC constituencies in Region Five that resulted in terrible acts of violence?
If you are interested in looking back at the year 2020, then go to the newspapers of September 12 and read a letter written by a grandchild, who described what happened to her and her grandmother in Hopetown, when Region Five was cut off from the rest of Guyana during the mayhem.
The letter is long so I will give selected quotes: (1) – “They attacked the vehicle in front of us, leaving the driver to flee for his life. We were still frantically trying to get out of the street but we were surrounded. We couldn’t go anywhere and couldn’t do anything! We were a car of Indo Guyanese. The rioters showed us little mercy.”
(2) – I clearly remember the first thing they did as they entered the car. One of the men ripped my cross from off my neck, which I wore for safety all my life. They then opened all the doors and pulled us out. I remember seeing them pull my grandmother away, she didn’t resist, and she just gave them everything she had, including whatever jewellery she wore. After I couldn’t see the driver or family friend, I began screaming out of fear. They took my bag, which I gave them without hesitation; inside the bag was a change of clothes, my phone, and my wallet.”
(3) – “I barely caught sight of our family friend who gave the rioters all his money and his phone. They then proceed to mercilessly beat our driver because he wouldn’t give the car keys. I saw my grandmother and I pushed to go towards her. I couldn’t pass through. I was now terribly scared that they would kill me, as I was a young Indo Guyanese teenager.”
(4) – “My few words cannot capture the horror that we experienced and endured during those two days. I am still haunted by those memories.”
The quotes above are about post-election marauding that took place in September 2020. As a social activist and media operative, I saw snippets of similar bestialities in post election violence in 1992, 1997, 2001 and in Buxton between 2002 and 2005. When the APNU+AFC won power, a process I participated in, I never believed I would see such election atrocities in my country again. It is poor intellectualizing or dishonest analysis to divorce the horrific descriptions in those quotes from the failure of the March election rigging.
I believe Granger and Harmon used the double homicide in Cotton Tree to generate violence as a way of expressing to the PPP that the PNC has muscles. The repugnancies about such mentalities are numerous. First, your innocent supporters are misled. Secondly, those innocent ones commit terrible acts of violence on other innocent souls just because they are from a different ethnicity. Thirdly, your country’s image suffered severe laceration. Fourthly, the ethnic divide widen thus making Guyanese a more unhappy lot. Fifthly, you damaged your chances of winning elections because citizens will remember your violent nature.
I do not know that 16-year-old who wrote that letter but if anyone reading this column who knows her, please ask her to just send me a note telling me how she is coping. I will reply to let her know that I admire her and hope she enters political life when she gets older so as to contribute to shaping Guyana’s future. My cell phone number is 614-5927. My home is 222-1615-6 and my email is [email protected]. How sickening that no women’s organization has ever attained the modest level of decency in 2020 to pen some words of sympathy for this teenager and her grandmother, but can have the mental ugliness to write about the danger of Mike Pompeo’s visit. Spinoza the philosopher once wrote: “I have striven not to hate, laugh or weep at human actions but to understand them.” Human actions in Guyana cannot be understood.

(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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