THE RULING PARTY SHOULD MAKE UP ITS MIND

Apr 21, 2024 Letters

Dear Editor,

While the Attorney-General seeks to bring all civic and political factions together in a Constitutional Reform Committee, other elements in the State apparatus were busy driving them apart. Last week, Guyanese were treated to a full-page advertisement in the Sunday Stabroek, paid for by a well-known PPP camp-follower accusing many named private individuals of remaining silent over rigging of the 2020 elections. The advert also singled out individual opposition parliamentarians for their supposed ‘heinous acts’.

The following day, the State-owned Guyana Chronicle published a column dedicated to slandering Miles Fitzpatrick and David DeCaires, two politically independent lawyers, now deceased. Later in the week, the Chronicle devoted an entire column to ridiculing and slandering a former opposition politician, Eusi Kwayana, now 99 years of age and living abroad for many years. At the same time, a Minister of Government was berating a well-known Guyanese female media presenter in a foul-mouthed rant on Facebook for commenting critically on the current electricity supply crisis. Neither the living nor the dead, it seems, are immune from ruling party outrage over inadequate cheer-leading of its accomplishments.

The aphorism ‘All that is required for evil to flourish is that good men stay silent’ is usually (and mistakenly) attributed to a well-known historical politician Edmund Burke. Authorship notwithstanding, however, the ruling party in Guyana has fully embraced the sentiment, determined to ensure that good men (and women) stay silent so that evil may flourish, (a portion of that currently ‘evil’ being spelt out in the recent Report published by the UN Human Rights Committee). Abusive threats and character assassination by the ruling party for both the recent and distant past are no doubt intended as a deterrent to public comments on current scandalous official actions.

Against this background, sectors of society which in earlier times routinely voiced opinions and monitored authoritarian abuse are cowed, remaining silent or taking refuge in oblique complaints. Balancing whether democratic participation is a high enough priority or a luxury they can’t afford too frequently, it ends with the latter choice.

People of integrity shying away from involving themselves in political life ensures it becomes a race to the bottom, reinforcing the truth of what Edmund Burke did in fact say, namely, “When bad men combine, the good must associate; else they will fall, one by one, an unpitied sacrifice in a contemptible struggle.”

All of this bodes ill for the recently announced Constitutional Reform Commission (CRC). Bringing the political and civic sectors together in the formal structure of a CRC could be a step in the right direction of strengthening decent relations between them and would also help to weaken the political polarization within Parliament. However, the evidence provided this week would suggest respectful relations as a priority of the ruling party ranks lower than keeping independent opinion suppressed.

Rather than bring the sectors together, current trends reinforce civil society tendencies to regard the State as inherently the enemy, rather than (even potentially) the friend, of human flourishing. Civic activists are almost always temperamentally on the outside, mistrustful, ever vigilant for evidence of a breach of faith.

Ironically given the ruling party on the past, not since the worst period of the 1970s and ‘80s has the State-owned media been so completely subject to party control as at present.

Executive Committee

Guyana Human Rights Association

Attorney General, Constitutional Reform Committee, Executive Committee, Guyana Human Rights Association, heinous

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