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Elements in the State apparatus hampering efforts of ruling party to bring society together – GHRA 

Apr 22, 2024 News

Kaieteur News – While efforts are being made to bring all civic and political factions together in a Constitutional Reform Committee (CRC), the Guyana Human Rights Association (GHRA) has noted that other elements in the State apparatus were busy driving them apart.

In a media release on Sunday, the GHRA pointed to instances in which the elements associated with the government have been using their platform as means of division.

Alluding to examples, the GHRA noted that last week, inter alia 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 human rights association went to explain that “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 GHRA said “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.”

According to the GHRA, 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.

The human rights association noted further that 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.

All of this, the GHRA said bodes ill for the recently announced Constitutional Reform Commission (CRC).

The Association said that by 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, it pointed out that the evidence provided this week would suggest respectful relations as a priority of the ruling party ranks lower than keeping independent opinion suppressed.

The GHRA emphasized that 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.

It pointed out that “Civic activists are almost always temperamentally on the outside, mistrustful, ever vigilant for evidence of a breach of faith.”

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