(This is one of a series of weekly columns from Guyanese in the diaspora and others with an interest in issues related to Guyana and the Caribbean)
The President has rightly condemned the most recent incident of torture and he has given the police two weeks to conduct an investigation, but he cannot afford to be selective on this matter in the face of other torture allegations. Nor is it, as Karen de Souza notes, for the President to unilaterally decide whether or not he is satisfied with the police report. This is neither his personal prerogative nor how accountability works. What we need is a comprehensive inquiry, carried out by an independent commission that commands the confidence of all Guyanese, with a clear and transparent mandate, and adequate resources to enable them to do their work.
Because our political culture is so divisive, let me say categorically that we need answers to ALL of the violence that has engulfed Guyana in recent years. Let the chips fall where they may. In this most recent instance, that means answers to the violence that horrifically took the life of Ramenauth Bisram, as well as to the torture meted out to the 15 year old and the alleged torture of Deonarine Rafick, held and since charged with Bisram’s murder. It means answers to the outrageous attacks on the courts, police station and Richard Ishmael Secondary school, without resorting to the methods that saw Troy Small apprehended as a suspect and allegedly tortured by the joint services after the despicable arson attack on the Ministry of Health.
To those who think this is being soft on crime, let me emphasise that human rights and crime control are not exclusive. In 2003, in a comment on the Criminal Law Offences (Amendment) Act 2002 and the Prevention of Crimes (Amendment) Act 2002, passed at the height of the crime wave, Amnesty International argued that the Acts contained provisions violating international human rights standards to which Guyana is a party, concluding that “human rights are not an obstacle to national security – they are the key to achieving this goal. This is not to say that we should feel no anger at those who kill, rob and maim, nor that such persons should not be held accountable before the law. Rather, we must be vigilant about the methods used to bring them to justice, or risk debasing values essential for a society to live free from fear”. This goes much further than allegations of rogue cops or rotten apples, a position already publicly taken by some government officials before the outcome of any investigation, and is precisely why a comprehensive, independent inquiry is necessary, to establish if we are dealing with a few individuals or whether or not there are systemic issues at work.
Reading about last Friday’s vigil outside the Guyana Public Hospital, took me back to January 2003, less than a year after the infamous Mash Day jailbreak. A few days after one newspaper reported that by January 21, 26 Guyanese had been murdered, hundreds of women of all ages, social and political backgrounds, assembled at the Cenotaph in downtown Georgetown. Their message was simple: STOP THE KILLINGS NOW!
WAVE launched a website (www.waveguyana.org), and began an international petition campaign in support of the local effort, recruiting the support of Caribbean artists like Alison Hinds, Drupatee, Buju Banton, Krosfyah, Dave Martins, Arturo Tappin, Machel Montano, Rupee, Terry Gajraj, Black Stalin, Raja, The Mighty Sparrow, 3 Canal, Rikki Jai, whose signatures appeared in full page advertisements taken out in Guyanese newspapers.
At the Guyana gathering, the message was addressed to three constituencies: the criminals; the political leadership; and law enforcement. That approach is at odds with those who cavalierly dismiss allegations of torture as roughing up, those who say that putting all three groups in the same sentence is letting criminals off the hook, or at worst that you are somehow supporting criminal efforts to destabilise the government. Far from it. It is to say that you cannot be above the law, in the name of enforcing it. You cannot resort to extra-judicial methods, in the name of enforcing justice. You cannot become the monster you decry. Not seeing this goes a long way to undermining confidence in those who hold public office and those entrusted to protect our security and safety.
In March 2003, hundreds of women marched in Georgetown to mark International Women’s Day, less than a week after University of Guyana student Yohance Douglas was shot in the back and killed by police, two of his friends also injured.
One of the speakers was Red Thread International Co-ordinator Andaiye. An excerpt from her remarks hauntingly reminds us of how little we have moved:
“People been asking some of us where we been all the time. And you chanted back, we deh here now. The criticism that we weren’t here all the time is a stupid criticism. Every single person in the world begins from himself or herself, their own family and their friends. That’s nothing peculiar. The thing that you feel most about, is what is closest to you. So the question is not where you begin, the question is where you are going. And this is what I want to suggest about where we are going. If you’re a student, and last week when Yohance was killed, and the other students from the University were hurt, that’s the first time it really entered your consciousness that something is wrong with the relationship between the police and the civilians, then what should happen now is that you’ll never forget it again. So that the next time that somebody is killed, let me tell you what we should not do, what we usually do. When somebody is killed, if they tell us that those are bandits we just accept it. We don’t even think about whether they are or they’re not. What is just as bad is, suppose they are bandits, since when we stop using the police and the courts and so on, to find people who are guilty and to punish them, instead of the police being judge and jury and executioner? So we have lived for what, several years now, we have lived all that time simply ignoring each one of these killings, and saying “Well, dey must be did doing something,” and now that it’s our fellow student, we say, “But he wasn’t doing anything”. And so we must remember the next time, perhaps he wasn’t doing anything. And perhaps, if he was doing something, then where we want him is locked up in jail until he can be tried and found guilty. So in the first place, I’m trying to raise something about class. So if you are middle-class, and you came out in the first place because you felt affected as a woman in the middle-class, then the job is, from here on in, to look more carefully at the hurt and pain of the women of the working-class. But let me talk about the biggest one of all, which is the question of race. We cannot go on forever killing each other and saying that that is liberation. We cannot go on forever with a situation where Indian-Guyanese say, if African-Guyanese are gunned down, that well, you all are killing us, in any case, so it serves you right. Nor can we go on forever saying that because African-Guyanese feel oppressed, the answer to that cannot be that we think it is ok to harass and to hurt and to abuse Indian people. So it seems to me that the job from today is for us to make connections. If we are African-Guyanese, the next time we hear that something happen to people in Annandale, could we try next time to show some solidarity, instead of behaving as if it serve them right? Could we try from today if we are Indian Guyanese, the next time African-Guyanese are hurt, not simply to say it serve them right? This could never, ever serve all Guyanese.”
On April 17 2003, Red Thread mounted a vigil outside of Parliament to call attention to the kidnapping and murder of 16 year old Joshua Bell and the stark disparity between official handling of this case and that of the kidnapping of US diplomat Stephen Lesniak. Ending their vigil on April 30th, Red Thread issued a statement calling on the government and opposition to jointly take effective action to end all violence, insisting that unless every child is safe, all our children are in danger, and reminding Guyanese that “we can make them represent us which they are paid to do, if more of us who abhor the violence and the racism speak out”. Adapting the words of the Reverend Martin Luther King Jr., they warned: “In Guyana, we are well past the time when silence became betrayal.” If we were past this time six years ago, where are we now? Where is WAVE today? What more do we need to speak up, speak together, and keep speaking until we get the answers we deserve, the action we are entitled to?
