Genocide By Ronald Austin : Mr. Ronald Austin is a highly respected Guyanese intellectual and diplomat.. He is a former Guyana Ambassador to China.
Let me begin by saying that I know that a debate is raging in this country and beyond its borders about leaders who have betrayed the Afro-Guyanese people. I know, and have unfortunately worked with most of them. I know their history and their way of thinking more intimately than most people. In due course I will write about them. The time is not right for this as yet..
But rest assured that it be cannot be far from now. I have an obligation to do this and to say what I know because it is no longer possible or acceptable for leaders of the Afro-Guyanese community to be the reason and the cause for the slaughter of young black men, the betrayal of the Afro-Guyanese interests and the unbelievable and heart-rending circumstances under which they live and walk the streets, or enjoy the cocktail circuit with impunity. This cannot go on. An end must be made of it..
I hope that when the readers of this article look at its title, they will either sputter in their coffee or pause before taking their next glass of whisky. I hope that when they do so they will pay attention to what I have to say, because this is serious business. The time for ignoring what is going on in Guyana or averting one's gaze from the tragedy that is engulfing the Afro-Guyanese community is long passed. This is a time for a bit of truth telling.
People will tell you that genocide has not occurred in Guyana, but things are going on in this country which make it necessary to do an evaluation of the intention behind the almost willful slaughter of young black men. Let me enter here a clarification. There are individuals who would tell you that some young Indo-Guyanese males have been killed. This is true. But not on the frequency and scale with which young black men, especially those in Buxton, are being sent to the great beyond.
I have been musing on these things for a certain time now. I am a troubled soul. I was fortunate that as a student of history of at least two universities, to be instructed by men who demanded that I look beyond existing reality. Example, put before me is that of the destruction of the Jews. There is no greater lesson in modern or post-modern history than this ugly occurrence. Anyone familiar with this passage in European history would know that the destruction of the Jews was preceded by centuries long culture of hatred and sustained campaign of demonization. The end result was Dachau and Auschwitz, among others. What is most intriguing about this period is that even the great intellectuals and statesmen of the day refused to believe what was happening to the Jews.
In the now famous words of Hannah Arendt: "Normal men don't know that everything is possible." Even as great an intellectual as Raymond Aron, when confronted with the atrocities of the Nazis in the early period of Hitler's reign, could confess in his memoirs that "it seems to me that no one in the immediate circumstances suspected the radical character of the anti-semitism that was expressed from 1942 on in the 'final solution.' How can one believe the unbelievable?"
This is what is troubling me in Guyana. I lived through the period of 2002 - 2004 when approximately 400 people were killed. It is shocking to look back and recognize that no one asked any hard questions about why it was possible, in a country with such a small population, for so many people to die. It was Dr. Kean Gibson, who in two books sought to offer an explanation for this killing of young black men. She identified tenets of Hinduism which facilitated the conception of Afro-Guyanese as a group which could be targeted, demonized and killed. There was a howl of protests from Pandits and Brahmins. But the fact of the matter is no one could deny that she had fingered an important reason for this eruption of killing.
To this day, apart from her explanation of this tragic period in our history, no one else has sought to offer a reason or an explanation for the agonizing period that this country had to traverse. And now, it seems to me we are returning to those perilous times. The French are famous for saying that when you speak of your ills, you give some ease to your soul. That is why I am writing this today. In contemporary Guyana young Afro-Guyanese men are again being shot, abducted and tortured. The silence of civil society if deafening at a time when there should be howls of rage and disapproval from the majority of people in this Republic.
Let me tell you that if you try to discuss this subject, even with supposedly intelligent Guyanese, they simply don't want to hear of it. This has a familiar ring to it. In the book Violence in War and Peace (N. Scheper-Hughes and P. Bourgois (eds.), 2004), they point out in the Introduction that Bourgois said that his father told him that when he told his friends that they were starving while working the Jews to death in huge camps, they thought he was exaggerating. He said further, "when I tried to tell my father, he told me to shut up. He said that certain things are better left unsaid." Speak to Guyanese about Buxton or the killing of young Afro-Guyanese and by their looks they will tell you to shut up. Not only that, they are apt to say the young Afro-Guyanese are criminals, implying that they deserve to be killed. They simply cannot believe the unbelievable. Evasion has begun a defense mechanism.
Recently I saw a most beautifully written and logical letter from Tacuma Ogunseye. He said among things that "If we accept as true the regime's claim that a group of African Guyanese armed militants executed the Minister [Sawh] for political reasons, we must therefore accept that it is an admission by them that a political war is being fought out with guns between the state and armed organized force/s acting with political objectives."
Tacuma is absolutely right. There is a war going on and many young black men are being killed. I am not speaking here of the official numbers, but also the bodies which are found in different parts of the city on a regular basis. Nobody knows who killed them and why. But we all have our suspicions. There is something else that Tacuma said that is absolutely right in psychological terms. The PPP/C regime is playing a determined mind game with the Guyanese people in general and the Afro-Guyanese in particular. You see, there is a drumbeat of propaganda painting every young Afro-Guyanese killed by the security forces as a criminal.
Too many people have come to believe that this is true. When young men resist the depredations of the security forces in Buxton and are shot even when they surrender, people can comfort themselves by saying that a criminal has been shot and therefore are more secure. But this is playing into the hands of the PPP/C administration as it undermines the struggle for justice and reinforces the status quo.
I do not know if I have convinced the readers of this column of how dangerous a situation we face of one group being targeted and killed. History has proven that if any such group is killed by the state, more often than not, other groups are eventually consumed. Today it is the supposed young criminals in Buxton. Tomorrow, it can be the intellectuals and other opponents of the administration. And before somebody raises their hand to tell me I am exaggerating, let us not forget that it was the fierce criticism and courageous opposition to the PPP/C regime that seemed to have occasioned the brutal killing of Ronald Waddell.
And while I am on this point let me say something else. No one can deny the obvious dictatorial tendencies of the Jagdeo administration. It can be seen in the constant and blatant violations of the Supreme Law of the land, the withdrawal of advertisements from the Stabroek News and the imposition of wage increases. If anything, this administration seems to have run amok. There is no area in which it does not throw its weight around, ruining people or destroying institutions in the process. What has supervened is a period of quiet terror in Guyana. People are afraid to oppose this administration and are reduced to whispering their opposition.
I can describe this situation no better that the way in which Scheper-Hughes and Bourgois have described how terror operates in some societies: "The terror operates quietly and secretly, below and between the lines, as it were and in blatant contradictions between "official story" and what actually happens on the ground. The chaos and the terror are disguised behind a facade of normalcy and the culture of terror moves between the space of the death and the space of everyday life."
