It is no coincidence that Chairman of the Guyana Reparations Committee Eric Phillips, appeared before the Lands Commission of Inquiry to claim fifteen thousand square miles of Guyanese territory, at the same time that the National Toshaos Council’s annual conference was in session last week.
In his pursuit to seek reparation for the atrocities committed on African slaves and the consequences on their descendants by the British Crown, Phillips relentlessly attacks the pillar of indigenous peoples’ survival: land rights.
The incoherence and daftness of his argument continues to find ears by the Government of Guyana in his onslaught against indigenous land rights, as he attempts to obtain buy-in for his cause. His theatrics seems to have gained favour with the Coalition and so far he has succeeded in diminishing indigenous land rights. As a result, the Amerindian Land Titling Project was recently forced to a halt after the Lands Commission of Inquiry was opened by a Presidential order. Indigenous land rights have been suspended in Guyana – a first since Independence.
In his scurrilous quest to delegitimize indigenous land rights, Phillips claims: “careful research has shown that Africans installed the following: 2.58 million miles of drainage canals, trenches and inter-bed drains; 3,500 miles of dams, roads and footpaths; and 2,176 miles of sea and river defence. No one else in Guyana has done that, yet they’ve gotten reparations,”. Whether by choice or not, Phillips pursues in a path of ignorance by persisting to equate indigenous land rights to African land reparation despite that each matter evolved within two very distinct historical contexts rendering their treatment under the one umbrella incompatible.
African slavery reparation is a matter which in all logic ought to be brought before the former slave traders for resolution, in this case the British Crown. In 2014, some fourteen Caribbean States made a move in this direction, with hopes of opening dialogue with former European slave trading nations. Phillips’ discourse however, seeks to inflict on Guyanese a sense of culpability for a horrendous passage of history for which they are not responsible. Additionally, his narrative omits hardships of all the other indentured immigrants who were brought to the colony following the emancipation of African slaves. It overlooks the fact that life on the plantation had its own harsh realities for the Portuguese, Chinese and Indians.
But more importantly, Phillips builds his argument on an altered version of history whereby Amerindians are being given reparation for which they are less deserving than Africans. Again, he must be reminded that indigenous peoples are not just the first inhabitants of the lands that later became Guyana, but they were the natives of the Americas for as far back as can be anthropologically and scientifically proven today. Phillips and those who support his delusional demarche must also be reminded that indigenous peoples had their lands stolen by the European settlers, were pushed out of their homes, had 90% of their population decimated, lost their cultures and languages, are still stigmatized and are still marginalized. No other peoples have suffered the same fate as the first known inhabitants of the Americas. Yet, indigenous peoples provide that bridge between humanity’s past and present, a quickly eroding fragment of our history. And their right to exist depends on the ancestral lands which were stolen from them. The 13.8 per cent of lands which today are legally owned by Guyana’s First Nations, are therefore not reparation; contrary to the cause of African land reparation, these belong by ancestral rights to Amerindians. The specificities of Amerindian land titling as ordained by the Amerindian Act 6 – 2006, (as well as guaranteed by the Independence Act Cap 14 S 17, the Constitution of Guyana, and the UNDRIP) cannot therefore rationally inspire African land reparations, nor as Phillips defends “set a precedence” for it.
Eric Phillips is pandering to divisiveness in a society that is already under the strain of economic and social disparities. The tensions which have since flared between indigenous peoples and the Government of Guyana are a consequence of his recklessness, contributing to the increasing antagonism between Amerindians and the Coalition.
His agenda is subsequently not only a threat to indigenous land rights, but also to the integrity of the Guyanese nation itself. It is the responsibility of the PNC-led Coalition Government to prove its commitment to Guyana’s First Peoples, by reign its ill-advised advisor Eric Phillips, so that Guyana doesn’t have to pay for his unsolicited imprudence.
