By Ryhaan Shah
For our population, Guyana has an outsize crime problem. No statistic reflects the reality, since many robberies and assaults are never reported because of a general distrust of law enforcers, whose loyalty to party politics was infamously invoked by PNC Leader Desmond Hoyte in January 1998 when he made them the party’s “kith and kin” and complicit in its unlawfulness.
Criminals inherit, or can be induced to, psychopathic behaviour, which, according to psychology texts, underlies a need for domination through power and control. Because of their lack of human empathy, they can commit the most heinous acts with cold-blooded and calculated precision; whether it is fraud, theft, rape, arson or murder.
Criminality also extends to political strategies which include racially motivated crimes like genocide and ethnic cleansing, as was witnessed here in 1964 during the Wismar Massacre, when Indian Guyanese were forced to flee the Mackenzie-Wismar area because of PNC racial violence.
Political crimes, whether perpetrated at a state level or by individual party supporters, reproduce structures of domination. In Guyana’s case, it is the construct of race and racial domination that fuels the crimes that guarantee the PNC political power.
WPA Leader Dr Walter Rodney confronted the issue of race in the trial of PPP activist Arnold Rampersaud, who was framed for the murder of an African Guyanese police constable in 1973 in Berbice. After two trials failed to convict, Burnham attempted to move the trial to Georgetown, intending that an all-black jury would find Rampersaud guilty. Rodney campaigned for Rampersaud’s release, and when he spoke publicly of the strength and pride of his people, he noted, “And now I cannot accept that such people must be put to do some dirty political skullduggery – coming to court lying to get another man convicted of murder. That is insane, from my point of view.”
But criminality of every kind was the modus operandi of the PNC dictatorship, which was itself dependent on the psychopathy of theft in the form of rigged elections in order to stay in power. The other psychopathic behaviours displayed by Burnham included corruption, thuggery, and the murder of his opponents.
Burnham had Rodney killed in 1980, and Granger’s hasty scrapping of the Commission of Inquiry into his assassination when he became president only solidifies the public belief that Burnham had ordered the hit.
The PNC has never admitted any wrongdoing at any time. In fact, they feel entitled to their criminal acts because of their alleged “marginalisation” — the cry that was heard at the turn of the century, and which was aided and abetted by many “worthies” in our society, even as Indian Guyanese faced the daily terror that emanated from Buxton.
The PNC learned from the best, starting with the CIA-funded racial violence of the 1960s which put the US-backed Burnham in power. The United States, in safeguarding its own interests, cares little about any collateral damage, and whether it is done through institutionalised state violence or through the more personalised political crimes being carried out by African Guyanese terrorists.
The PNC’s criminality and the criminalising of its supporters have been handed down through three generations. The boy soldiers of Buxton are now grown men who are learned in the arts of violence; and even up to the 2015 general elections, there were post-elections’ reports of “matches being lit” in the best tradition of the PNC’s “slow fyah, mo fyah” campaign. Had the PNC not won, their supporters would have taken to the streets and burned the city. No one disputes this.
When ACDA declared Granger the “African Leader”, they were laying proud claim to him as their President. So, too, did Burnham declare himself their kabaka.
And when, in his recent address to party supporters in Atlanta, Granger vowed that the PNC would do everything necessary to stay in power, as it did in 1968 and onward, it was a public admission that the party’s illegal acts would continue along with the criminalisation of its supporters, which would be needed to retain power.
This is more than passing strange for a people who wish to be viewed as proud and dignified. That they will find themselves on the wrong side when the history of this country is fairly judged seem to not matter at all.
Nurturing criminal minds can only be self-destructive, and to ask why the continued criminalisation presupposes a reasoned answer. But when, in order to destroy the enemy, the choice is made to destroy oneself, there can be no reasoned answer.
The PNC has decided that creating a “scorched earth”, where everyone loses, is better than sharing that earth with the appointed enemy.
