Hamilton Green knows all about the Wismar Massacre of 1964

Dear Editor,
I read Hamilton Green’s letter, “Tulsa is a stark example from which Guyana must learn”, published in “Kaieteur News” on June 9, 2021, and am left to wonder why Mr Green feels the need to travel all the way to the United States to learn lessons about an “environment of envy”; guarding and overcoming prejudices; the reality of polarisation; racial tension; “real or perceived racial incidents”; and about the care needed to “prevent any sparks from flying that lead to trouble”.
He writes, supposedly with a straight face, about Tulsa, Serbia, World War I, and about Police needing to “avoid being misguided by a political directorate as happened in Tulsa” as if he was not present here in Guyana when the race riots of the 1960s rocked the very foundation of this country.
Mr Green knows all about the Wismar Massacre of 1964. He does not have to read about it in the news. It is not someone else’s history. It’s his very own history. Yet he has never written to exhort us to learn lessons from that massacre, which involved arson, looting, assault, rape and murder; a massacre as violent and despicable as any that has happened anywhere in the world.
Was that massacre in Wismar perpetrated by the violators because of an environment of envy, prejudice, racial tension and polarisation that existed right here, Mr Green?
And where was the political directive to the Police coming from that directed them to look the other way as Indian-Guyanese homes and businesses were razed to the ground, Indian-Guyanese women brutally raped; and Indian-Guyanese murdered?
Given the size of Guyana’s population in the 1960s compared to that of the US in the 1920s, the Wismar Massacre is in comparative terms worse than the Tulsa Race Massacre.
No massacre of any people is any good for any country. Mr Green has been part of the PNC Government, and still belongs to the party; and the list of atrocities perpetrated by the PNC on this nation – racial, economic, social and political – that brought this country to its knees is very, very long, the latest being the barefaced attempt at election rigging and the violent attacks on Indian Guyanese in West Coast Berbice just last year.
No one expects anything better from Mr Green and his colleagues, but to use the real pain of African-Americans to try and whitewash their own history and bamboozle the public is nothing short of shamelessness.

Sincerely,
Ryhaan Shah