On the occasion of International Human Rights Day 2024, the Guyana Human Rights Association (GHRA), which operates by issuing press releases on subjects it defines as important – without any known interactions, much less consultations, with the “humans” it purports to represent in Guyana – sent out the expected press release via social media. There was not even a press conference where its self-appointed “executives” could be questioned on its claims and assertions.
But the latest release, “Oil wealth changing significance of ethnicity in Guyana”, merely reaffirmed the GHRA’s long-held preconception of the individual. He is no longer the bearer of rights and a moral agent with a will and purpose of his own, but an individual whose interests need external articulation, protection and promulgation by, of course, the GHRA. This reconceptualization created the GHRA’s paternalistic political praxis, where it exercises the asserted rights rather than the individual’s rights.
The GHRA’s fundamental premise in its argument about “the significance of ethnicity in Guyana” is flawed. It asserted “that human rights are the international community’s response to the idea that every person counts, as captured in the reference in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights to ‘equal and inalienable rights of all members of the human family’. The idea of everyone being equal before the law worked well as long as States were formed from nations of people who spoke the same language, professed the same religion, had the same colour and lived in nature-defined geographic areas.”
The idea of everyone being equal before the law – dubbed the “rule of law” – arose gradually in the West from the 16th century through the 20th as the foundational principle of the Liberal Order when individual countries like Britain were divided along religious, national, and in the case of the US, African slave-dominated lines. So, to contrast such societies with “states formed from the colonial experiences…(where)… culturally different groups were compelled to live together by imperial powers” is fundamentally disingenuous.
In Guyana, while we accept that “ethnic groups” were compelled to live together by Britain, we have been following the steps pioneering diverse liberal countries took in creating a just system under the rule of law. The challenge of the rule of law has always been one of ensuring that if any group is being oppressed along any identifying line by the operations of the law, then that anomaly must be addressed. This is inevitably not an instantaneous event occasioned by the passing of laws and the creation of institutions, but a process that would take time for the goals to be fully realized.
The GHRA’s central claim arising from their flawed premise is that “political ethnicity has determined the quality of life in Guyana over the years, and condemned it to the bottom of most social and economic indicators, the advent of oil has introduced a new and abrasive factor. Electoral victories achieved by moulding ethnic groups into political formations are being superseded by the changing control of the economy to an important degree.” Political ethnicity is a tautology, since there have always been “ethnicities” – different cultural groups in a geographical unit – but it is modern democratic politics of agglomerating political support that created “ethnicity” – where the agglomeration is along ethnic lines.
In Guyana, this occurred in 1955, when Forbes Burnham split the unified nationalist PPP to form the PNC with African and Coloured Guyanese support. After he connived with colonial powers to subvert the democratic process by rigging elections between 1968 and 1985, Burnham and the PNC permanently changed the power structure in Guyana.
The GHRA suggested that “Guyana perhaps needs a national conversation on the economic significance of ethnicity. Priority in such a conversation must be given to the concept of ‘fairness’”. However, the debilitating effects of ethnicity have been already altered by the changing demographics that the GHRA notes. All political parties must adhere to democratic norms, and appeal to all groups, since there are no longer any built-in majorities.
The rights-bearing voters will exercise their right to ensure fairness. We do not have to fix what is not broken.
