What Ethnic Cleansing?
An alarming tendency has surfaced in the PPP/C to make full use of very dramatic words and phrases to describe non-dramatic situations. Very boldly, without any attempt to shield the true intent of their disingenuous posturings, they deliberately skewer every situation into an emotive appeal. The PPP/C Opposition has continued, even after the national elections, to do what they do best – propagandise for selfish gains and to save face.
Our new three-month-old government has been grappling with the minutae of governance which fortunately and unfortunately involves the detailed, time consuming process of finding the missing money, equipment and facilities over which the PPP presided for some 23 years. The new administration is also doing what it committed itself to, i.e. ensuring that the people employed across the public service are properly re-trained and to reset their focus on delivering a high standard of public service.
This process involves a close examination of the suitability of each public servant for the posts they hold in order to determine the level of re-training needed, and to ensure that the square pegs are removed from the round holes they were stuffed into during the previous administration.
This process is revealing that the previously informed assumptions are indeed fact, i.e. that many senior and mid level officers were promoted to positions they could not properly function in only because of their dedicated service to the PPP party. Others, though qualified, were found to have flouted the sacrosanct rules and regulations of traditional public service, and had committed many infractions which assaulted every course of natural justice.
The APNU+AFC Coalition gave commitments to the people of Guyana to make their lives easier, to remove the red tape and systemic bureaucracy, and level the field to give every person a fair chance to benefit from the nation’s resources, whether it is a piece of land to farm or construct homes, or assistance to start or expand an enterprise. These commitments were made with the full knowledge that the public service under the PPP was not delivering to Guyanese who were not closely aligned to the party. In fact, very many of their own supporters at the lower end of the pecking order could not receive any benefits, not unless they visited the party’s headquarters to appeal to a ‘big one’ in the central executive, and agree to certain pay back measures.
This had to stop. Any honest government worth its salt would ensure that the system is cleared of corrupt, inept persons who were not serving in the interests of the people they are supposed to serve irrespective of their political affiliations. New governments all over the world are compelled to measure every system for its efficacy when they go into office, and restructure according to the regulations enshrined in the laws. Guyana was never an exception, not in 1964, 1985, 1992 and certainly not 2015.
The new Coalition government of six (6) political parties is the largest in Guyana’s pre- and post independence history. It is made up of people from all of Guyana’s six main races (and then some), from every culture and from all walks of life – independent people who freely express their opinions and recommendations. There really is no room for blind faith to any particular race.
This makes the PPP’s claims that the new government is practicing ethnic cleansing stupid and ludicrous. Ethnic cleansing, properly defined, is really seriously destructive and has wreaked havoc in numerous countries the world over.
The official United Nations definition of ethnic cleansing is “rendering an area ethnically homogeneous by using force or intimidation to remove from a given area persons of another ethnic or religious group”. These events are perpetrated under conditions akin to civil war and states of emergency when constitutions are suspended and martial law takes its place.
Global scholars have defined ethnic cleansing as the systematic forced removal of ethnic or religious groups from a given territory by a more powerful ethnic group. The forces applied may be any form of forced migration (deportation, population transfer), intimidation or mass murder. It is usually accompanied by efforts to erase physical and cultural evidence of the targeted group through the destruction of homes, social centers, farms and infrastructure, and by the desecration of monuments, cemeteries and places of worship. It has been carried out with murder, torture, arbitrary arrests and detention, extra-judicial executions, sexual assaults, confinement of civilian populations in ghetto areas, forcible removal, displacement and deportation of civilians, deliberate military attacks or threats of attacks on civilian areas, and wanton destruction of property. All of these acts are crimes against humanity.
No one (in the previous generation) would forget the horrible events that occurred in the east-central African nation of Rwanda from April to July 1994. This was ethnic cleansing at its worst. Members of the Hutu ethnic majority murdered as many as 800,000 people mostly of the Tutsi minority in four months! Ironically, Hutus and Tutsis were differentiated only by association, not by any physical differences.
The massacres began in the capital city of Kigali while flames of hate were being fanned by extremist Hutu nationalists on radio programmes, through loud hailers on vehicles driving through the streets, and by word of mouth. The President then was a Hutu. The genocide spread throughout the country with staggering speed and brutality. Ordinary citizens were incited by local officials and the government of Hutu Power to take up arms against their neighbours, those whom they believed to be Tutsi and from this a horrendous killing spree ensued that saw such brutality of man against his compatriots that the world prayed that we would never again witness anything akin to it in this lifetime or the next.
By the time the Tutsi-led Rwandese Patriotic Front (RPF) party gained control of the country through a military offensive in early July hundreds of thousands of Rwandans of all persuasions were dead and thousands more displaced. There were over two million refugees (mainly Hutus) exacerbating a full-blown humanitarian crisis. Rwanda’s international image and their relations with the rest of the world have since been tainted by this massacre.
This was highly dramatic ethnic cleansing. One cannot help but wonder how the PPP determined that the government’s decisions to terminate several employment and civil construction contracts qualify for this harsh terminology, especially considering that some workers/contractors were not of Indian extraction. Their comments throw a harsh spotlight on their own mindset that has almost always been rooted in racial division. We recall the comments made by former HPS, Dr. Roger Luncheon, under cross examination during the Jagdeo/Kissoon libel trial. He had stated that his government could find no ‘black person’ sufficiently qualified for appointment to ambassadorship.
Guyanese are fed up of being placed into brackets or pockets. We are no longer tolerant of people disposed to act with racial discrimination as their motivation. Irrespective of where our foreparents came from, we are all Guyanese first and unless we relinquish our citizenship in another land, we’ll always be Guyanese first.
We note that former president Jagdeo has done an about-face recently. Overnight he has become clairvoyant and is promoting himself as having all the answers to the woes that he created during his 12-15 year reign. Notice we avoided the dramatic terminology “reign of terror”. These are dramatic words not even befitting the years of deprivation people suffered between 1999 and 2015.
His new 20/20 vision, this cloak of righteousness that he donned lately, is not enough to make people forget his rule as a foul-mouthed, attention-seeking, disrespectful despot who took what he felt he was entitled to, and distributed the nation’s wealth to those who genuflected to him.
This is a peaceful nation and the Coalition government will do all in its power to maintain that equilibrium.