Dear Editor,
I resonate with Mr. Leon Rockcliffe’s courageous letter, captioned “In any respectable society this minister would have resigned,” which took civic society high rollers to task for their deafening silence over the illegal firearm use by a government minister, and the apparent business as usual response by government to this, and certain other incidents that demanded justice and not compromise.
Obvious criminal matters involving local political figures that are being settled out of court may prove quite unsettling, if not dangerous grounds, for our already maligned justice system and very susceptible society.
Perhaps the following is analogous for our enlightenment. The New York Post carried a recent editorial about a group of Orthodox Jewish youths who attacked a Pakistani Muslim a year ago in New York, yelling he should go back to his home country. They got arrested, pleaded guilty to first-degree assault to inflict serious injury, and second-degree assault as a hate crime, and received conditional discharges, because they conceded they acted out of `personal’ hatred and their victim, surprisingly, didn’t want them to go to jail. The District Attorney viewed the end result as fair but was justice served? Crimes, the editorial pointed out, are more than transgressions against their victims they are grave affronts to the rule of law, to society.
It further warned, “When the judicial system starts letting victims direct outcomes, society inches closer to lynch-mob justice.” Now, when a government, and not a mere private citizen, becomes involved in such outcomes, are we looking at probable state-sponsored chaos?
Getting back to the issue of the gun-toting minister, Mr. Rockcliffe wrote “The main element of this affair, however, that causes sore disappointment is the reaction – or lack of it – on the part of citizens like myself. I had restrained my burning desire to make public comment, awaiting a surge of disapproval from the many sources from which one might fairly expect it. We tend, through weariness, to remain passive under the burden of a multitude of daily irritants and disappointments and now regard them as just a part of life. But occasionally, there is some event that gravely offends our sense of right and wrong and which should jerk us out of our lassitude and move us to arms. This is one such occasion.”
He also noted, “Those of us who by the kind hand of fate or by personal effort have achieved a healthy level of academic, social, intellectual and economic advancement are the ones in any society who must not fail to pick up the gauntlet at a time of national crisis. We had better recognize the event as such.”
Well, except for the few angry or concerned letters, including Mr. Rockcliffe’s the deafening silence of the majority of society’s middle and upper class citizens is deeply disturbing, to put it mildly.
For a while now, I, too, have been wondering: Where is the outrage from society’s intellectuals, academics, affluent and well-heeled actors over this high-class criminality?
Mr. Editor, whenever gun-toting deviants strike repeatedly at businesses and the well-off, society’s high rollers would react with concern and would ask government to do something. Government, in response, would rely on whatever the police force and the army can do, even if that might result in the shooting death of suspects and actual perpetrators. But each ‘successful’ joint patrol exercise is often followed by a slew of manufactured letters expressing gratitude to the joint patrol for alleviating society’s fears, and the government would take credit.
Now that a government minister has behaved like a deranged, gun-toting criminal, definitely breaking the law governing the legal use of a firearm, society’s higher-ups have gone deafeningly silent, and government takes this silence as a golden consent to do nothing to the minister in question.
Mr. Editor, there was a time when Guyana had a government that behaved in eerily similar fashion, except that back then, most of society’s higher-ups virtually formed some part of the government because the state was the major employer or it wielded extensive political influence even over private employers.
Then came a moment in time when circumstances dictated that certain of these social higher-ups become openly agitated to end the state of political play, and thus the Guyana Association for Reform and Democracy (GUARD) was born.
This birthing of this social movement also took place at a time when the main opposition party, the PPP, could not energize the country’s frustrated and anxious grassroots based on its own to help bring about change, yet the PPP was able to conveniently ride into power on the social ripples caused by the same GUARD movement.
Today, based on what we are witnessing under the PPP regime, with the main opposition PNC – not being able to energize the country’s still frustrated and anxious grassroots base on its own to help keep the PPP regime in check or bring about change, it is becoming increasingly evident that society’s higher-ups must once again react in a timely manner to create fresh social ripples so that the ‘democracy’ fought for and won in 1992 would not be limited to free and fair elections, but be forcefully extended to include genuine ‘reforms’ in other areas of government for human development in accordance with basic rights and justice.
Thank you, Mr. Rockcliffe, for finding the courage and taking the time to speak so eloquently and loudly on a matter that so many of your peers, for reasons best known to them, cannot or have not spoken (or written) on for the edification of a yearning public.
Yours faithfully,
Emile Mervin
