Dear Editor,
Emile Mervin’s missive titled ‘We need leaders who can point us to the way of unity and prosperity’ published in the SN on January 30, again exposes the shortsightedness of Mr Ramjattan’s Bath Settlement call. Mr Mervin and other defenders have hinged their responses on some worrying propositions. I can only hope that these positions do not form part of the AFC or Mr Ramjattan’s defence of the issue, for if so it would demonstrate a distorted and biased position grounded in perception rather than reality.
Mr Mervin seems to be embracing a belief which says that others do the same or worse, so why can’t Ramjattan? He and the others also seem to see the Bath Settlement call as a non-issue or trivial matter. In fact, he describes reactions to it as an “inconsequential storm in a teacup.”
This position and those taken by others is ill advised, insensitive and troubling, and has opened the gates for people to insinuate all kinds of things and advance wild, baseless theories.
Mr Mervin sought to advance his defence by stating the following: “Mr Ramjattan went into an Indian community and reassured Indians that Africans are not necessarily the enemies of whom they should be afraid.” My question is, why does Mr Ramjattan need to reassure Indian Guyanese that they should not be afraid of African Guyanese? Where is the evidence to suggest that Indian Guyanese are afraid of African Guyanese? What will be Mr Ramjattan’s reassuring call to African Guyanese? I guess the answer might be there is no need for reassurances here. I also wish to ask Mr Mervin to explain what the word “necessarily” means in the context in which he used it. I think it apposite for me to stress a point which I consistently make, and that is that Guyana continues to be a country that does not embrace scientific research; as such all kinds of hunches and perceptions are making their way into documents and theories and recorded as though they are facts. This is a problem that the ‘new political culture’ must address – the need for research and empirical evidence to arrive at conclusions on various issues.
From examining the statements of the defenders, all I see is a group of people who have decided that their main objective is to blindly rush to defend Mr Ramjattan and their party. As such, no care is taken to apply some level of objectivity to the issue; one may argue that this kind of mentality might be likened to the very political culture the AFC says it hopes to change. Is this the way the party hopes to appeal to Guyanese “based on reason and substance”? Are we getting more rhetoric than substance coming from the AFC? Given the reasons advanced by the defenders of the call, since they claim that the call was not ill-advised, it might be fair to assume that their collective expressed positions form part of Mr Ramjattan’s thinking on the subject. With this situation the question now becomes whether this thinking is capable of “doing away” with the “race based political system” which Mr Mervin tells us, was the principal rationale for the birth of the AFC.
Yours faithfully,
Lurlene Nestor
