The worst thing one can do is to misdiagnose what has happened to Mr. Colwyn Harding and cast most of the blame on specific individuals and/or institutional relations and so look for solutions in the form of judicial penalties, compensation and specific institutional reforms. All of these are of course necessary, but in my opinion, outside of the proper political context their effect will be minimal if not useless.
This is the way the regime expects us – as normal people who have been brought up to believe that we live in a normal political society – to view matters and behave, and it can agree to some institutional reforms (which it may or may not implement) and compensation (which is usually minimal) until the next time. In this context, the only thing that may be difficult for the regime to contemplate is giving up the actual wrong-doers, as to do so would put the entire trajectory of its design in jeopardy.
Make no mistake: neither the PPP/C nor the police hierarchy directly encouraged the police to brutalise Mr. Harding by beating him in the manner they did or by allegedly raping him with a baton. They have nothing to gain and much to lose from such excesses. These kinds of outcomes are a dysfunction of the politics of domination. Acts similar to what has allegedly happened to Mr. Harding have happened before and will happen again because they are outcomes of the pervasive development of a permissive environment that has become necessary as the PPP/C struggles with ethnic/political dominance in its attempt to govern a bi-communal Guyana single-handedly.
It would also be a huge mistake to believe that what has happened to Mr. Harding is the work of a maverick policeman or the result of the general administrative direction of an incompetent minister. What we have here is systemic and far more dangerous. Think, for example, of the age- old complaint by the PNC that African youths are randomly picked up and finger-printed; treason trials that were never concluded; the abuse at the Leonora Police Station in October 2009 when the genitals of a young man were set on fire after he was arrested in relation to a murder investigation; the inexplicable shooting of our protesting parliamentary representatives and the killing of protesters in Linden. These and this latest case suggest a pattern that should be a cause for grave concern.
Present-day Sri Lanka (which I dealt with in a previous column), Nazi Germany and Stalin’s Russia are good examples of the politics of domination. Once set in motion, the politics of domination follows a logic in which brutalities, intimidation, propaganda and confusion are commonplace. As the Guyana Human Rights Association (GHRA) has observed “Police officers allegedly present when the beatings and sexual assault took place and apparently took no responsibility to either stop the assault, to assist Harding to get prompt medical attention, nor to report the incident to higher authority.” They were either actively taking part in the brutality or acquiescing to it by their silence.
What kind of state do we live in when, given the public focus on this case in which the state is responsible for Mr. Harding who is being guarded under its protection, prison officers, also employees of the state, can be so brazen as to enter his hospital room and intimidate him in the fashion that has been reported?
As is to be expected, when these events occur and come to public attention in relatively open societies such as ours, the regime tends to scurry about for responses, which are often initially confused. This has prompted Mr. Harding’s attorney, Mr. Nigel Hughes, to claim that the government’s approach to the issue sought to create confusion, and the GHRA to observe that the police was attempting to cover up rather than investigate the incident. Their conclusions are not without substance.
To add to this confused state, as reported, the Minister of Health Dr Bheri Ramsaran told the National Assembly “The intestinal injuries sustained by prisoner Colwyn Harding, who has accused a policeman of sodomising him with a baton, resulted after an operation for an incarcerated inguinal hernia.” But almost before the words were out of his mouth, he warned the Assembly not to take him too seriously. “The juxtapositioning of the claim or the complaint of the sexual assault need[s] to be taken in this context” and a full report would be completed by his experts at the Georgetown Public Hospital Corporation (GPHC).
Of course the Minister was right to be cautious, for around the same time, the Director of Medical Services at the GPHC, Dr. Sheik Amir, was reported to have said that it was “difficult for me to say” whether the hernia could have been aggravated by an object such as a baton being inserted into Harding’s anus. “Specifically what you are saying, I can’t say if it does or not.” Dr. Amir’s tendentiousness was also in order, for according to the same report “Doctors (either at the GPHC or elsewhere) said that given the length of time between the alleged sodomy and now (more than a month) hardly any bruises would be seen!”
Those who seek to make and implement policy to safeguard our collective and individual safety must, at the very least, take cognisance of this broader political context and agenda. But have no fear, notwithstanding evidence to the contrary in some parts of the world (the current ethnic and nationalist confrontations Africa come to mind), in my view, given our geographical location and the more liberal world in which we live, no generalised level of atrocities is possible in Guyana. Although this is small comfort to those who have been or will be brutalised, wrongly imprisoned, etc, the Nazis will not be coming to town.
