Etched in the public mind about Mark Benschop is his incarceration, for five years, in solitary confinement for treason followed by an unconditional pardon by then President Bharrat Jagdeo.
As mentioned last week, when Benschop finally returned to live in Guyana in 1998, he tried and failed to gain work at Channel 9, a station that generally supported the PNC. He then began working with Channel 69, which was unapologetic about its support for the PPP/C and in the ethnic cauldron that is Guyana, he could not avoid being viewed as a supporter and mouthpiece of the PPP/C. After only about three months, Benschop left Channel 69 when the owner demanded that he apologise to President Jagdeo, who was apparently furious about a statement Mark made in one of his broadcasts.
Benschop now gained employment and began to air programmes on Channel 9 accusing the Jagdeo government of corruption, extrajudicial killings, Afro-Guyanese marginalisation, etc., which not only made him seem pro-PNC but in those heady days of political protest made him a clear and present danger to the extant regime. Benschop and his supporters believe that it was this political positioning that made him a target for the PPP/C regime and landed him in prison.
Briefly as he tells it, on 3 July 2002, on his way to interview some Caribbean heads of government who were in Guyana for a meeting, he was informed that some bauxite workers were marching to the same hotel where he was going. He was among the protesters when some of them diverted from the crowd and went through the gates of the Office of the President. The presidential guards opened fire, two people were killed and bloodied persons began running away from the compound. Benschop claimed he was only in the vicinity for about ten minutes and never entered OP but stood on the street with a megaphone yelling at the presidential guards and asking why they were shooting the protesters.
Warrants were issued for the arrest of Benschop and Philip Bynoe, the leader of the protest, both of whom had disappeared underground. But Benschop soon resurfaced, surrendered to the police and was imprisoned. Eventually, in August 2004, his trial ended in a hung jury, eleven for acquittal and one against. It was not until August 2007, that President Jagdeo, claiming that he believed that Benschop had learnt his lesson, unconditionally pardoned him.
But Benschop remained unchastened. He believes that national and international protest was responsible for his release and has continued, if in a somewhat more muted and structured fashion, with his political activism. We see him in the forefront of many social protests and his Benschop Foundation has trained and helped many persons. (Bynoe, who also received a presidential pardon, resurfaced as a staunch regime supporter!)
Benschop believes that due to his years in solitary confinement he is now a more psychologically self-reliant and caring individual and is ready for any suitable leadership role, including that of mayor of Georgetown. He has come to realise that one should not allow oneself to be used by the current crop of politicians and believes that if the leadership of the PNC had been stronger, his time in prison would have been much shorter and others who subsequently had to face the ordeal of imprisonment for treason might have been spared.
His family left Guyana for the US in about 1985 and eventually Mark, who wanted to be a lawyer, enrolled at John Jay College of Criminal Justice but took a sabbatical and never completed his studies. He also worked as a press aide, Caribbean media, in the office of Mayor Rudy Giuliani of New York.
The 21 year old Benschop first returned to Guyana in 1992 to live with maternal grandparents in Linden. Early in that year, he was employed by the Guyana Broadcasting Corporation (GBC) as an announcer anchoring its ‘Man in the Street’ programme. As he tells it, he had worked for some 5 months before he was confirmed in the job and paid any salary. Indeed, having to find the daily passage from Linden was so burdensome that for a while, until some kind people helped him with free lodgings, he was forced into secret vagrancy.
It was during his stint at GBC that he first met the leader of the opposition, Dr. Cheddi Jagan, ‘an old man sitting quite unassumingly waiting to do an interview’. At the time, Benschop was trying to become more acquainted with Guyana by reading such works as Jagan’s ‘The West on Trial’ and Burnham’s ‘A Destiny to Mould’. He introduced himself to Jagan and they struck up one of those animated Cheddi Jagan-type discourses.
As I concluded last week, Benschop’s general orientation towards African Guyanese was insufficient to suppress his natural desire, perhaps strengthened by his period in the US, for personal independence of thought and social fairness’. Not surprisingly then, only months into the job, he was already running into difficulties with the GBC establishment, who, he claims, wanted to edit all his interviews to suit the prevailing (PNC) political positions.
So, about two weeks before the 1992 elections that brought the PPP/C to office, Benschop left Guyana and returned to New York, where he began working for radio station 105.9 FM. He remembers doing interviews for the station with now President Cheddi Jagan, and in 1993, when the late president Desmond Hoyte suffered a heart attack and was taken to hospital in New York for surgery, Benschop (no doubt looking for a story) visited and became life-long friends of the Hoytes and their close associates.
Claiming that his party needed bright and dynamic young people, it was Desmond Hoyte who encouraged Benschop to return to Guyana. As Benschop remembers it, after the elections loss in 1992, the PNC in the USA was dead and he worked with former minister of health and Channel 9 owner Dr. Noel Blackman and others to try revive it. Indeed, such was his association with the PNC that in the run-up to the last local government elections in 1994, Mayor Hamilton Green asked him to come to Guyana and run his public relations campaign, but he refused.
In 1996, Benschop came to Guyana in the hope of finding work and settling down. He was sent by Hoyte to speak to the then general secretary of the PNC but the interview was not very productive. But during that visit he met his future wife and he went back to the US with the intention of returning and making a permanent life in Guyana. He came back in 1998, began working for Channel 69 and the rest, as they say, is history.
Next week I will conclude by considering Benschop’s understanding of the City of Georgetown and its management.
