– gov’t intervention underway, but stakeholders say should be more strategic
A recent report by the Guyana Human Rights Association (GHRA) has painted a horrifying picture of the Region One community Baramita, where the incidence of sexual and physical violence is so high among women and children that young girls are forced to walk with broken bottles in their bosoms as a form of protection.
However, government says it is aware of the many ills in the community and has started an urgent intervention that has already seen a reduction in suicides and gang rapes. But according to Minister within the Ministry of Indigenous Peoples Affairs Valerie Garrido-Lowe there is still a high incidence of wounding as a direct result of alcohol abuse.
The GHRA report told the story of women and children being drunk in the middle of the day and of more than 70% of the population having marks of violence owing to the many wounding incidents in the community.
The report, titled ‘Impact of Mining: Survival Strategies for Interior Communities in Guyana,’ made some other troubling observations but it singled out the Carib community as that which represents the “most advanced case of disintegration of an community for which the principle cause is mining” even though there are other contributing factors such as isolation by language and religion.
“Sexual abuse of young girls and women is rampant, beyond anything the GHRA has learnt about in other parts of the interior. The unparalleled number of suicides, estimated at 73 since 2005 (an average of one every two months) is symptomatic of the state of widespread alienation,” the report said.
A high percentage of the suicides involve alcohol abuse and the report said the village council was dominated by coastlanders’ influence which saw a large number of such persons working on the estimated 20 dredges operating in the community.
The Amerindian People’s Association (APA) has been aware of what has been happening in the community since 2013, but its Governance and Rights Officer Laura George questioned the need to graphically highlight the ills of the community without any real strategic intervention being done.
“I would be very concerned that a report such as this can create repercussions for residents in the village…” George told the Sunday Stabroek in a recent interview.
“I am concerned that such a report comes out without preparing the community, without having a plan for further supporting the community as to why this is important and it is made public. The residents need to know that this is public and the focus will be on them… We can end up having a community alienated from any other further support from other organisations,” she said.
Asked to explain, George said all the reports coming out of the community have demonstrated that the village council has been unable to make independent decisions and “that can create further alienation because the council needs support…and they cannot do it all by themselves without having them prepared.”
George said that when APA visited the community in 2013 under the land tenure assessment, a report was compiled. She admits that their findings were “shocking” and the government at the time was aware of what was happening.
“… [The findings] were so extreme that we couldn’t make it public. We couldn’t take it to the press for the very sole reason that it was so sensitive. It was a very sensitive issue because these are a people who had experienced years of cultural erosion [of their dignity being taken away] from different avenues…” George told the Sunday Stabroek.
At that time, she said, the political climate was that “you could not take this to the ministry” and try to seek intervention. At that time as well a district development officer, a resident of the community, was being paid by the ministry and was aware of the degradation of the community. The leadership was weak and also was corrupted by influential persons whose sole aim was to extract gold from the community.
“You could not bring out all of these things against the people without us as an organisation having the resources to further work with the community,” George said adding that they returned the following year to validate and update the information.
‘Governance’
Garrido-Lowe said the strengthening of the village council has been the focus of her ministry since the government had set up an inter-ministry task force when it was greeted with Baramita on its accession to office.
While George questioned the absence of terms of reference for the task force and suggested that it has disintegrated, the minister said it has been working and has engineered some positive changes in the community. George called for a “holistic strategy” to better address the needs of the people of Baramita and pointed out that it took the APA a while to gain the trust of the community.
“We found a Baramita that was a scary Baramita, it was scary for all of us and we had to come together and have intervention. Sometimes we spent weeks in the community,” Garrido-Lowe revealed. She said many ministers were in tears when they witnessed what took place in the community.
Since the government’s intervention, she said, suicides have decreased which is “very good because the rate was very frightening.”
“There has been an upsurge in … bottle stabbing, knife stabbing as a direct result of the alcohol abuse,” the minister said.
She admitted that village council is not as strong as it should be but it is an issue that the ministry is attempting to address. In one case the ministry had to intervene as a non-indigenous person was elected to be on the council. Work is also being done with women and children and putting a halt to shops being built in the area since these increase access to alcohol.
“You see, people already own land, we can’t take it away from them and as a ministry we can only deal with if you are hurting our people, we will step in and try our best to put a stop to that by getting the police involved, bringing in help…while we try to talk to parents and village leaders and hold workshops,” she said.
The ministry has also employed a community development officer who resides in the community and reports directly to the ministry.
“First the miners had total control, but now they don’t have that,” the minister asserted.
She said there were high level meetings that included her ministry, Ministry of Public Security, Ministry of Social Protection and the Ministry of Public Health.
One of the issues was the fact that women and girls were not comfortable reporting rapes as there were no women police officers, one has since been placed in the area.
The Pan American Health Organization (PAHO) has partnered with the government in addressing mental health in the community, in having children vaccinated and providing items such as All-Terrain Vehicles and a refrigerator for the storage of vaccines. Environmental health programmes were also conducted and according to the minister, PAHO has been very focused and strategic in its intervention.
Violence against women and girls
Meanwhile, the GHRA report spoke about what it described as the “social chaos” generated by miners, which saw one government worker describing it as the worst community he has every worked in.
“Sexual abuse of young teenage girls… by adult miners, police and others is rampant, with parents permitting sexual abuse of daughters in exchange for liquor,” stated the report.
It was noted that the idea of linking up with coastlanders as the way to a better life was ingrained and often encouraged by mothers, but it also paved the way for exploitation becoming a way of life.
Frighteningly, the report said, girls as young as 14 were being raped and this rampant abuse has caused girls to walk with the “tops of broken bottles in their bras which they pull out to defend themselves.
“It is estimated that 70% of the community (men and women) have marks of violence on them as a result of the fighting which accompanies drunkenness.”
And worryingly the report pointed out that the absence of institutional protection for women and girls particularly from the police was a major contributing factor to the crises in the community. Reports of police taking bribes from miners, exploiting women sexually and failing to intervene are widespread.
The report noted that following revelations about suicide in Baramita in July, 2015, the then new government took steps to create an Inter-Ministerial Task Force to address the multi-dimensional crises in the community. However, the initial concern, the report said, has not produced systematic steps to address the issue, although the police personnel have been replaced.
It was also noted that although the Indigenous Peoples’ Commission visited the community on a number of occasions, no reports of their concerns have been made publicly available.
This newspaper was able to confirm that several fact-finding missions by inter-ministry teams, which involved ministers, visited the community and various reports were prepared, but not whether interventions were done. However, one such report had indicated that suicides and sexual violence were not as widespread as suggested and that at least one large-scale miner had been doing a lot for the community and residents were grateful.
Suicide
Meantime, the report said that the most telling indicator of the extent of the social disintegration was the number of suicides in the community. It was revealed that since 2006 the number of suicides had risen to 73 at the time of the report, with the latest occurring in June last year when a19-year-old was found hanged by the airstrip, two hours after he had been seen playing cricket. The youth’s father reportedly also committed suicide around the beginning of the epidemic a decade ago.
“Most suicides take place by hanging, but not necessarily with their feet off the ground. Victims have been found slumped in chairs [and in] other strange postures,” the report said.
According to the report, an average of one suicide every two months became a pattern. A sad case as that of a 28-year-old who left a 23-year-old wife and three children. Six weeks earlier his father had also taken his life.
And other case involved a Grade Six pupil, who had attempted suicide even though just the day before she had expressed the wish to become a pilot. Two 17-year-olds also committed suicide in separate incidents, a former Toshao attempted suicide as well as a councillor and a former Deputy Toshao killed himself while the wife of the councillor attempted to take her life as well.
“The suicides which allegedly have taken place since the mid-2000s have not galvanized attention on the advanced state of disintegration of the Baramita community,” the report said.
The report noted that high suicide rates in indigenous communities affected by the loss of lands have been documented by Survival International. It was stated that in light of previous evidence, it would be an error to view them solely as events triggered by individual personality traits. The breakdown of communal life must be viewed as a central contributory factor.
The report also stated that the public health consequences of unregulated mining, namely the pollution of creeks by sediment and mercury poisoning which has contaminated drinking water and fish consumed by humans, along with the vulnerability to HIV and other sexually transmitted infections as a result of the social disorder, need to be “urgently and systematically monitored as a basis for introduction of effective protection programmes.”
The community, which is said to have 23 settlements with a total population of approximately 3,000 residents who predominantly speak the Carib language, is largely influenced by a coastlander who moved there in the 1960s and produced a large number of children with various indigenous women. It was he who introduced gold mining to the community and established the first stamp mill to crush gold bearing rock.
“Villagers claim that when he opened his first shop, members of the community had to bring a basket of gravel to the shop to be sifted. Based on the pennyweights of gold recovered from processing of the gravel, credit to the equivalent value would then be extended for goods from the shop. Villagers also state that by various forms of influence peddling he dominated the community,” the report claimed.