Give back the Guns to them

Posted September 14th. 2002

Guyana's problems can be solved without resort to Violence

The Editor Stabroek
News Georgetown.

Dear Editor,

I thank Ras Dalgety for cutting the three of us whom Mr. Lowe and Mr. McAllister generously called "luminaries" down to size. If we had "luminaries" in public life we should not be having this conversation. Dalgety sees our remarks as "utter shallowness". We shall be entitled to test the depth of his remarks. I am replying to his letter as received by email from a concerned person.

I apologies for the length of mine, but I am poorly educated and moreover cannot answer in sound bites. Mr. Dalgety's reference to an attack on Blackie by us is "a fast one". While not knowing much about Blackie, I do not hold him up as a hero, being a certified Anglo-Saxon. However, I have publicly condemned the manner of his death and pointed out that members of the political directorate justified it publicly.

But his admirers must explain, too, why it appears that his woman companion was "released" to face b bullets before he came out and was double-crossed. Just by the way, I publicly called on the government to compensate the owner of Toucan Suites where London had lodged under another name. We in the WPA are no defenders of the Black Clothes. We oppose them as much as we opposed the Death Squad under the former PNC government. Because it was then an African Guyanese-controlled government (note, controlled), many of the same social classes, which are now angry, were silent. The suspects then apparently deserved what they got.

Today, as I believe Tacuma Ogunseye was intending to say, social classes, which support this government, think the Black Clothes are very valuable to society. However, it was left to me as a WPA member during the PPP regime to charge PC Gomes and then Superintendent Merai with murder in the Courts and to pursue them in the High Court. Even before that, in 1998, we charged a PPP activist known as Beast with possession of dangerous arms and ammunition and led evidence of that through police officers who could now be shot at sight by the self -styled Taliban.

The Stabroek News was the only newspaper to send a reporter to Cove and John week after week and to record the evidence. Prime News also obtained reports from time to time. All this may seem very self- promoting, but when it is suggested that we somehow support the Black Clothes, something needs to be said. True, we did not go and shoot them and will plead guilty to that failure. In August 2001 Ms Debbie Backer, PNC/R MP, had given notice of a motion asking the National Assembly to resolve that a Commission to investigate the Police be appointed. Such an important motion, vital to security, was put on the order paper (for debate) only about ten months later.

At that stage the motion could not be debated as the PNC was doing something better than calling the government to account. It was boycotting parliament. The government, that is, Dr. Luncheon, had declared that there would be no enquiry and perhaps his word was taken as being above Parliament.

I have to thank Mr. Dalgety also for his short reading list, which my colleagues, having had, like him, the benefit of a foreign education, must have exhausted. Mr. Dalgety is a scientist, a chemist. He knows that there is a whole range of things with common characteristics classified as atoms and yet that an atom of gold is not the same as an atom of hydrogen. Another even large range is known as compounds, yet they are all differently composed, or different in quality, or type.

Their reactions with third substances will be different. When he comes to social questions, he is unfortunately less respectful and sees all violence as the same supremely important factor. Let me now try a little political chemistry: Mr. Dalgety puts us on his knee and teaches us patiently about the 1763 Berbice uprising, about the 1823 East Coast uprising and about 1834, about the rise of the trade union movement inspired and led by Critchlow and about the violence of the sixties. Finding that the agents for change did not in all cases use violence, he calls them all by the name "encounters". Mr. Dalgety seems to fall back on dialectics late in his argument when he says that we are in a dialectical process. Are not all processes like that? (Surely the process by which Mr. Dalgety got a rich English scientific education and did not become Afro-Saxon is dialectical).

The examples he has given, however, examples chosen solely by him, show that our fore parents knew more about dialectics in practice than we, even Ras Dalgety, claim to know. I shall not take the examples of the violence imposed by the slaveholders and colonizers. The point is that the enslaved in his examples moved from out-and-out, necessary violent resistance to less and less use of violence. Even in the darkest days, they used experience, knowledge and brainpower.

Some of us use brainpower only to cram passages. In 1823 the intention of the reformers was not to kill any white man. As Dalgety recalls, although the reformers - not the masters - were tortured and killed, drawn and quartered, improvements in the conditions of enslavement followed. Only after that could Africans marry in this country. But this is our mentorıs example of violence, not mine. The Damon revolt as treated by Tommy Payne in "Ten days that Changed the World" does not in any way justify violence as a form of struggle. In 1834 Damon inspired and conducted a prolonged silent vigil, which was nothing less than the application of soul force a century before Mahatma Gandhi, in an epic class struggle.

It was a tactic, which brought a whole planter and colonial conspiracy against the apprentices to nothing. The ruling class, excepting the governor, wanted violence and tried unsuccessfully to provoke it. They wanted violence to allow them to make their pleas to the international community based on the conduct of the "barbarous apprentices". Damon ahead of his time read their intrigue. He was hanged for his creativity and wisdom, as a sop to the frustrated planters. Payneıs book is a book everyone should read; it is history written like a novel. Damon had outlawed a violent reaction by the women who had been deliberately provoked and by the men who were rearing to go. Mr. Dalgety has testified to the value of the tactics Damon and his comrades employed.

The villagers in Buxton and other villages need training in advocacy, not in arms. But training in advocacy empowers people. Many of us have spent years training young people in villages without any "benefits" from any government. Training in arms places them under commanders.

There is nothing modern in killing except the weapons. Our mentor sees the killing of suspects by the Black Clothes under the PPP government as Indian violence against Africans. Then by the same logic, we have to conclude that the killing of suspects by the Death Squad under the PNC government was African violence against Africans and a few others.

That is why my pleadings to the courts against the DPP speak of the killing of suspects. If the courts in various rulings come down on this malpractice, it will set the stage for safeguards for all suspects and in particular for the typical endangered young African Guyanese suspect. When I wrote on the 1763 Berbice uprising in 1963 and again in1966, I did not take the traditional view of it as a rebellion.

I claimed, without professional support, that it was a revolution, as it aimed at change of the established order. Since then I have read scholars taking a similar view on that path-breaking episode. Next, our mentor Mr. Dalgety tells us "We are in a dialectical process that poses the question, "Is Buxton a terror camp?" Does Mr. Dalgety think it is historically correct or unavoidable that a woman suspected of informing the police was violently punished without trial by the self-styled Taliban with arson and attempted murder? With his knowledge of history, Mr. Dalgety will recognize this as a reign of terror in spirit just like those which Europeans have made classic.

I wish to remind Mr. Dalgety that the struggles of the worldıs peoples against oppression, violent or not, have resulted in a bundle of Human Rights which we all claim. In their writings, CY Thomas and Walter Rodney have never treated them as "bourgeois" rights. They include rights of women and children and also rights of prisoners and suspects. This will naturally limit the freedom of freedom fighters as well as the freedom of, governments. When they both ignore Human Rights, the widest revolution of all time, we are in the dark ages again. Shooting a wanted man with his hands on his head was a step in that direction.

The report that that victim first pushed a woman companion out of his place of hiding, to be shot, if true, is another step. Truly, the North African Christian theologian Saint Augustine, writing in "The City Of God" was inspired when he wrote: "Justice being denied, what is the State but a great robber?

For what is a gang of robbers but a petty state?" It is simply not reasonable to tell me that political resources in Guyana cannot achieve without an army what Critchlow and Edun achieved without armies against the colonial state-sugar combination of those days. Most of the dogmas we repeat about violence from two centuries ago, or from the days of the Second World War, were not intended to be dogmas. Often, for those who uttered them, they were the only means available at that time and in that place. One of these said in 1871 that "insurrection would be madness where peaceful agitation would more quickly and surely do the work." He was Karl Marx. Malcolm X said, "by any means necessary", not "by any means". We who claim to be interested in change should think of revising that reliance on violence as a first or second resort. My own conviction is this.

It is not violence that is essential to change, but a social force. Guyana is rich in examples of that non-violent social force. Ras Dalgety named two; I would say three examples, including the Damon passive resistance and the Critchlow movement. Damon and Critchlow did not have adult suffrage, balanced election commissions, adult suffrage, parliament and rights entrenched for all in a constitution . We claim to have these. Do we, government or opposition, make any real effort to give them teeth? There can be better government, not Heaven in Guyana, but better times, if only we had the honour, for a start, to work the changes made to the 1980 constitution and move on from there.

The electorate has not even been allowed to know what the changes are.

Let me pull rank based on age and long observation: EVEN NOW GUYANA'S PROBLEMS AS NOW PRESENTED CAN BE SETTLED WITHOUT RESORT TO VIOLENCE. IN FACT, an attempt to solve them violently will make then time worse.

This is only a letter and it has to end.

Yours respectfully,

Eusi Kwayana.