By GHK Lall- There’s a human tragedy. Cotton Tree and two cousins. Across Mandarin Bridge and an 11-year-old-child. Police killings in Linden. And, more lately, a boat that went down and took down over 100 Guyanese lives. Poor ones. The rich ones and big ones don’t sail, they soar. A flight is ‘fine change’ for them. The PPP Govt has a practice. An entourage rolls up to the family doorstep. Amidst human tragedy, there’s a caravan, and human drama. Political ones that follow a canned formula, a set procedure, what are now standard operations. Follow the thread to the end.
A visit. Some handholding. Solemn expressions. Proper clothing. Words and carriage to match. By golly, the PPP has this down to a science. All that is desired is truth and justice. A genuine search for truth and a sincere quest for justice are all that’s placed before visitors and professional mourners. There are none better than political ones. Done! Will be done! Guaranteed under the seal of a public oath.
Repeated, whether it is Cotton Tree, or Tuschen, or Linden, or the national tsunami that was the capsizing, plunging, horror of the MV Barima in a strange place with a stranger name. Hope stirs, springs. Out of the agony of tragedy, there will be duty to the people (and truth and justice) done; there will be that finality that brings blessed closure. The ghosts of the stricken and fallen can find peace. So, also the savaged spirits of families and communities. So, begins and ends part one of chapter one in the Guyana story when tragedy stalks and the PPP Govt runs to the rescue. The first objective that transcends all others is damage control, limit the spread, the flareups that could lead to more fallouts.
Part two of chapter two reveals the hypocrisies that ran deep amid the solemnities, the mourning and grieving, the speechmaking celebrating Guyanese life and Guyanese resilience. Theater in full swing, free political matinees for the masses. Now, there is distancing. The machinery of the bureaucracy takes over. The PPP stars who were in the forefront, retreat, take the most distant seat. To make themselves invisible, so that no stain reaches them. A commission, there will be.
It’s the first attempt at conning the Guyanese people. The team is announced. The second foul just delivered. The scheme and the sham register deeply. Are those the best? Who should or could trust them? Precedents exist. Can’t be denied or wished away. Take two: an inferno and police mishaps. The fire killed children, the other killed adults by gunfire. Whichever the way of those blood sacrifices, this reality is incontestable: the dead is still dead. Something is conspicuous. Where are the people who were making soothing speeches? Into which hole have they disappeared? Practice and process are the new headliners, with the right kind of people in place.
The whitewashes of before seem likely to be repeated. One dead, two dead, a hundred dead, it’s only a number. Nothing to get worked up about. It’s the new line of the people who promised truth and justice. That is, if they care to say anything at all publicly. Gruesome murders are ancient history. A child drowned in mysterious circumstances, and its business as usual. Killings by the State, better get used to that condition.
A hundred sent to their death, through criminal negligence from top to bottom, and those fingered are three poor working men from Guyana’s darker segment of its soil. Perhaps, that calumny (an official crime by itself) is all the truth and justice that families and Guyanese will ever get. Though, it’s a travesty. Thus, the concerted effort at distancing. Put a COI in the middle, one that developed a hernia and emergency appendicitis. But that is not all, for a ruff case of tonsilitis has affected the Barima COI. Can’t move. Can’t talk. Can’t collect its wits, can’t get its wheels rolling. A month later.
Stretch out, so that there can be proper straining out. The negatives. The inconveniences. The revealing memories. A month later, and there is official indifference. It’s the COI business, not that of leadership. It’s of people now dead, who were nobodies. Why work up a sweat? Why go near to what has teeth and can bite? Indifference confirms what I always pegged to insincerity. Hypocrisy. The pretense of shared pain overcome by political priorities. The MV Barima is dynamite. Whoever goes near to it risks being blown up. Thus, the distancing first, and now the indifference. Cruelty amid raw tragedy. The reprehensible walking side-by-side with the indefensible. The PPP way of life.
