By GHK Lall- Demerara Waves and Kiskadee Watch carried it. I’m sure Kaieteur News, Village Voice, and 592Guardian also will give it prominent display. I saw a copy of it late Saturday night. It is the 33-point prison manifesto of Azruddin Mohamed. In many of its aspects, it is the memoir of a war declared on a citizen, a victim held at the mercy of the State. One that’s brutalized.
One subject of this Republic, also a national leader, punished and pierced, rent and bent, tested and tortured. Through a ferocious combination of atrocities that pulverizes the mind, stretches the spirit beyond human limits, beyond its capacity for endurance. Mr. Mohamed’s 33-point manifesto cum prison memoir, as translated, stands as a testimony to how the law is contorted to lawlessness. How standards are smashed to rubble. How a government has earned the distinction of mention in the same breath as the masterminds behind Germany’s Auschwitz and Belsen-Bergen, and America’s Guantanamo and Abu Ghraib.
Mr. Mohamed’ manifesto of the evils inflicted on him is unsigned. I wouldn’t know his writing nor his signature. But I recognize its contents. For that’s the way of powerful men determined to teach undesirables and dissidents unforgettable lessons, to break their will on a modern-day rack, to reduce to a quivering shell. Suffocating heat. Toxic air. Sleep strangulation. Merely the beginnings of his now documented ordeal that’s already flashed around the world.
If these preconceived and prearranged savageries can be delivered on a country’s Opposition Leader, a constitutionally recognized office, then what could be the fate of any tiny, powerless, conscientious citizen? Is the PPP Govt still chortling about freedom and democracy? Is the Hon Attorney General, Mr. Anil Nandlall still holding fast to his insistence, his farce, that the law is still inviolable? Is Mr. Nandlall still selling the law’s unchallengeable paramountcy is still at work, is still relevant, and is still sacred?
Whatever he or the PPP Govt’s response, a prison should never degrade to a psychological waterboard, a mental slaughterhouse. By design or accident, Mr. Mohamed is now part of Guyana’s ugly political history. His character, such as it is, has been riddled with holes, assassinated in so many ways, some crude, some clever. Yet the laurel of a living martyr is out of the question, out of reach, not his to have. A hero to some, he has mutated into a horror story for all Guyanese.
I will not hedge. I do not seek shelter in protective language. I give Mr. Azruddin Mohamed the benefit of the doubt with what he wrote. Every benefit on this one occasion. The reason is simple: some of the elements in his 33-point prison manifesto and memoir have been among the repulsive practices of the PPP Govt in its wars against Guyanese. Calculated PPP Govt poisoning of the air and environment, with one objective: to destroy those denouncing its duplicities. Premeditated PPP Govt heat applied to those exposing its corruptions. Dogged PPP Govt assaults on those holding in contempt its versions of truth, who reveal them as nothing but total and serial falsehoods.
What Mr. Mohamed has been subjected to physically and psychologically in a cell, other Guyanese have been pummeled through social media, State media, and similar such obscene media, wherever found. The Guyana Prison Service (GPS) can counter that Mohamed is an uber fabricator and exaggerator. It will only be believed by those who have made deceiving their business, deceiving their way of life. The GPS may prove its point, cleanse itself, on one or two of Mohamed’s manifesto items. The GPS will still be seen and believed to have committed all 33 modules of what’s appalling and abominable on its high-profile guest.
Never would have thought that I would be standing in belief, in acceptance, in advocacy, of Azruddin Mohamed, or those of his crowd. When I do, it should give a twinkling or a torrent of how the PPP Govt disfigures its face, deforms any of its residual standing, and destroys its right to lead this country. Even if it were to be populated by only rodents and reptiles. The PPP Govt has made Azruddin Mohamed into a monument of a kind. The PPP Govt may still make him president.
