State sending conflicting signals on wanting to work with civil society - GHRA

While the AttorneyGeneral is seeking to bring all civic and political factions together in a Constitutional Reform Committee, other elements in the State apparatus are busy driving them apart, according to the Guyana Human Rights Association (GHRA).

In a statement yesterday, it said that last week Guyanese were treated to a full-page advertisement in the Sunday Stabroek, paid for by a well-known PPP camp-follower accusing many named private individuals of remaining silent over rigging of the 2020 elections. The advertisement also singled out individual opposition parliamentarians for their supposed ‘heinous acts’.

The following day, the GHRA said that the Stateowned Guyana Chronicle published a column dedicated to slandering Miles Fitzpatrick and David de Caires, two politically independent lawyers, now deceased. The GHRA said that later in the week Chronicle assigned an entire column to ridiculing and slandering a former opposition politician, Eusi Kwayana, now 99 years of age and living abroad for many years. At the same time, a Minister of Government was castigating a well-known Guyanese female media presenter in a foul-mouthed rant on Facebook for commenting critically on the current electricity supply crisis.

“Neither the living nor the dead, it seems, are immune from ruling party outrage over inadequate cheer-leading of its accomplishments”, the GHRA said.

The human rights body contended that abusive threats and character assassination by the ruling party for both the recent and distant past are intended as a deterrent to public comments on current scandalous official actions.

“Against this background, sectors of society which in earlier times routinely voiced opinions and monitored authoritarian abuse are cowed, remaining silent or taking refuge in oblique complaints. Balancing whether democratic participation is a high enough priority or a luxury they can’t afford too frequently it ends with the latter choice.

“People of integrity shying away from involving themselves in political life ensures it becomes a race to the bottom, reinforcing the truth of what Edmund Burke (said), namely, “When bad men combine, the good must associate; else they will fall, one by one, an unpitied sacrifice in a contemptible struggle.”

All of this bodes ill for the recently announced Constitutional Reform Commission (CRC), the GHRA said. It stated that bringing the political and civic sectors together in the formal structure of a CRC could be a step in the right direction of strengthening decent relations between them and would also help to diminish the political polarization within Parliament. However, the evidence provided last week would suggest respectful relations as a priority of the ruling party ranks lower than keeping independent opinion suppressed, the GHRA asserted.

The GHRA also cited government control over the state media.

“Ironically given the ruling party on the past, not since the worst period of the 1970s and ‘80s has the State-owned media been so completely subject to party control as at present”, the human rights group said.