Preach the Gospel TRUTH Freddy  

THE non-existent Guyana Human Rights Association (GHRA) has lambasted me in a press release carried in the Stabroek News (SN) on Saturday. The complaints focused on two of my columns last week – Tuesday, April 16 – “The Moray House Mensheviks – Part 3,” and Thursday, April 18, 2024 – “Sydney King at 99: Freudian notes.”

Both columns constitute what academics do – they research and write. It is their interpretation and they have a right to their analyses even if you disagree with their conclusions. The GHRA described my notes on David DeCaires and Miles Fitzpatrick as slanderous. All I did in assessing the social role of these two men from the 1950s onwards was to show they belonged to the Mulatto/Creole class (MCC) and their social role was based on their class origins.

Academics around the world pen such writings about influential actors in society almost daily. I guess for the GHRA, only the politics of PPP leaders should come under the microscope. The editor of SN has the right to refer to me as a PPP lap dog but MCC personalities like DeCaires and Fitzpatrick are too special to be criticised.
I say unapologetically that I stand by what I wrote about those two MCC personalities. My conclusions are factually argued. GHRA opined that I ridiculed and slandered Eusi Kwayana. I stand by what I accused Kwayana of. I am accusing Kwayana of support for the attempts of rigging elections from March to July 2020. He destroyed his legacy that would have remained intact if he did not use silly excuses to defend the five-month saga. I went on to argue that Kwayana’s position was motivated at the Freudian level by a bias based on the binary of ethnicity in Guyana – East Indians versus Africans.

Now for the analysis of GHRA. People in a moment of lapse show their true colours. Dr. Bertrand Ramcharran was acting High Commissioner for Human Rights in the United Nations. But after an email to me last year, I say unapologetically, his perspectives on human rights are highly skewed. He requested that I should cease my criticism of the GHRA head, Mr. Mike McCormack because McCormack is a friend and he respects McCormack’s work.

This was a barefaced denial of the hypocrisy of the GHRA in Guyana. The GHRA vulgarised and continues to vulgarise the sacred words of “human rights.” The GHRA is a highly questionable entity whose politics is not independent but anti-government. For an organisation whose names contain the words, “human rights,” the GHRA would not recognise human rights if it appears on its office steps on Brickdam as a large elephant.
Mr. McCormack has headed that body since its formation in 1978 with all its founding members gone. I remind you that is 45 years. Almost half a century that man has been at the helm of his organisation in a country where 80 per cent of the population wasn’t even born when he became its head.

The GHRA has no board of directors, no membership and is only known to Guyana because the SN gives it episodic life by highlighting the occasional press release. No one contacts the GHRA to help with their plights because human rights victims do not know there is an organisation named the GHRA.
The lowest moment in the life of any group that says it is a human rights organisation was the five-month attempt to rig the 2020 election.

I was a young university student when the GHRA was born to fight for free and fair elections. I witnessed all the illegal voting in Guyana: 1968, 1973, 1978 referendum, 1980, and 1985.
No tampered election from 1968 to 1985 could be compared to what happened in the months of March to July in 2020. We came close in 2020 to returning to one-party totalitarianism that devastated Guyana from 1968 to 1992. I did not campaign in the 2020 election. I had no party preference. I voted for the Liberty and Justice Party of Lenox Shuman because I believe the more parties you have in parliament the more democratic the political culture becomes.

When I saw what happened in those five months in 2020, it changed my life forever. I will never be the same. People I fought with for over 50 years for electoral democracy suddenly supported rigged election and chose the pathway of permanent power by the PNC once more.
Organisations like the GHRA, individuals like Kwayana, supported what took place in 2020 based on the ideology and emotions of anti-PPPism and anti-Indianness. I replied to Ramcharran telling him that he lives abroad, so permanent power in Guyana would not affect him. The GHRA hasn’t got and will never get the moral authority to criticise a social activist like me.