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14 Aug 2012 11:53 #96291
by SCA
What is it with ole man looking to establish an identity, and relevance??? Same ole.
Lindeners now want to have autonomy....Berbice soon.
Warlord exposed
August 14, 2012 By admin
Self-determination?
The chairman of Region 10 Sharma Soloman let slip the thinking that permeates the minds of the extremists in Linden. In his Sunday’s letter to the press, where he once again threw down the gauntlet to the government, he declared: “The people of Region 10 too have the right to self-determination.†Now this is a shocking statement. As Wiki says, “self-determination is the principle in international law that nations have the right to freely choose their sovereignty and international political status with no external compulsion or interference.â€
Solomon has been so emboldened by the escalation of violence in Linden – they’re now throwing Molotov cocktails at the law enforcement detail – that he is now upping the ante. In his letter, we find that the explicit demands have now ballooned to seven – the electricity tariff is now afterthought. Every demand is redolent of one thought – Region 10 must be paramount over the central government.
For instance, demand number four insists on: “The provision of funding for a committee to carry out a study and develop an economic programme for the region. The participants for this committee will be arrived at by the RDC, Region 10.†So here we have one region of the country – which has already signalled what it thinks of the rest of the country over the electricity issue – telling the government that it alone will decide how much it will take from the national treasury – and how it will be spent.
But all of this is totally understandable under the demand for “self-determinationâ€. In fact this demand usually ends with either secession – where a new country is formed – or in autonomy, where the region collects its own taxes and decides its own spending etc. From the beginning, we saw this as the end game of the extremists that have now taken over in Linden. We called it the “warlord†syndrome.
These warlords are ubiquitous in the tribal areas of the Middle East, all the way up to Afghanistan. They play on the sentiments of their people to build resentments against the rest of the country. They are always ‘oppressed’ by the central government, which is always controlled by ‘other’ groups. The people of Linden are suddenly a nation, “Afrikanâ€, according to one member of the Linden extremist fraternity.
The government must stop encouraging warlordism in Guyana. Return all discussions and debates about allocations and development to Parliament – as the Constitution demands.
Minnows manoeuvre
Another noteworthy feature of the Linden imbroglio has been the role of the minnow parties –WPA and AFC – in stoking the fires. The WPA is a handful (literally) of old men who want a last hurrah in the sun. Burnham emasculated them after he decapitated their movement with the assassination of Walter Rodney. They’ve seen the willingness of the PPP over the last 20 years to accommodate all views in the public arena. But having tasted Burnham’s ‘steel’, they’ve concluded that the PPP is weak and can be ‘takenâ€.
The AFC’ is fighting not only for its survival, but its identity – which amounts to the same thing. Having defined itself as the ‘multi-racial’ alternative to the PPP and APNU, the AFC was critically embarrassed in 2006 when it received votes primarily from Afro-Guyanese – including, noticeably, Linden. Last year, those disaffected votes returned to APNU/PNC and AFC picked up disaffected Indian Guyanese votes.
With the next swing of the pendulum, they know they’re goners. Hence their desperation to attract the Linden votes – by any means necessary.
Another take
We remind those that fill Lindeners’ ears with stories of ‘discrimination’ of the same government’s treatment of sugar workers and the water they’d received free for 50 years. GuySuCo had provided this from a SILWF fund, which originated in workers’ sweat. Yet under liberalisation, this was taken away and now sugar workers pay for water, without burning down their communities.
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