FORMER President, Dr. Bharrat Jagdeo and other PPP/C leaders are continually pleading with the nation not to be inveigled by race hate rhetoric anymore, and take this country down the retrograde path that the PNC habitually orchestrates; because Guyana’s Opposition leaders are agent provocateurs extraordinaire.

The burden of hate the Opposition is laying on this nation is like the proverbial albatross of “The Ancient Mariner” fame; and this burden is systematically wasting away the valuable resources that can propel Guyana’s social development and economic growth to unprecedented levels.
One only has to hear, not merely listen to, but hear the subliminal message within the joint Opposition pronouncements, utterances, and actions to understand that they are determined to once more take Guyana down that dark and retrograde path post-2012 Budget Day.

Dr. Martin Luther King (Jnr) said: “I have decided to stick with love; hate is too great a burden to bear.” But this is an alien concept to the collective Opposition – in and out of Parliament. Hatred is Guyana Opposition’s tool used to create stratagems to drive their own agendas, and this has agonised and caused destruction to this nation time and again.

Dire consequences to the nation always ensue when the Opposition incites volatility in actions by their supporters with their inflammatory rhetoric.

Instead of heeding a timely warning by this newspaper in 2012, the professional protesters reviled this newspaper’s staff as being ‘racists’ and set fire to the Chronicle; just prior to Linden being set afire – figuratively and literally.

This is the sad history of our beloved country: The perennial intention and implementation of strategies to set Guyanese against their fellow Guyanese, to make Guyana ungovernable by politicians hostile to the PPP. While Dr. Cheddi Jagan’s party has always reached out to embrace political colleagues on the other side – the latest attempt being President Donald Ramotar’s invitations to engage the Opposition in tripartite talks to find consensual positions on solutions to problems affecting Guyanese and to drive Guyana’s development trajectory upward, the joint Opposition has continually rejected this call by the President and has instead sown the seeds in insurrection in their supporters. As always, they succeeded in setting public and private properties on fire and getting innocents injured and killed in Linden.

When they move on with their comfortable, and even luxurious lives, with their children absolutely safe, their supporters and their victims are left in mourning.

Who are the criminals here? Certainly not the Opposition supporters, who have, as usual, merely been used as cannon-fodder to foster the self-serving agendas of their leaders.

Even as Linden was burning, AFC’s Gerhardt Ramsaroop was promising to rile the people up even more. The regional chairman for Region 10 had incited PNC supporters, saying that the people have to fight back and hurt the Government, “…. they will lead us to a state of emergency.”

In Wismar on June 23, 2012, PNC/APNU’s Aubrey Norton subtly first, and then overtly, incited Lindeners to violence, calling on that party’s supporters to create havoc by blocking access to the interior mining areas and to utilise their skills to challenge the Government’s decision to stop subsidising electricity in that town and bring the rates up, in a staggered way, to national levels.  He adjured the gathering “We have to be prepared to do what is required to achieve our objective. We stand at the gateway to the interior. I say no more….. Let me tell you, this Government does not understand reason, so the only solution to this Government comes from pressure, more pressure… we have to put them in the pressure.”

Norton reiterated that the task at hand is to ensure that Government backs down. This was like the blackmail Dr. Jagan’s first Government was subjected to with the infamous X-13 Plan, so that he had to concede to Duncan Sandys’ proposal, which was the precipitator of the destruction of Guyana.

In 2003, at the height of another PNC campaign to destabilize a PPP Government, Freddy Kissoon had written, in an article entitled “Opposition abuses the trust of some of its supporters by teaching them the art of self-destruction.”

In this article Freddy wrote about the captive audience the extremists within the Opposition had in the youths of Buxton.

This is what he had to say: “These youths were being taught by men who were politically ignorant, extremist and essentially racist. The voodoo theory they taught the Buxton conspiracy was simply the language of self-destruction.

“Self-destruction – essentially what occurred in Buxton and the Opposition extremists attempted to spread this to other parts of Guyana. Thankfully they did not ultimately succeed.”

There is a reason why these extremists had almost taken up home in Linden during the riot, and that reason was because that PNC stronghold was ideal for them to restart their sinister campaign of terror and destruction.

In 2003, Freddy Kissoon had described these extremists as racists and specifically spoke about the dangers of one he referred to as “Mr. Wild Man”, who was arrested and charged for treason, and Freddy had underscored the dangers of such individuals back then.

The lawless behaviour of PNC/APNU Attorney James Bond, who incited supporters to participate in an illegal procession post-elections in defiance of police orders in December of 2012, is also a case in point. Thank God for then Commissioner of Police Henry Greene and the professionalism of Guyana’s Police Force, who rejected Opposition racist “kith and kin” rhetoric and instead stayed true to their mandate of protecting and serving the people – all the people of this nation; or else Guyana’s capital city would have been in a worse state than Linden was after the depredations incited in that community by the irresponsible and destructive Opposition cabal.

Kudos are owed to members of our police force, who did their duty at great risk to the lives of ranks during the Linden and Agricola ‘protests’. They stood their ground in the face of much provocation and danger and did their duty to protect the peaceful citizens of Guyana, and Guyanese once more owe them thanks.
As Freddie Kissoon had articulated in 2003, “It is frightening what the violent youths of Buxton were educated in. They were told the most untruthful things about the Government, the business class and the East Indian community.”

After Buxtonians had rejected their calls for a return to violence, they moved their campaign of “divide and conquer” to Linden.

The unfortunate turn of events which occurred in the mining town of Linden on the night of the 18th of July is truly unfortunate and deeply saddening for all Guyana,

The real tragedy of the loss of lives, and the tragedy of the retardation of development that has ensued from this fiasco is to be laid squarely at the foot of the joint Opposition and their satellites in the media who are hostile to the PPP/C Government.

The catastrophic occurrences in Linden have always been the tragic outcomes of Opposition’s “peaceful protests.”

This is the thrust of the PPP/C leaders who are encouraging Guyanese to desist from such actions in the future, as such destructive incidents hurt the entire nation in too many ways to count. All have the right to support the political party of their choice: No one has the right to hurt others for their choices; and the race card is the factor that the Opposition cabal uses as its trump with its aspirations to become the next government.