THE Guyana Human Rights Association (GHRA) says the administration must act now to pull back the slide in human and social standards in Baramita, Region One, North West District.
In a statement on Friday, the GHRA said ministerial initiatives set in motion since July 2015, following submission of confidential reports on Baramita by the organisation and other sources to the Ministry of Indigenous Affairs (MoIA), lacked the decisiveness and overall coordination to address the fundamental problems facing the community. In particular, the penetration of the community by external interests has decisively undermined the capacity of the Village Council to protect the rights and welfare of the indigenous community, the GHRA said in the statement. It added, a more comprehensive strategy under the tripartite leadership of the broader indigenous community, the MoIA and civil society is required to insulate the community from the malignant influences which are fuelling a process of ethnocide.
“The intertwined weight of mining and a dominant religious grouping constitute the most potent negative influences. Being more complex and difficult to confront, they attract less attention than exploitation, alcoholism, suicide and sexual violence. Another under-reported dimension of the problem is the fact that both of these influences are dominated by mixed-race members of the community, while the majority of the Carib population live in ramshackle, dilapidated dwellings in isolated settlements.”
According to the rights group, the strength of economic and religious interests with a stake in maintaining the status quo in Baramita, places the problem beyond resolution by civic organisations alone – indigenous or otherwise. “The multi-layered intervention recommended above requires the backing of the State, exercising its responsibility to protect as set out in Art.2 of the ILO Convention 169 on The Rights of Indigenous & Tribal Peoples. The Responsibility to Protect may be invoked to enforce a range of protective measures to address emergency/urgent actions; humanitarian interventions; restoring authority; protection of human rights; conflict resolution; suspending contracts; controlling access; and to promote integrity of the natural environment.”
The GHRA said collective leadership should be exercised to protect against the tendency for individual agency interests displacing the needs of the intended beneficiaries. Most importantly, a collective intervention should involve the Government, through relevant ministries, the national indigenous community, in particular other Carib-speaking communities, the National Toshaos Counci and other relevant civil society bodies. Equally important, ownership of the rehabilitative process should be progressively exercised by the Baramita community.
The substance such a process might adopt was addressed in the recently issued GHRA 71-pages Report “Impact of Mining: Survival Strategies for Interior Communities in Guyana” in terms of a response suited to communities generally, in which little remains but economic, social and environmental devastation as a result of gold-mining, the GHRA said. It added that the Report notes that “The sense of helplessness, lack of control and uncertainty of status felt by inhabitants of townships, settlements and indigenous communities…is akin to the aftermath of an epidemic or a hurricane” (p.62).
The main recommendation of the Report is that each community undertake a process of developing a Community Life Plan for itself. Such an exercise will assist the community to develop a sense of itself and to assess what is compatible and not compatible with community-oriented, rather than individual-oriented development processes. Moreover, such an exercise will assist the community to arrive at a place where it can assess, among other things, what they want and do not want from mining and take the necessary policy and legal decisions to protect that vision. Without a framework of this nature, communities remain vulnerable to a multiplicity of short-term development projects from a wide spectrum of un-coordinated agencies.