The Constitution (Amendment) (No. 2) Act 2000 amends the Constitution by inserting immediately after Article 212, a number of Articles from 212A through 212F, establishing an Ethnic Relations Commission, its composition, a Tribunal, its functions, annual report, and rules.

The PPP/C continues to address the question of diversity management and the building of national unity, racial unity, and working people's unity in Guyana. Some achievements and proposals in these areas include:

ú A Race Relations Committee established in the 1990s.

ú Prevention of Discrimination Act 1997 - focuses on prevention of discrimination on grounds of race, sex, and gender particularly relating to employment.

ú Ethnic Relations Commission now established.

ú The optional Protocol on the UN Covenant on Civil and Political Rights endorsed; the previous PNC Administration was not a signatory.

ú International Instruments supported in principle, in order to enforce the sanctity and protection of human rights of all Guyanese:

- International Labour Organisation Discrimination (Employment and Occupation) Convention ILO 111

- Convention on the Rights of the Child

- Declaration of the Rights of the Child

- Declaration on the Rights of Disabled Persons

- Declaration on the Rights of Mentally Retarded Persons

- Declaration on the Elimination of all Forms of Intolerance and of Discrimination Based on Religion or Belief.

ú Activism of the Women Affairs Bureau whose mission is to eliminate allforms of discrimination against women, to promote development of their full potential, and to ensure their integration in the national development of the country.

ú The setting up of the President's Youth Choice Initiative, concentrating on youth development in all ten Regions.

Multiethnic societies need the presence of an entity as an equal opportunities commission to address real or perceived 'racial' grievances, in order to reduce ethnic tensions and also correct deficiencies in human rights. Many of these tensions could be and are being constructed and reconstructed through petty and some fringe politicians' application of divisive ethnic rules.

Divisive ethnic rules
White colonialists exerted control through structuring the society along ethnic lines, that is, demarcating differences between East Indians and Africans. Departure of these colonialists, however, created a power vacuum that had to be filled by the local citizens who were mainly East Indians and Africans. But competition and struggle to occupy this vacuum was governed by the divisive ethnic structures imposed upon ex-slaves and ex-indentured servants in the colonial era. Some divisive ethnic structures included sustaining a total institutional structure for East Indians on the sugar plantations, resulting in minimal interactions between East Indians and Africans; restricting the marketing of African products; using taxes paid by Africans to subsidize East Indian immigration, in order to maintain a cheap labor rate, among others.

Today, some fringe politicians attempt to apply similar divisive ethnic rules for capturing the prized legal-political stage, that is, control of the government and state. These divisive ethnic rules create ethnic tension, leading to perceived or real allegations of racism. In the next section, therefore, we shall review explanations of race and ethnicity, as these terms are used loosely. Erroneous applications of these terms are dangerous, in that used incorrectly may increase ethnic tension in different sections of the society.

Race & Ethnicity
It is widely accepted that racism is an ideology that depicts another group as being congenitally inferior to one's own group. This situation of racial inequality is worse when racism becomes injected into rules and procedures of organizations that deny opportunities and equal rights to certain racial groups or individuals; such a scenario is referred to as institutionalized discrimination (Schaeffer and Lamm, 1998:297). 'Race' refers to a group of people who perceive themselves and are perceived by others as different because of biologically-inherited characteristics (Henslin, 1995:310).

Biologically, it is not possible to identify a genetically isolated group that has special gene frequencies. Therefore, no 'pure race` exists. Even physical characteristics, such as, skin color, cannot appropriately describe a group as distinctive from another group. Examining a drop of human blood under a microscope cannot indicate the race from which it comes (Schaeffer and Lamm, op. cit.:288).

In addition, Schaeffer and Lamm (1998:288-289) point out that migration, exploration, and invasion have destroyed the concept of pure races, and have produced increased racial miscegenation (mixed racial human products).

Race, therefore, is socially constructed and reconstructed by power holders through stereotypical images to sustain the subordination of racial minority groups. The biological characteristics of a person's race, as skin color, is given a social meaning, a meaning that is manipulated and falsified by fringe politicians to gain political advantage.