The Red Thread organisation is calling on all persons who are engaged in street protests to desist from using threats or committing violence in the process since such tactics don't work and have in the past been a setback to race relations.
According to a press release from Red Thread coordinator Karen de Souza, the activist group is issuing this appeal in light of last Friday's incident, particularly on Regent Street, when protestors shut down city stores over the death squad furore. Then confusion reigned amid a heightened police presence on Regent, King, Water, Main and Robb streets as demonstrators, mostly women, ordered businesses to close their doors and join them in the protest.
The release recalled that on that day phones began to ring with terrified warnings that violence was starting again and a few people, in their terror, began to close offices far away from Regent Street.
"On the streets there were incidents of direct harassment. All the people on the phones and all the people who closed their offices far away from Regent Street and all the people harassed on the streets that we know of were Indo-Guyanese," de Souza stated.
She said further that "those who threaten and commit violence against Indo-Guyanese during street protests and whoever leads them have the foolish belief that beating or scaring PPP supporters will make the PPP listen."
The Red Thread coordinator asserted that "it is better for the PPP not to listen than to beat their supporters. The strategy of racial bullying is immoral. And it doesn't work."
It doesn't work, she contended, because nothing has ever been won in this country except when Guyanese found ways of recognising and fighting for the interests they share.
In this case, de Souza noted, both Afro-Guyanese and Indo-Guyanese organisations responded publicly to the allegations by George Bacchus that the Minister of Home Affairs had planned and operated a death squad by saying that involvement of the state in extra-judicial killings could never be acceptable. Minister Ronald Gajraj has maintained that the allegations are groundless.
Moreover, de Souza said there was some recognition of shared interests which had given a small piece of hope that citizens could join together to turn things around, starting by uniting to win an effective enquiry into the violence against Indo-Guyanese and the violence against Afro-Guyanese and what lay behind all of it.
She said the "appeal is being made to all those engaged in street protests, whether you are organising other people to protest or organising yourselves to protest." She added that the lessons of the last two-and-a-half years are the same as the lessons of the last 50 years of Guyanese history. "Racial violence, wherever it starts, ends by consuming all of us. . . . do not let us do this again, de Souza cautioned.