Thursday, May 25, 2006

Dear Sir:

Does cultural identity lead to violence? This was the question of Nobel Laureate’s Amartya Sen’s recent deliberations carried on the on-line community called developmentgateway.
 
The simple answer is no -- cultural identity per se does not necessarily lead to violence, even though people mobilize along the lines of cultural identity to commit violence.
 
Normally, when people cite cultural identity as the reason for violent acts, it is because they feel aggrieved over perceived or real threats to their cultural identity. This is usually tied up with feelings that their rights are being unjustly denied.
 
In fact, collective feelings and perceptions related to identity are always informed by specific ways of interpreting history. Thus, threats which people feel and perceive may be either real or invented for some other purpose, such as personal desire for power. Nevertheless, when they are perceived as real, cultural identity can become a site on which the ‘aggrieved’ mobilize and press their claims.
 
One example is the Afro-Guyanese mobilization and threats of violence on the bases of perceived denial of rights in Guyana. In this case, we have a situation where the ‘aggrieved’ party wants to acquire electoral power and choose violence as the means to get there as some of their leaders see their numerical minority status as preventing ‘their’ political party from winning national elections.
 
The perceived threat to Afro-Guyanese which is cited by their leaders may indeed have some truth to it, but in the climate of their own threats of violence, it is difficult to determine the nature and extent of it, much less design viable solutions, including mechanisms to share ‘power’.
 
One interesting thing about this situation is that the Indo-Guyanese majority also feel a serious threat to their existence, perhaps more so than Afro-Guyanese. This is because although they are the numerical majority and an Indian-led party has formed the government since 1992, they have consistently been at the receiving end of violence mainly from Afro-Guyanese. Their very physical safety is threatened.
 
This was the case when the Afro-Guyanese based political party was in power for 28 years from 1964 to 1992, and has continued to the present. Most recently, Minister Satyadeow Shaw, three members of his family and his security guard were murdered. Some are celebrating this on the internet and 'their' political parties and intellectuals have stepped up explicit threats of more violence as national election approaches in September 2006.
 
Several points related to cultural identity can be made on the basis of the above observations. First, Afro-Guyanese have mobilized on the basis of Black Nationalism, an ethnocultural ideology which has wide currency in the Caribbean, the USA, the UK and elsewhere.
 
This ideology is buttressed by Caribbean Historical Discourse which sees Afro-Caribbean people as providentially and historically appointed emancipators, a teleology which results in an aggressive and violent assertion of cultural and political rights against everyone else. This ideology today serves as an empowerment and encouragement mechanism for Afro-Guyanese and Afro-Caribbean violence against others, even though it had progressive purposes in the anti-colonial period and was supported by both Indians and Africans.
 
Secondly, Black Nationalism has constructed a common sense with attendant values and desires around its reading of history and its mission or winning ‘power’. These serve to make the claims and the violence which follow seem right and justified, even among, nay, especially among very well educated ‘Africans’  as they are the ones who receive the ideology from Caribbean Historical Discourse and disseminate it among ordinary Afro-Guyanese and Afro-Caribbean people.
 
Third, by unleashing violence and terror on Indo-Guyanese and others, it has turned Indo-Guyanese into a psychological minority. This is experienced as a highly restricted cultural and physical space and a state of permanent terror and suspicion. In effect, the violence and threat of violence directed at Indo-Guyanese has resulted in the internment of this group, a forced confinement which has very major psychological effects, including increasing loss of empathy for the claims made on behalf of Afro-Guyanese.
 
Like people everywhere else, Indo-Guyanese are just too busy defending themselves physically to have time and moral space to even want to listen to someone else's claims about their being economically and politically marginalized. It has also generated forms of Indo-Guyanese resistance. These responses, I believe, are normal in conditions where people feel their lives are unsafe.
 
Fourth, the overwhelming dominance of 'Africans' in the Police and military forces in Guyana serves as another empowerment and encouragement mechanism for Afro-Guyanese violence and threats of violence against Indo-Guyanese. One prominent Afro-Guyanese leader recently pointed out quite frankly that given the composition of the security forces in Guyana, ‘Africans’ cannot be militarily defeated.
 
What these points highlight is that people who commit violence in the name of collective identity act when they are empowered and encouraged to do so. This was true of Whites during colonialism, of Serbs in Kosovo, of Fijians in Fiji, and of Afro-Guyanese in Guyana today. Black Nationalism, and its intellectual source, Caribbean Historical Discourse is largely to be blamed for this state of things. The above points also highlight why it is so difficult to get beyond violent attack and intransigent defense.
 
The solutions lie in:

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