Latest update April 25th, 2024 12:59 AM
Apr 26, 2015 Features / Columnists, Freddie Kissoon
I was in the head office of the Alliance for Change last Tuesday evening in a very animated conversation about whether the PPP’s leadership, sensing it will lose the election will try to derail it, when my mobile phone rang.
The caller was from Region 6. The man asked for my help. First he wanted to know if the police can impound his sheep. I told him I think it should be the NDC but I wasn’t sure. He explained that the police are constantly impounding his sheep and he feels he is being victimized.
If you think that it was funny that someone deep in the heart of Region 6 can call on me for help who lives deep in the heart of Georgetown then you are wrong. There are many, many implorations I get from very far about harassment and victimization. A man called from Region 6 about a traffic cop that was targeting him. I couldn’t understand what I was supposed to do from as far away as Georgetown.
These people have no other avenue to turn to except the media. These people do not know about the existence of any human rights organization in this land, yet in Guyana we have a thirty-year-old entity named the Guyana Human Rights Association (GHRA) headed by Mr. Mike Mc Cormack and his wife Merle who have been at its helm since it was founded.
The GHRA is well funded and has a large office on Hadfield Street, in Stabroek. What exactly the GHRA does from Monday to Sunday, this columnist doesn’t know, but this I know – my work is to study Guyana, so I would know most of the active organizations that operate in the sphere of human rights. Given the alarming rate of human rights violations, the GHRA needs to do more. I now offer readers a sad, tragic case that the GHRA, all associations concerned with rights and the media need to get involved with. I am reproducing the entire news item
“Anjanie Gouden The wife of missing cargo handler David Bisnauth, who was in the Air Services plane which disappeared in Region Eight last December, has come forward for the first time. Anjanie Gouden, 43, said since Bisnauth went missing, neither the authorities nor the airline has contacted her or offered any help whatsoever.
“Nobody never, ever call me to tell me what is going on,” the woman said in an interview. Bisnauth was onboard the aircraft went it disappeared off air traffic control radars on December 28, 2014. The other person on board was the pilot, Nicky Persaud. After the authorities cancelled a search for the plane in January, a private search was launched to find the plane. Leading that effort is Frank Singh, the Father-in-law of the pilot as well as the pilot’s father, Cecil Persaud. Bisnauth’s wife came forward to speak after she said she noticed that a billboard which was mounted on Main Street, Georgetown was removed. I want the search to continue,” she said. The woman said since no one contacted her in all of the four months since the plane’s disappearance, she depended on the news media for information. And so, she said she felt the search had ended when she noticed the billboard was removed.
Bisnauth, 51, was employed by Air Services Limited three years ago and lived in the company’s facilities at Mahdia. He fathered two children with Gouden. The woman said he was the sole breadwinner of the family and since his disappearance she has had a rough time making ends meet. She said the most difficult is getting finances to meet the school needs of the couple’s two children Devi, 14 and Dave, 9. (end of quote)
This news item was carried on Tuesday. At the time of writing (Saturday morning), I have not read or seen a response from Ms. Annette Arjoon, the General Manager of Air Services Limited. I stand corrected if Ms. Arjoon has responded, but I haven’t seen it and I have been looking for Ms. Arjoon’s response since Tuesday.
If I am to assume that what Ms. Gouden has said is true, then this is an urgent case that the Guyanese nation must give immediate attention to. Why it doesn’t sound true is because Ms. Arjoon once won an award from Trinidad for her efforts in the conservation of the turtle population at Shell Beach. She is the wife of Stabroek News’s weekly social commentator and prominent former calypsonian, Dave Martins (can’t say I ever loved that kind of music; maybe I was a conservative ghetto boy).
I am tempted to say that surely if Arjoon-Martins can save turtles she should save Ms. Gouden and her children. Maybe Dave Martins can do a column on Ms. Gouden.
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