An Open Appeal to the President of Guyana

Jun 11, 2025 Features / Columnists, Peeping Tom

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The Peeping Tom column…

Kaieteur News – There are moments in history when silence is complicity. There are periods so drenched in cruelty, so suffocating in the stench of injustice, that to remain passive is to align oneself with the perpetrators. Mr. President, this is such a moment. And you, Sir, appear disturbingly oblivious—or worse, unperturbed—by the cold-blooded slaughter of Palestinians unfolding daily in Gaza.

Particularly, but not limited to the past three weeks, the world has watched with horror as Israel’s Armed Forces turned Gaza into a graveyard. Not of soldiers, not of armed men, but of children, women, and men whose only crime was to be born on the wrong side of a wall, into statelessness, into a siege.

Whatever sliver of doubt may have remained as to Israel’s ultimate aim—the obliteration of the Palestinian people—was disabused by the savagery of the past three weeks. There is no longer ambiguity. No moral gray. What we are witnessing is genocide, bold and unrepentant.

It is not a war, Mr. President. It is an extermination.

Food convoys are bombed. Hospitals are shelled. Families are reduced to bloodied heaps beneath the rubble of their former homes. Persons seeking food are being fried in cold-blooded attacks.  Israel has targeted bakeries, water lines, hospitals, shelters and even schools. Starvation is no longer collateral damage—it is strategy. The attempt to erase an entire people by hunger is not merely reprehensible. It is a crime against humanity.

And yet, your government remains mute. Not even the polite murmurs of diplomatic discomfort. Where is Guyana’s moral compass, Mr. President? Are we now to calibrate our conscience to the dictates of Washington? Is the slaughter of thousands permissible because the ones pressing the trigger sit at tables of influence? Must our ethics be leased by foreign policy?

The Islamic community in Guyana is not without strength. It is not without voice. And now, it must find its roar. In every masjid, in every household where a Quran is held dear, the people must rise. They must demand, unequivocally, that your administration sever all diplomatic relations with Israel. This is not an act of petulance, but of principle. We must not stand in polite deference while bombs fall on hospitals and murder children and babies.

But we must not stop there.

Knowing, as we do, how weak-kneed your government can be in the face of American pressure—how you genuflect to foreign interests with practised ease—the people of this country must act with greater resolve. If our government does not speak, the people will. Let it be known: we will boycott all Israeli-made goods. From pharmaceuticals to electronics, let no item touched by that nation’s hand pass through our ports or our purses. This will not end their assault. But it will mark a beginning. It will be the start of a new indignation, a moral movement that says: we may be small, but we are not blind.

There is no neutral ground here, Mr. President. To sit in silence is to stand with the oppressor. And history, that incorruptible chronicler, will record where you stood. The names of the slain will be etched into memory. And so too will the silence of those who could have raised a voice but did not.

What does Guyana gain by its friendship with Israel that is worth more than its soul?

You have spoken often of human rights, of justice, of standing on the side of history. But these must not be slogans trotted out at the United Nations and retired at home. They must mean something. And now, when they mean everything, your silence is a betrayal.

We are a people born of struggle—freed from the lash, the yoke, the colonial claw. What use is our history if we cannot recognise its mirror in the plight of the Palestinians? What honour lies in our independence if we cannot use it to call out barbarity when it struts in daylight?

Mr. President, history does not wait. It will judge. Harshly. And no amount of trade deals or press releases will launder the stain of inaction.

You must act.

Break ties with Israel. Speak for the silenced. Join the arc of moral resistance, however small our contribution may be. And if you will not, then know this: the people will. We will speak. We will protest. We will boycott. And we will not stop until this monstrous slaughter ends.

(The views expressed in this article are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the opinions of this newspaper.) 

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• Gaza, Irfaan Ali, Open Appeal, Peeping Tom, President of Guyana

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