Political Victimisation in the Bahamas

by Sir Arthur Foulkes

On a visit to Inagua last year, I had the opportunity to chat with a man who was introduced to me as one of the sons of Wellington Smith. Having regard to the experiences of his early years, I was pleased to see that he had become a confident and intelligent gentleman. Still, there was a trace of not bitterness exactly, but something more like a steely defiance.

Back in the 1970s many Bahamians who had aligned themselves with the fledgling Free National Movement were viciously victimized and intimidated by powerful people in the PLP and their henchmen.

The powerful ones seemed to think that it was a mortal sin for anyone to dare oppose the ruling party and that they were justified in their efforts to break the will of their opponents and to punish them for their audacity.

Some of the worst cases in this brutal campaign took place at Inagua. The case of Wellington Smith was perhaps the most egregious.

Mr. Smith worked for the Morton Salt Company and was involved with church and community activities. Once he came to Nassau to sing with the choir in the presence of the Governor. He came pretty close to being the ideal citizen, except that he was not a citizen.

Mr. Smith was from Turks Island. He had married a Bahamian woman and had fathered eight Bahamian children with her. He was not involved in politics and could not even vote. But his wife was a supporter of the FNM; and that was, literally, the undoing of the Smith family.

One day the power of the state descended upon Mr. Smith and his family. He was unceremoniously deported to Turks Island by the PLP Government leaving his wife and young children without their husband, father and provider.

While their own Government persecuted them, the foreign managers of the company showed compassion towards this Bahamian family. They gave Mr. Smith a job on one of their ships so that, as a seaman, he could legally visit his family in Inagua from time to time.

No one can know how much Mrs. Smith and her family suffered and how many tears they shed over the years. They survived, but the family was smashed.

The demon which drives some human beings to victimize others for their beliefs and for exercising their God-given and constitutionally-guaranteed rights is still very active in the PLP.

Perhaps it is driven by the very same arrogant attitude of entitlement some members of that party have cultivated over the years because of a grievous misinterpretation or abysmal ignorance of history.

Once again the biggest victims are the most vulnerable in our society and once again the tyrants have identified them as those who live in what they regard as remote corners of our archipelago.

The reports of victimization in Mayaguana are too many and sound too credible to be ignored. The managers of a foreign group in partnership with The Bahamas Government have been accused of brutal discrimination against residents of that island identified as supporters of the FNM.

Trevor Collie, C. J. Brooks and Eddy Brooks, who had been hired by the company, were fired just around the time three expatriate workers landed on Mayaguana to take up employment. Out of 85 employees only 30 are Bahamians.

One would have thought that the Government and the company would be anxious to make sure that every able and willing worker on the island was employed before recruiting expatriates.

Thomas Charlton who has been doing plumbing work at the island has been refused employment while expatriates have been observed doing this kind of work. He happens to be chairman of the FNM Constituency Association in Mayaguana. These young men refuse to bow and to violate their conscience for what should be theirs by right.

But the most heart-rending case is that of Samantha Collie who has also been refused work because she is a supporter of the FNM. Ms. Collie has five young children and they survive only with the help of friends and what she can make catching and selling crabs.

Ms. Collie may not be a constitutional expert but she understands that in her Bahamas she is entitled to freedom of conscience, freedom of expression, freedom of assembly and freedom of association. She knows that it is wrong for anyone to try to deprive her of these freedoms.

She refuses to be broken, and that gives her a certain nobility of spirit. It certainly makes her a better citizen than the cowardly cretins who persecute her, and those who condone them.

Back in the 1970s some of those who instigated victimization tried to make excuses for it. One of their favourite dictums was about power:

“If you don’t use it, you’ll lose it!”

They sounded much like Adolf Hitler:

“Terror is the most effective political instrument. I shall not permit myself to be robbed of it simply because stupid, bourgeois mollycoddles choose to be offended by it.”

Victimization is a form of terror. It is the use of intimidation, discrimination and victimization against individuals and groups. Its ultimate objective is not only to punish its immediate targets but to strike fear in the wider population, to cause them to bend to the will of the tyrants.

There are basically three kinds of victimizers. There are the powerful ones who pull the strings from the safety of their high offices. Some of this lot will deny knowledge of the evil they are perpetrating while others will hide behind an alleged cause.

Among the second group are the stupid ones who are programmed to believe that what they are doing is for the greater good even if it means destroying themselves in the process. Like the targets, they are also victims of the prime manipulators.

The third group is populated by those sadistic monsters who, in the definition of Erich Fromm, like to have complete mastery over other people, to make others helpless victims of their will, to become absolute rulers over others, to humiliate and to enslave others.

These vermin have always crawled out of their holes whenever the circumstances were conducive to indulge their dark nature, and they will go just as far as those circumstances permit. They have figured prominently in every bloody chapter of human history and in bloodless but nevertheless painful persecution of many.

They were at work during the Crusades, the enslavement of black Africans in the New World, the French Revolution, the Belgian genocide in the Congo, the European genocide in North America and the Nazi Holocaust.

Most of them could not care less about the cause and some would work their mischief for any cause. They do not believe in the dignity of human beings and either do not understand or have contempt for concepts like democracy and human rights, not to mention compassion.

Those who sit in high places and who have power over the victimizers cannot escape responsibility for the ones who carry out the persecution, especially when a word from them would bring it to an end.

They can try to avoid responsibility like Herod or wash their hands like Pilate, but they can be excused neither by self-interest nor ignorance nor even by their own shameful weakness.

On their shoulders lies responsibility for the pain and humiliation inflicted on people like Samantha Collie and her five children, and all the others who are made to suffer because they dare to exercise their God-given and constitutionally-protected rights as human beings and Bahamians.