WHAT IS GOVERNMENT AFRAID A FLOATED MV BARIMA WILL SHOW?

WHAT IS GOVERNMENT AFRAID A FLOATED MV BARIMA WILL SHOW?

The Paper Trail Behind the “Family Choice” on Recovery

THE 592 GUARDIAN — EDITORIAL

By Hem Kumar, Editor

The government wants the nation to believe that whether the MV Barima is raised from the seabed remains an open question — one to be decided by the families of the dead, gently and patiently, through consultation.

It has gone so far as to float the idea of retaining, at public expense, a conflict resolution expert should those families disagree among themselves. All very reasonable-sounding. All very procedurally correct.

It is also, on the documentary record now before this news-media, a fiction.

I. Before a single questionnaire was drafted. Before any “consultation process” was announced to the public. Before, as far as this news-media  can establish, most families had been formally approached at all — a document titled “Declaration of Agreement — MV Barima as Memorial Site” was already circulating for signature.

Read that title again. Not a survey. Not a canvass of sentiment. A declaration of agreement. The document does not ask the relative of the deceased what outcome they would prefer. It states, as an accomplished fact, that the vessel will remain a memorial where it sank — and it invites the signature of the grieving to ratify that fact. 

Name of the deceased. Name of the relative. Relationship. Address. Telephone number. Signature line.

That is not the architecture of an inquiry. That is the architecture of a release form — the kind an institution circulates when it needs the record to show consent it has not actually earned.

II. The sequence damns the government more than the document alone. This news outlet timeline shows the Declaration following directly on the heels of Prime Minister Mark Phillips’s own pronouncement in the House — delivered before the families’ “consultation” had even formally begun — that recovery “conditions are not favourable.” The conclusion preceded the process. The verdict came before the hearing.

What followed was not fact-finding. It was the construction of a paper record to justify a decision the Cabinet had already reached in private. The questionnaire, when it did arrive, did not exist to discover what families wanted. It existed to produce signatures consistent with what the government had already decided they should want.

A government that had genuinely left this question open does not tell the nation the vessel is staying down and then go asking families to sign a form agreeing that it should.

III. This casts the “conflict resolution expert” proposal — offered to the public as evidence of the state’s sensitivity to divided family opinion — in a considerably less flattering light. If the outcome was fixed before the canvassing began, there is no live dispute for such an expert to mediate. 

There is only the management of dissent: the handling of those families who decline to sign a script already written for them. Guyanese taxpayers would not be funding conflict resolution. They would be funding compliance management, dressed up as grief counselling.

IV. None of this changes the underlying moral arithmetic, which this news-media  has already set out plainly: it defies belief that any family, absent influence or inducement, would choose to leave a loved one’s remains at the bottom of the Essequibo rather than retrieve them for burial. It defies belief further still that a memorial marker — which is all any family will ever see or touch, whether the vessel is raised or not — cannot achieve every commemorative purpose the government claims only a sunken hull can provide. And it should not need saying, though apparently it does, that surfacing the vessel, recovering the remains and any evidence of value, and returning it to the water afterward serves every party’s stated interest at once — unless one interest was never about grief at all.

The government has already conceded that the manifest cannot reliably establish who was aboard when the Barima went down. Somewhere between that admission and the pre-drafted Declaration sits an uncomfortable question this publication  intends to keep asking: what, precisely, does government fear a floated MV Barima would disclose — and to whom does it owe an answer first, the families, or itself?

The families deserve a genuine choice, honestly presented, before any decision — not a signature drive dressed up as one.

— The Board