Genocide is defined in Article 2 of the United Nations Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide (1948) as “any of the following acts committed with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group, as such:

a)    Killing members of the group;
b)    Causing serious bodily or mental harm to members of the group;
c)    Deliberately inflicting on the group conditions of life calculated to bring about its physical destruction in whole or in part;
d)    Imposing measures intended to prevent births within the group;
e)    Forcibly transferring children of the group to another group.”

On Thursday, December 20, 2018, on Krem’sWUB Morning Show, Brother Nuri Muhammad replayed a clip in which the youth Brother Dwight Mariano had expressed his thoughts. Listening to his analysis of the situation that has been taking place in southside Belize City and the willpower that he gave to his life, brought to my mind many questions which seem to have no answers, but when I go back into history and learn about the things that took place in the past it gives me a vision of why the descendants of African sisters and brothers have been set aside without being given an opportunity to progress.

It cannot be possible, that Belize which has a black Prime Minister, Governor General, and several black Cabinet Ministers from Belize City apart from so many wealthy black Belizeans that live abroad, has not been able to take its people out of the situation in which they are living. After listening to our little Brother Mariano, I wished I had enough money to buy a hundred acres of land and give it as a gesture of a good Samaritan to all those youths that find themselves in difficult situations but want to make changes in their lives. This is something not difficult to be done, but unfortunately, and I say this without the intention of being prejudiced, you’re black. If you were a white European, like those who came in 1958, you can be positively sure that you would have had a country within a country, the same as how they, the Germans, have.

However, there is no fairness in this Westminster Parliamentary model, which was introduced by other leaders who thought of themselves as Anglo-Belizeans. There is a history that was published in the Amandala of a military people from St. Domingue who were transferred to Yucatan sometime in 1796 due to the Spanish/French war in such island; of the Haitians that had served the Spanish Crown during the war, 115 were sent to Yucatan. From there came a history of a place called San Fernando Aké where the governor of Yucatan had given the Haitians an amount of land for farming. It is an interesting history, since even though a place was given to them where they had established their own system, laws and regulations, the Spaniards were not so comfortable. They had this, what we call “fear”, that these people could have joined the Maya and other black communities where there could have been a threat to the established system.

The British had a similar mentality towards the African slaves and the Maya, who could have joined forces and damaged the huge businesses that were taking place here in the Settlement of the Bay of Honduras. With time, we came to prove that neither of the both parties were right, that is, neither the Spanish nor the English.

That is why I will continue to say that we, descendants of these two races who suffered the European savageness, have been and will continue to be set aside like scum of the society. While we are distracted by their philosophy and technology, we continue to be slaves and refugees in our own land except for the privileged few.

In 2005, I stated in one of my articles that there were 9,000 sugarcane farmers. Today, it is reported that there are 5,000, which means to say that the other 4,000 small cane farmers had disappeared as being part of the Association. It is well known that in the practice of the neoliberal capitalist system these corporations do not accept workers unions, associations, or do not want to have any sort of dealings with unionism, much less, for governments to interfere in their transactions.

It has been a long time since the sugar cane farmers of the north had lobbied to be the owners of their own factory, but due to the powers that be, with the support of the leaders of this country, such enterprise was sold out to an American corporation and little by little, these cane farmers are getting less profit for their product and are also disappearing from being cane farmers to sugar cane cutters; that is the precise road.

The idea of globalization is taking the goods, natural resources, property, culture and intellect of the indigenous people. When we look at the history of how the old capital of this country was built and by whom, we will learn that it was done through the lives of slaves that were thrown into that place which up to this day is a swamp. Three to four hundred years ago, it was in a worse condition, which means to say that it was in the wild, swampy and with all the different kinds of animals.

The history of Belize City is real, even though there was also a Maya village by the name of Holzuz before the arrival of the British pirates. I accuse the Anglo-Belizeans of cleansing the sins of the British, as many of you may remember how the British royal jail in Belize City looked like and the awfully unthinkable things that took place inside. What they did was to destroy all that evidence and built a modern building to represent the past. Shame on you!

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December 21, 2018
Finca Solana
Corozal Town