The Tribune

By Frederick Smith, QC

Matthew Sewell [Jamaican,] was illegally imprisoned in Fox “Hell” Prison and the Carmichael Concentration Camp for nine years; for most of the time without ever being charged with a crime. Atain Takitota, [Japanese], was illegally imprisoned for eight years, also without charge.

For Joseph Amihere and Douglas Ngumi, [Africa], it was seven years. And a group of asylum seekers, from Ambazonia, fleeing political persecution in wartorn Cameroon in Africa, were illegally imprisoned for two years.

This is not ancient history; with the exception of Mr Takitota, all these innocent victims of state oppression regained their freedom within the last six years. And even then, only because a stenching government was Court-ordered to release them. The unconstitutional addiction to illegal imprisonment has been a feature of The Bahamas since before the savage days of PLP Immigration Minister Loftus Roker.

Victims are usually, though incorrectly, assumed to have entered the country illegally. The irony is that even if they had, the maximum penalty would have been a $300 fine, or one year in prison. Mr Amihere, a tourist and the most recent victim to be released, was made to suffer through seven times the maximum sentence for a crime he wasn’t even charged with and didn’t commit.

Thousands have been subjected to inhuman and degrading treatment; beaten, tortured and abused, terrorised in one way or another. In any civilised country, their names would be burned into the public consciousness, their stories a beacon for protest against the evils of institutional cruelty and the abuse of power. But not in The Bahamas. After all, we can all smile and pretend none of this exists, because “Its Better In The Bahamas”!

This roll call of human misery is only the tip of the iceberg. Since the founding of the Carmichael Concentration Camp [by PM Hubert Ingraham’s FNM], untold thousands of innocents have been illegally deprived of their freedom; swallowed up by our very own homegrown manufactory of suffering and injustice.

They are hidden away behind walls of silence, denied the right to an attorney and only allowed contact with the outside world on the whim of authorities. Who knows how much longer Sewell, Amihere, Ngumi and the others would have remained illegally imprisoned had Human Rights Bahamas [HRB] not helped? Who knows how many other Amiheres, Carlos Mendozas’, Lazaro Searas’ (Cubans) and Dahene Nonords’ (Bahamian) have lived for years and even died in unlawful detention in The Bahamas without the terrible crimes committed against them coming to light?

This deplorable state of affairs is the direct result of our national obsession with government control over the lives of individuals. Our paranoid insistence that everyone who cannot produce “papers” must be guilty of some crime, although there is no such law. PLP and FNM Governments continue to conveniently forget the Constitutional Presumption of Innocence.

This collective derangement and xenophobic hysteria has led to a general suppression of people’s constitutional right to move, speak and congregate freely. Ultimately, inevitably, it was bound to harden into a system of routine unlawful deprivation of freedom as the COVID Emergency Orders have now morphed into.

But now the chickens are coming home to roost. Almost without exception, in case after case before the courts the victims are being vindicated, freed, and awarded increasingly hefty damages to teach Government that Constitutional Crimes do not pay.

Sadly, this stubborn FNM government has learnt nothing. It continues to hold people illegally, to the everlasting shame of the nation and detriment of the taxpayer forced to foot the bill. Sir Cecil Wallace Whitfield, the founder of the FNM, who fought discrimination all his life, is rising from his grave, God Bless his soul, to haunt this hyprocritical FNM Government.

Rather than righting the wrong, the FNM and PLP politicians shoot the messenger and make scapegoats of HRB who stand for victims. They accuse HRB of bleeding the Treasury dry, as if HRB created the problem by daring to tell truth and holding Government accountable in court. The same tactic is currently being used against people fighting for their homes in Abaco, whom the FNM Immigration Minister, Elsworth Johnson, labelled “Cowards”. It is apathetic attempt at sleight of hand, deflectIng blame, distraction and passing the buck.

The truth is if the FNM really wanted these expensive and embarrassing illegal imprisonment claims to end, they could make it happen tomorrow. A simple review of all detention cases would identify those being held unlawfully and trigger their immediate release. The government could acknowledge the egregious wrong that has been done, apologise, and offer a reasonable settlement to each victim. It is the civilised, humane and decent thing to do. That is what is called, Prime Minister Minnis, “Respect For The Rule of Law”, which I witnessed you swear to at your inauguration in May, 2017.

Instead, you, Prime Minister and the FNM’s strident Attorney General, Carl Bethel QC, Minister Johnson and Minister of Foreign Affairs, Darren Henfield, double down and fight tooth and nail defending the detention of people you know are illegally imprisoned. You waste government resources and the court’s time, dragging out the victims’ ordeals and thereby increasing taxes by the damages awarded by the courts. Even after you lose, again and again, you descend to tedious nitpicking over the worth of an innocent man’s stolen time, arguing pennies on the dollar.

Frankly, the FNM have proven too cowardly to do the right thing. Instead of going down in history as the administration which corrected this awful wrong, this shameful stain upon our national character, the FNM have chosen to defend it to the death.

In this, and many other ways, the Minnis administration has proven to be the ultimate custodian of our national obsession with government coercion and control – which at the end of the day, is really an obsession with discrimination.

Discrimination along class lines, because those who are stopped in the street in unlawful roadblocks and ordered to prove their right to exist, are almost always people of modest means. Discrimination against foreigners, because by far the most targeted category are those who are perceived to be foreign, especially Haitian or of Haitian parentage.

Such people, reviled and denigrated by the Bahamian public at large [and what is “A Bahamian” anyway?], are defenceless and easy pickings. It is no mistake that in most cases of illegal imprisonment the victim has been a foreigner or Citizen In Waiting. I cry Shame on my FNM!

In part, the FNM’s posturing in these cases is just the usual political opportunism, an attempt to score points with a population already programmed for prejudice and xenophobic hysteria by the PLP from the good old Pingdomite “Roots” Days. On a deeper level though, it may be a sign of incipient panic; an intuition that the whole discrimination-for-votes system might be under threat.

That system depends upon the victims of discrimination remaining anonymous statistics in the public consciousness. But court cases bring them to life, supply individual identity, faces, names. They paint detailed pictures of shocking injustices perpetrated against real people, who continue to suffer terribly. Suddenly, it is no longer so easy for the public to look the other way, except the Long Island Xenophobes.

For exactly the same reason, Cabinet ministers, like Desmond Bannister [Works] and Johnson, have gone out of their way to pretend that the human beings at Farm Road in Abaco are not Bahamians who are entitled to - as they historically do - self-help and build their own shelters in the tragic absence of government help after Hurricane Dorian. Last week they went so far as to attack children in Abaco.

It is one thing to talk about demolishing structures, but another thing entirely to see the suffering face of a child who will be left with no shelter, no security, no future. Tragically, the FNM is creating future ETHNIC HATE. That level of reality, that testament to vulnerable humanity being broken on the alter of discrimination, is a national disgrace.

As a lifelong supporter of the FNM, I never thought I would see the day when my party took over the role of “Oppressor in Chief”. But it seems that sad day has come. In truth, the current administration should thank God for PLP Fred Mitchell, because his febrile, ostentatious and above all vocal intolerance may have distracted from an evil that has been growing inside the FNM for quite some time.

Sir Lyndon’s PLP routinely detained people who couldn’t produce “papers” on demand and send them to Fox “Hell” Prison pending deportation. But in 1993, the FNM made things exponentially worse. By the responsibility of our current Governor General CA Smith, then Minister of National Security, the notorious Carmichael Concentration Camp was illegally established. Still existing totally and intentionally outside the law, it has become home to crimes against humanity. Detainees are beaten and tortured; live like animals, teargassed for sport, denied any and all protections under the law, raped and even kidnapped by Immigration officers for use as slaves, all with total impunity. Because as far as the laws of The Bahamas are concerned, the facility doesn’t even exist. All thanks to the FNM.

Now the veil has been pulled aside, and the FNM can be seen for what they are: a gang of low life bullies who will not shy away from attacking the most vulnerable in the name of political gain.

Having won a historic victory in 2017, they had a unique opportunity to disrupt the entrenched system of discrimination and official injustice. They chose to do the opposite.

But this may just backfire on them. Voters, particularly the many thousands of Haitian descent, read the harrowing stories of the illegally detained. They see the distraught faces of children made homeless. In choosing the cowards’ path in an effort to avoid losing political power by pandering to the Hate-The-Haitian Lynch Mob, the FNM may just end up guaranteeing the outcome they were seeking to avoid.