International Lawyer, Melinda Janki believes that ExxonMobil’s relationship with Guyana amounts to an attempt at colonisation
Speaking to anti-colonialist Kingston University Professor, Andy Higginbottom, during an online forum, Janki said last month that “the main point of colonization is to take a country’s resources and to pay little or nothing. The colonizing entity co-opts the political elite, [then] the colonizing entity and the co-opted political elite rely on agents and accomplices. Together, you have an unholy trinity that completes the colonization.”
She explained that in order to get away with this, ExxonMobil has to fool people. She reminded that in the old days, European colonizers promised civilization and a better faith.
“We know what that looks like,” Janki said. “We’ve heard that. Genocide, slavery, brutality, land dispossession. Grinding poverty for the colonized; riches for the colonizing power.”
“The lie,” she said, “isn’t gonna work now. So today, the colonizers say we’ll get economic development – the holy grail of the capitalist system.”
What is promised as economic development, Janki posited, tends to turn into genocide, land grabs, grinding poverty for the colonized, riches for the colonizing power and the elites, and their accomplices and agents, and destruction of the natural world…”