Terrorist gang and company driving the new criminality

Jun 20, 2008 Letters

DEAR EDITOR,
Tristram Korten penned ‘Gang’s terror reign in Guyana years in making’ in the Miami Herald on June 15, 2008.

This piece addressed Guyana’s most wanted criminal and his gang of armed fugitives, parading as an armed resistance.

And Korten noted that the genesis of the problem dates back some years when the Government through a previous Home Affairs Minister created a band of vigilante assassins called “phantom death squads,” as a reaction to the crime wave initiated in 2002.

However, the Commission instituted to investigate this Minister found no direct connection of this Minister with extra-judicial killings.

In this piece, Korten failed fundamentally to link the criminal activities in Guyana to regional drug trafficking, money laundering, and racketeering, inter alia; Korten failed to observe the global roots of criminality; Korten failed to see the local political link to criminality; Korten failed to present the considerable crime-fighting efforts exerted by both the Guyana Police Force (GPF) and the Guyana Defence Force (GDF); Korten failed to acknowledge the public’s assistance rendered to law enforcement personnel; and Korten failed to understand the active role of the Government in maintaining law and order.

Any discussion of some of the execution-style killings in Guyana must make the connection with Guyana as a possible drug transshipment route to North America and Europe.

McElroy places illegal drug trafficking in the Caribbean to around $5 billion in 2005; and then Acting Resident Representative of the United Nations Drug Control Program Flavio Mirella said that about US$3.2 billion in illegal drugs was trafficked through the Caribbean in 2000.

Former President of the Caribbean Development Bank Sir Neville Nicholls pointed out that “In the Caribbean, the link to drugs and crime is clearly documented and if not fought on all fronts, there is the potential of undermining the rule of law.”

The region’s crime situation is not much different from Guyana. The Economist of February 8, 2008, referred to Jamaica as the world’s most murderous country; the Economist saw the affluent Bahamas as more unsafe than Guyana; it saw Trinidad & Tobago’s murder rate quadrupled over the last 10 years; and for the last five months of this year, T&T experienced about 200 murders; and the Economist pointed to illegal drugs as the culprit.

But the Economist also noted that since the 1990s, cocaine trafficking in the region has become less prominent, yet murder rates continue to escalate in the Caribbean.

Clearly, then, a diagnosis of the crime upsurge in Guyana needs to factor in the ‘regional illegal drug trafficking’ variable and some new emerging complexities, otherwise the solution and prognosis of this new criminality will be way out of whack.

Domestic terrorism is one of these new complexities to this new criminality.
Saturday, January 26, 2008, was the day when Guyana experienced the Lusignan Massacre and February 17, 2008 was the day of the Bartica Massacre. Both Massacres were really domestic terrorism in action.

Terrorism uses intimidation, fear, and violence to achieve political ends; in fact, the U.S. Department of State sees terrorism as pre-meditated politically-motivated violence against non-combatant targets.

Look, frequent challenges to democracy, revealed through terrorist behaviours, are the order of the day in Guyana. These political challenges are in unison with criminality that over the last few years has induced an unholy upsurge in criminal activities.

In order to keep these challenges alive and on the front burner, the terrorist elements give the society a periodic dose of ‘intimidation transfusion’ to create terror in the hearts of innocent Guyanese.

This political link to criminal behaviour is not only the condition that accelerates the crime wave, but this condition motivates and remotivates criminals to believe that a political comfort zone exists to provide the necessary refuge for them when appropriate.
But more importantly, who provides this ‘comfort and protection’ zone for the terrorists?

Is there a well-oiled organisation that provides the social infrastructure to the terrorists? Well, we must remind ourselves that the goal of this terrorism is to destabilise the country because of their belief that they will be the beneficiaries of dividends.
Prem Misir