Lusignan Massacre: One Year Later

Jan 28, 2009 Editorial

A year after the Lusignan Massacre, we find ourselves still trying to grapple with the enormity of that depravity, which exemplified the maxim: Homo Homini Lupus – Man, to his fellow man, is a wolf.
We now know that the Lusignan Massacre was not to be the last horror story of 2008. We know too of the bloody denouement of ‘Fine Man’ and some of his gang members, who perpetrated the atrocities. The arrest a few days ago of one additional member of the gang should remind us that there are others out there – most appositely the planners and ideological schemers – for whom the present may simply be the calm before another storm. We republish excerpts of one of our editorials from last year to remind all of us that eternal vigilance has to remain our watchword.
After the Lusignan Massacre there were sections of our society who saw the slaughter only through the prism that our ethnicised political history has filtered our reality. “The murderers came from Buxton so they must be black; the individuals killed were all Indians, so, ipso facto, we had a ‘racial affair’.”
While on one level the syllogism may be “true”, it is so in such a superficial and banal manner that it is bereft of any explanatory power and one wonders why it was trotted out in the first place. The purveyors of that line of argument conveniently refused to remember that in the Agricola Massacre of a few years back, the victims of the gunmen’s rage were all black. Or maybe with the unrelenting onslaught of criminality on our psyches, our attention span is getting truncated. Well the Bartica Massacre, a mere three weeks after Lusignan, with the twelve unfortunate fatalities and several others wounded, should remind us that this criminal enterprise had long transcended ethnicity or race.
We are in the throes of a situation where our entire society is under siege and, to use a gruesome metaphor, if we do not hang together, we will certainly hang separately. After Agricola some asserted that “drugs” were involved; after Lusignan, the grief of an enraged gunman for his paramour and “seed”. But now after Bartica, we cannot evade the leitmotif that had run through most of the various atrocities that had involved the gang operating out of Buxton since 2002: they are terrorists.
Terrorists unleash violence on targets – both civilian and state – to make a “point” against those who hold state power – the government. And this could be the only motive for the egregious and gratuitous attack on the Bartica Police Station and its environs, notwithstanding the robbery of a nearby jewellery establishment. It appears that the latter was entirely opportunistic. The average criminal does not single out Police Stations for targets. We note the shots fired from a moving vehicle on Police Headquarters in the hours leading up to the Lusignan Massacre. We hope that the entire society can now begin to understand the mindset of the terrorist. Believing unswervingly in the rightness of his or her “cause”, the terrorist is even prepared to use any means at his disposal to put pressure on the government to rectify their claimed injustices. They are even prepared to destroy the group they are “fighting for”.
The problem that we have however – and one that has maybe caused the confusion in determining the motives of the terrorists – is that they have not bothered to make their grouses – political or otherwise – known to those of us who are forced to endure their depredations – not to mention the government to which they are sending their “messages”. There are some individuals who have written in the press that the terrorists (labelled “resistance fighters” – but that does not alter the fact that they are using the tactics of terrorists) are articulating the anger of some segments of our population at their “marginalisation” by the government. But these individuals are always careful to state that they are not the official spokespersons of the terrorists. But by their acts they shall be known.
Our Disciplined Forces have gradually begun to turn the tables on those nihilists who would wipe out the hard-earned progress – minimal as it may be – that our country has made in the last two decades. All citizens will have to emulate their example to wipe the scourge of terrorism from our country forever.

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Lusignan Massacre: One Year Later

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