Look for motive and this crime will be solved quickly

Jul 20, 2009 Letters

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Dear Editor,

Under the Laws of Guyana, motive is not an essential criminal element that has to be proven before a Court of Law. However, motive can be extremely important to investigators when attempting to put together a facsimile of what happened, why it happened, and perhaps by extension, who were the characters behind the happening. Basically motive explains the reason or purpose behind an act.

The question that has to be foremost in the minds of any investigator sincerely in pursuit of exposing and prosecuting the perpetrators of the arson committed on the Ministry of Health must be, what was the motive behind this act. And in this context a series of queries comes to mind.

Were the perpetrators just some mindless and vindictive saboteurs who are politically opposed to the current regime and did this out of spite? Is this the kind of target persons thus ideologued would select as the most strategic for their purpose? Would people who are motivated by vindictive and petty malice go to such lengths to plan and execute such an act, and choose such a sterile and none partisan target for the purpose of venting their anger at a political regime?

In most other societies where logic and commonsense tend to superimpose itself over the stretches of wild and convenient imaginations, this would not sell. In Guyana however, where connectivity of thought sometimes become lost in excruciating mazes of conjecture and conveniently arrived at conclusions, unfortunately all things are possible.

Let’s develop this scenario a little further. Anti Government saboteurs, who are not blind, deaf and dumb, and who surely had to have been following the revelations over the past several weeks that included an auditor general’s flagging of the financial accounting of the Ministry of Health, and implications of involvement of the head of that Ministry with the activities of Roger Khan in Guyana, proceeded to destroy the one building where records or evidence to substantiate those issues would have been resident. I mean is this even plausible for contemplation? They hate the Government and the Minister so they are going to destroy irreplaceable evidence that they could access in the event that Freedom of Information Legislation become a reality. Only in Guyana man, only in Guyana.

There has to be a limit to the orchestrated manner in which the intelligence of Guyanese is being insulted by these Orwellian scenarios. Here we are in Guyana in 2009 in vivid re-enactment of the Animal farm Windmill issue, when upon discovery of its destruction the revolutionary leader Napoleon fumed, quote, ‘”Comrades, do you know who is responsible for this? Do you know the enemy who has come in the night and overthrown our windmill? Snowball!” He suddenly roared in a voice of thunder. “Snowball has done this thing! In sheer malignity, thinking to set back our plans and avenge himself for his ignominious expulsion, this traitor has crept here under cover of night and destroyed our work of nearly a year. Comrades, here and now I pronounce the death sentence upon Snowball. ‘Animal Hero, Second Class,’ and half a bushel of apples to any animal who brings him to

justice. A full bushel to anyone who captures him alive!”

The Minister of Health on being queried about the associative implications of this fire brushed reporters off with the comment, quote, “Let us not go stretching and looking for a story that is not there. It is an absurd story…” But isn’t it more absurd to believe people entered a compound guarded by security personnel, positioned their accoutrements of sabotage on spot, and then selectively set afire areas where financial records of the Ministry were being kept?

When a child goes missing in the US, or a murder or kidnapping occurs, the first suspects Law Enforcement target are those closest to the victim, even if just to eliminate them from attention.

In a nation where an audit of financial records raises questions about the operations of a department or entity, and that department or entity is subsequently subjected to an act of arson, where the dickens does the Minister expect and believe the attention of investigators have to be focused.

But of course this is Guyana where the rule of law, where the direction of evidence of wrong doing, where the national and accusatory finger of suspicion has been permanently fused against the chest of one group, in an example of double standards that is unmatched anywhere else.

Ronald Waddell’s praise of people he termed Freedom Fighters, but who others, perhaps justifiably, regarded as criminals, was pronounced as racist by the collective media and civil society, and he was assassinated with little expression of outrage from these quarters.

Meanwhile another group of cold blooded killers were being praised as crime fighters by many in our society and eliciting virtual approbation from the very collectives that metaphorically demanded the delivery of Ronald Waddell’s head on a platter. And this represents the Guyana that is in existence today.

Robin Williams

 

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