There’s a lesson for us in Gadaffi’s downfall

Oct 23, 2011 Letters

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Dear Editor,
As I read unfolding news stories and watched amateurish, grainy video clips of Libya’s Moammar Gadhafi’s capture by his countrymen, I tried to focus on the fear on his bloodied and swollen face, to capture what I think was going through his mind. But then another report said he was so badly wounded, he was dazed and confused, only asking that his captors not shoot him or his sons.
My heart immediately sank on realizing that this despot who ruled with an iron fist for 42 years was, after all, just another human. He simply allowed his heart and head to become consumed by lust for power and wealth. He lost all sense of humanity, and everything he did was just for publicity points.
But on Thursday, the entire charade ended. The people of Libya, determined to end his misrule, took a firm stand and fought hard until he was run out of his presidential palace and town, and when he thought he found refuge in his boyhood town of Srite, the people came after him right there and, with the help of NATO, brought an end to his ignoble rule.
What stood out in this entire months-long drama were two things: 1) the people’s determination to get rid of their corrupt and murderous leader and 2) their leader’s determination to hold on for as long as possible, despite offers for asylum. But the people won.
Gadhafi was not captured and tried in a court like Iraq’s Saddam Hussein; he met street justice at the hands of the people, and there is a useful lesson here for Guyana to learn. We, the people, seek justice against the injustice foisted on us by the Jagdeo regime via the regime’s failure to use legal means to address demented criminal elements posing as Freedom Fighters, opting instead for allowing a notorious drug baron to spend his ill-gotten gains on an extra judicial death squad, and for refusing to mount a probe into the crime sprees that happened on his watch.
True, the Guyana Constitution has a clause that protects the President, while in office or after he demits office, from criminal indictments and lawsuits for acts committed while in office. But this protective clause does not extend to the entire government, and especially specific players, like cabinet ministers and law enforcement officials named in court cases as part of the government injustices.
The protective clause also does not apply to the International Criminal Court (ICC) system, which needs to be approached with a view to investigating the Jagdeo regime for the unsolved deaths of hundreds of people, both Indians and Blacks. The same way the ICC placed Gadhafi on its wanted list, I believe an investigation into the Jagdeo regime could result in this President being on the ICC’s wanted list to answer serious questions about what he knew and what his government allowed to happen in the last decade.
Yes, there will be those Jagdeoites who believe that justice was served when Roger Khan, a perceived hero, took on the criminal elements and wiped them out. But in a truly law-abiding country, no crime figure has the authority from any government to execute justice on behalf of the government. Khan may have saved the regime from falling at the hands of the criminal elements, as he boasted in newspaper advertisements, and the regime may have benefited from his actions, but both Khan and the regime broke national and international laws and need to be investigated by the ICC.
We need to ensure justice prevails and is seen to prevail in order to assure ourselves that the system works in Guyana. If the investigation turns up guilty parties, let the system determine sentence or pardon, but at least we must let the system of justice help bring official closure to the criminal era on Jagdeo’s watch.
There are surviving relatives of Indians who have no idea who actually harmed or killed their loved ones. They only heard the government and police level accusations, but there was no capture or trial for facts to come out, perhaps linking the accused to masterminds anywhere.
There are surviving relatives of Blacks who have no idea why their now deceased relatives were killed by the extra judicial squad. Information has since emerged that some of the squad’s targets were persons who were in the drug business and had to be gotten rid of as part of the Khan competition. Other targets were part of murder-for-hire plots, so apologists for the squad need to stop ‘bigging up’ Khan as a hero who saved the day; Khan actually was on a mission to establish himself as part of the regime by orchestrating a series of nefarious events in which he would have become seen as the ‘saviour’.
Still, it is the need for a sense of a return of justice to Guyana that demands the Jagdeo regime be investigated by the ICC to determine its role in the unsolved deaths of hundreds of Indians and Blacks on his watch. His regime could have called on CARICOM or the Commonwealth to help provide back-up security, but it failed because it was criminally corrupt, and the police force and army were too criminally and politically compromised, so it couldn’t risk having these facts discovered by foreign security forces in Guyana because the forces would have seen where the root of the problem rested.
Guyana needs official justice and closure from the last decade!
Name withheld

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