The Troubles

Feb 17, 2013 APNU Column, Features / Columnists

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The ‘Troubles’ is the name given to the decade, roughly between 2000 and 2010, that witnessed the most intense and sustained wave of criminal violence since independence.
More persons were killed as a result of criminal violence during this period than at any other time in Guyana’s history since the 1823 Demerara revolt.
The scars of the ‘Troubles’ are still visible. People have become so conscious of the bloodbath of murders and other unnatural deaths that monuments to the victims have already sprung up at Bartica, Buxton and Kingston. Our nation should be building colleges, and institutes to educate our children for the future, rather than erecting macabre memorials to the victims of a criminal campaign.
No one knows for certain how many persons were killed during that deadly decade. No one has investigated the real causes of the violence. No one has calculated the consequences.
Some claim that hundreds were killed. Opposition parties in the National Assembly, non-governmental organisations and civil society attempted to chronicle the course of events and to calculate the body count of persons who perished in this period.
The Joint Opposition Political Parties – comprising the Alliance for Change; Guyana Action Party; National Front Alliance; People’s National Congress and Working People’s Alliance, all of which are still sitting in the National Assembly – most certainly were committed to bringing an end to the rampant criminality.
It took members of the Legislative branch, not the Executive branch, to initiate the compilation of a ‘Dossier in Support of an Independent Legal Interrogation of Grave Human Rights Abuses in Guyana’ on state-sponsored violence and other crimes in order to try to comprehend the enormity of this terrible human tragedy.
The Guyana Human Rights Association had also compiled a landmark study – Ambivalent about Violence: A Report on Fatal Shooting by Police in Guyana, 1980-2001. This established the fact that, in 21 years, the police had killed 239 persons, an average of over 11 persons per annum. Police killings continued throughout the ‘Troubles’ up to the present time.
More needs to be done. It is the duty of the National Assembly to identify the persons who met violent deaths; determine the circumstances and places of the deaths; identify, as far as possible, the culprits responsible for the killings; commence a process to punish those found guilty of serious crimes and make recommendations to ensure that a recurrence is averted.
It is clear that a major contributory factor to the virulence of the violence was the rising tide of trafficking in illegal narcotics and firearms over the first decade of this millennium which brought waves of criminal violence to this country. The consequences have been that Guyana earned a ghastly reputation for massacres and a gory record of assassination, executions and murders.
The National Assembly must seek explanations for the vicious massacres – in Kitty at Natoo’s Bar; Lamaha Gardens on bloody Wednesday; Bourda on Diwali night; Buxton-Friendship; Prashad Nagar; Agricola-Eccles; La Bonne Intention;  Bagotstown-Eccles; Black Bush Polder; Lusignan; Bartica; at Lindo Creek and elsewhere.
The assassinations of a government Minister and the deputy head of the Customs Anti-Narcotics Unit; the attempted assassination of the Director of Public Prosecutions; the elimination of suspects by an increasing number of extra-judicial killings by the police suggest that the ‘Troubles’ were not random acts of racial rivalry but, rather, the result of deeper criminal enterprise.
Dr. Roger Luncheon, Head of the Presidential Secretariat – who is also Chairman of the Central Intelligence Committee – was the first official to admit publicly that the violence was drug-related.
He introduced the expression ‘phantom’ force to describe the gangs responsible for the perpetration of certain crimes, particularly ‘execution’ murders.
He explained that the original members of the ‘gang of five’ persons who escaped from the Georgetown Prison on 23rd February 2002, were not the only ones responsible for the surge in crime.
He declared, as early as November 2002, that there was “plausible evidence to suggest that there is a body out there that is involved in criminal activities and that it is not the escapees and those who have been associated with the escapees.”
It was always clear that violence during this particular period was ‘criminal’ and not ‘communal’ in character. Executions continue up to today, indicating that the root causes of criminal violence, especially since 2000, have not yet been eradicated.
The circumstances under which Balram Khandi, Outar Kissoon and Ramphal Hardatt were killed at Port Mourant and Rose Hall in July 2002; Ronald Waddell and Satyadeo Sawh in 2006; Donna Herod d a 47-year-old mother of nine – who was escorting her child from school in September 2007 and everyone else who suffered violent and unnatural death must also be investigated.
The causes of these crimes and the prevalence and persistence of violence need to be explained. Measures to protect the lives of our people from such violence need to be implemented.
The National Assembly owes the nation a detailed chronicle and an accurate record of every person who has died as a result of the violence since 2000. An independent inquiry can learn much from former and serving government ministers, advisers and officials, former commissioners and senior police officers, politicians, businessmen, criminals, victims and villagers who were involved in the ‘Troubles’.

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