The brutality in our midst

May 11, 2013 Editorial

Guyana is no stranger to unusual deaths but this past week has had its fair share of unusual deaths. One is now left to wonder whether the country is once more trying to establish itself on the map as a crime capital.
Every country has its crime and Guyana is no different. However, the people of this country are accustomed to the deaths that occur during robberies. Not that this is an accepted state of affairs. Rather, some of these deaths have occurred with such frequency that people just cannot help but notice them.
Indeed this is a relatively new development and it comes at a time when there is a proliferation of guns in the society. Many young men, some barely out of school where they spent years learning nothing and cultivating role models from members of the criminal world, now pick up guns to prey on households.
Sometimes these killings are so senseless that one wonders whether the ignorance of the perpetrators is not the cause for some of them to attempt to show that they are macho men. There was the killing at McDoom, East Bank Demerara. The bandits had already robbed the household and were leaving when they shot the home owner who happened to be a miner.
The police did an excellent job in identifying the possible perpetrators but they have reached a snag. The victims are refusing to come forward to identify the perpetrators, thus leaving them to perhaps kill someone else during another criminal attack.
Then there are the so-called domestic murders fuelled by a spate of jealousy or a rash of anger. Many of the perpetrators are men who have no compunction about killing their spouses, sometimes so brutally that one wonders whether the killer was of sound mind.
There was the case of the stepfather inflicting no less than two dozen wounds on his stepdaughter. Many others have been equally brutal and while the society is busy trying to organize campaigns designed to stop this level of violence against women the killings continue. It is as though there is an open season on women.
Indeed, some women say that they tolerate the abuse because they see no way of sustaining themselves outside of sharing the same house as the abuser who is seen as the provider. Just recently, a man kicked at his wife, missed and kicked his baby in the head. He is in prison pending trial. However, his spouse has suggested that she is prepared to share her life with this man who almost killed her child.
There are others. On Thursday night a man used a gun to shoot his paramour then to kill himself. Sometimes the killer hangs himself but in cases where he chooses to run, when caught they often end up with a prison sentence that is seen as inadequate.
But these pale into insignificance when one looks at the killings this past week. Some residents of South Sophia respond to a cry of ‘thief’ from a neighbour. They come out in their numbers. It is shortly after midnight. They chase the suspected thief and beat him mercilessly.
They then dragged him through the streets and strapped him to a post. He might have been dead by then. Somebody gets the bright idea to burn the body. It turns out that the man might not have been a thief after all.
One day later, in Berbice there is a similar cry. This time relatives and friends beat a man and young girl with whom he was walking. They put him and the woman into the trunk of a car and drive them around. The man dies. Had it not been for the police the perpetrators might have escaped.
Then there is the most brutal killing that occurred early Friday morning. A man and his wife are bound and blown up in their home by persons unknown. What could be responsible for this level of criminality?

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