Guyana’s homicides find her in bloody company

Jan 08, 2017 Countryman, Features / Columnists

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By Dennis Nichols

What is a fitting subject to explore as the first week of 2017 unfolds, with too much rain and, for some of

us, too few resources to lighten the January gloom following December’s Christmas splurge?
I thought positive, but couldn’t dismiss the wave of crime and bloodletting that had spread distress across our land in 2016, and which appears to have rolled over seamlessly into the new year with that double-murder on New Year’s Day and the Linden Highway four-fatality carnage last Wednesday. Maybe this article will help bring some objectivity and a tiny bit of consolation to this brutal reality.
Our once (some say still) hospitable country finds itself in murderous company in this part of the world – Central/South America and the Caribbean. That is according to several international crime and homicide monitors, and maybe common knowledge. Since the beginning of the new millennium, this mayhem seems to have taken on a more savage, demoniac dimension. Incidentally, how many of us realize that Earth’s north-west quadrant in which Guyana is located, has the world’s highest crime and murder rates?
According to several watchdog groups whose figures are usually thought of as reliable, of the 25 countries with the world’s highest homicide rates, between 17 and 20, i.e. between 68% and 80% are in this region. Most of us, would have heard about Honduras and our neighbour Venezuela, but St. Lucia, and little St. Kitts and Nevis!? Native islanders were reportedly angered that their tourist-friendly paradises had been listed among the most dangerous places on earth.
Well, here is my skeptic’s caveat; such figures are not always one hundred percent factual. For one thing some figures relate to ‘intentional homicide’ the definition of which may vary among countries. Other factors include the under-reporting of crimes, secrecy, propaganda, and the inclusion of attempted murders in homicide data. Yet apart from these, they are generally accepted as valid and should serve as a reinvigorated wake-up call for us here in Guyana and in the region; well actually in the whole bloody world.
The global homicide rate is said to average about 7 per 100,000 inhabitants. That isn’t necessarily a bad number, and looks even better when it is reported that more than 140 countries out of Earth’s 200 nations appear to have a rate less than that average. It’s however hard to believe that a country like North Korea falls below that figure; that Japan, Hong Kong and Madagascar fall below 1, and that three of Europe’s microstates, Andorra, Monaco, and San Marino, have zero. I know there was a sensational double murder in Monaco in 2014; so there you go!
To gauge the significance of homicide rates in our Central/South American and Caribbean region, I used a cut-off point of 20 murders per 100,000 (far above the global average) and came up with the top 10 partly from data supplied by the World Bank, Wikipedia, and the United Nations Surveys on Crime Trends and Operations of Criminal Justice Systems (UN-CTS). Apart from Honduras (85) and Venezuela (62) there is El Salvador, (64) Belize, (34) Jamaica, (36) Colombia, (28) The Bahamas, (30) U.S. Virgin Islands, (53) Guatemala, (31) and St. Kitts & Nevis. (34)
Others above the 20 per 100,000 rate are Trinidad & Tobago (26) St. Vincent & the Grenadines (26) Brazil (25) St. Lucia (22) The Dominican Republic, (22) Dominica, (21) and Montserrat. (20) It may come as a shock to many that although much-maligned Guyana lies within the Top 25 bracket, its rate is ‘only’ between 17 and 20 murders per 100,000 people. But of course this sort of data tells just part of the savage tale.
Mark Twain sagely observed that ‘facts are stubborn things, but statistics are pliable’. And in Guyana’s case there’s reason to be exceedingly worried about our homicide stats and the feral viciousness of some of them.
Last year saw several sensational murders, some of which seemingly defied comprehension and the definition of being human. Who can forget the bludgeoning, mutilation, and shallow-grave disposal of British teen Dominic Bernard, and Anita Baichan, duct-taped, tortured and left to die in a burning building, both in the first week of 2016. Then, adding a psychopathic twist to horror, 81 year-old Arthur Rajkumar and his 49-year-old wife, Diane Chamanlall were savagely hacked to death, allegedly by a group of drugged-up youths, one of whom admitted to the Baichan murder as well. These happened within the first 10 days of the year. More was to come.
In April another couple, Mohamed and Jamila Munir, were burnt to death in their heavily-grilled house when would-be robbers set it afire after failing to get $20 million rumoured to be in the building. Around the same time, 23 year-old Simone Hackett had her throat slashed and her body dumped into a trench, allegedly by her ‘child father,’ just one day before she was to be the maid-of-honour at her sister’s wedding.
Before these outrages, remigrant agriculturist, Anthony Breedy, was battered to death with wooden clubs and a concrete block in Linden after inviting a newly-acquired ‘friend’ to his home. In May, sex and revenge were claimed to be behind the unsettling murder of retired professor Perry Mars, bound and strangled at his Prashad Nagar home by a group of teenagers.
Inhumanity was stepped up a notch in the second half of the year with several more murders, among which three stood out for sheer gruesomeness. In July a man butchered his wife, Vanessa Sookram, and two-year-old son, Joel Ganesh, with a cutlass, then turned the weapon on his mother, the only one to survive, but with an arm amputated. Then in October, Bibi Shairoon, a 56-year-old shop owner, was found with her hands and feet bound in a pool of blood, with a hammer nearby.
November saw perhaps the most demoniac killing – that of 53-year-old Bhumatie Deolall, who had her neck almost severed by a neighbour with a machete taken from a Mandir, and who allegedly said he’d been sent by ‘the master’ to commit the atrocity, after which he replaced the blood-smeared weapon on the temple altar. All of this and I haven’t even mentioned the jail-fire deaths, the Mibicuri triple murder, or the Faiyaz Narinedatt made-to-look-like-an-accident homicide!
A most worrying aspect of this savage litany is the age of some of the alleged perpetrators; in six of the killings teenagers were involved, two of them only 14 years old. These are mere children who, most of us may agree, should be thinking about school exams and classroom crushes rather than crushing the life out of an unsuspecting target. Parental and societal factors undoubtedly play a vital role in their upbringing, but these aspects have been commented on and analyzed ad nauseum, and I needn’t rehash them.
What I will say is, we should be extremely concerned about this malignancy amongst us. Of course we still have some way to go, homicide-wise, to catch up with countries like Honduras, Venezuela, and Jamaica, but when we include our suicides, and fire and accident fatalities, (road, river, and mining) the death-bond shared with our regional neighbours becomes more potent; certainly more evident. In any case it is small consolation to murder victim survivors, and no balm to our troubled national psyche.
Let’s see what 2017 has in store for us.

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