APNU+AFC machinery trying to change the prison riot narrative

Jul 17, 2017 Letters

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Dear Editor,
Whenever there are unpleasant truths to confront, the APNU+AFC machinery, including its leaders and its political commentators and those in the media who are supportive of APNU+AFC, aggressively try to change the narrative, re-direct people’s attention, replacing unpleasant truths with fabrications and half-truths. Another disaster, in a mind-numbing, unending list of disasters since May 2015, has hit Guyana like a deadly tsunami. A fire and a jail-break incident at the Camp Street Prison on July 9, 2017, have led to the death of a young prison officer and the complete destruction of the Camp Street Prison.
The new narrative being peddled by the APNU+AFC machinery is that it was a miracle that only one person died and that only a handful of prisoners escaped. Their distasteful take on the events is that given the fury of the fire that led to the complete destruction of the prison, it is simply astonishing that only one officer died, that no prisoner died and that almost all the prisoners were kept in custody.
The fact is that even one death is too many and the life of the prison officer is an unforgiveable loss. There is nothing to celebrate. But, in addition, a whole prison has been razed to the ground and there are dangerous prisoners on the loose and fear stalks the land. Just in case the APNU+AFC machinery try to misrepresent me, let me state clearly that the women and men of the security forces averted a greater disaster and deserve recognition, but what happened was a disaster, nonetheless.
The facts are clear and unequivocal. The cold, hard facts cannot be ignored and dismissed, cannot be changed and cannot be varnished. The real narrative deserves reiteration, so that the narrative remains alive, it must be in BOLD PRINT to hold people accountable. There was a second prison fire in sixteen months, going along with several escape events and several protests and disturbances by prisoners.
The first prison blaze sixteen months ago killed seventeen prisoners and destroyed a part of the prison. The second one on July 9, just over a week ago, led to the death of a prison officer, serious injuries to several others, the total destruction of the Camp Street Prison, the main prison in Guyana, and the escape of at least six dangerous prisoners.
This second fire has led to hundreds of prisoners being kept in a pasture in sub-human conditions and the release of more than fifty prisoners, some of whom were serving multi-year imprisonment for robbery under arms and for rape. The Minister under pressure released the names of the freed prisoners without the offense or jailed terms of the prisoners, obviously an effort at deception.
For several days after this second fire, no one could accurately tell how many prisoners had escaped and no one could tell the nation how many of the prisoners in Camp Street at the time were still in custody. It became a State Secret. Under any circumstances and under any government, this is a scandal and the minimum expected is that the Minister will take responsibility and resign. If the Minister will not be man enough to take responsibility, then the buck stops with the President.
Instead, he has abrogated his responsibility by insisting that the Minister inherited a broken system from Clement Rohee and the PPP. If some people were willing to excuse them after the first fire led to the death of seventeen people, now after almost thirty months in office, this excuse for the July 9 fire is lame and disgraceful.
Adding to the magnitude of the scandal is that President Granger, Minister of Public Security, Khemraj Ramjattan and APNU+AFC have admitted that they knew that the Camp Street inferno sixteen months ago and again on July 9 were fully expected, a disaster waiting to happen. Yet, even with full knowledge of an imminent disaster, by their own admission, there is little evidence of any real effort to improve security and conditions at the Camp Street Prison or in the prison system as a whole.
In fact, little attention has been paid to the fact that there was knowledge by the authority that an escape was planned and little attention was paid to the fact that on July 9, with a prison population of 1,018, there were only nine prison officers on duty, half of them female. Commentators have not vigorously asked why the recommendations by an expensive COI after the first inferno were kept secret and not published to this day and why little to no action was undertaken to implement the recommendations.
It is our country and we must face these facts, unpleasant and indigestible as they might be. The death of Officer Wickham cannot be subsumed by the fact that no other officer or any prisoner died. That brings no comfort to his family. Even here there is a nauseating other element to the shifting narrative APNU+AFC wants to instill in people’s minds – Ramjattan claims that he is trying to provide a compensation of $1M to Officer Wickham’s family.
This is not something for him to try to get. It is a compensation that has been catered for any officer whose life was lost. And the $1M compensation is a vulgar insult to this officer and his family, indeed, to all officers in the security force. Given his age, his death robbed him of earnings at present day salaries of more than $23M.
But the furious effort on the part of President Granger, Ramjattan and the APNU+AFC machinery to change the narrative started even in the early hours and even as the inferno was ongoing. We cannot dismiss and not hold Ramjattan responsible for the reckless blaming of sugar workers and SUGAR for the inferno at Camp Street. He has not apologized for trying even as the disaster was unfolding to move the narrative from a deadly, destructive fire and dangerous prison outbreak to subsidies to the SUGAR Industry.
Dr. Leslie Ramsammy

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