My column... Going back to the days of horror in Guyana

My column… Going back to the days of horror in Guyana

Feb 04, 2018 Features / Columnists, My Column

At the turn of the century, Guyana experienced its worst crime wave. Suddenly sleepy villages became the object of police hunts and near incessant gunfire. Many people died; some because they dared to object to the presence of gunmen and some because the law enforcement authorities caught up with them.
I remember the jailbreak that started all this. The bands were out on the road; people were celebrating. There I was reporting on the floats and the excitement people were feeling. Cell phones were not as smart as they are today. And I had one of them, a Nokia. It rang.
Immediately my mind switched from Mash to jailbreak. I saw the police patrols that found the escape car, but there were no signs of the escapees. That jailbreak made the headlines. It overshadowed the Mash celebration.
Fast forward to a day in August. I was in New Amsterdam when I got a call that the police had found Andrew Douglas dead in a car on the East Bank. He had been shot. But before that he posted a video claiming to be a freedom fighter. This video is what has put a spin on some of the comments that have been heard after President David Granger swore in a commissioner to probe the Lindo Creek massacre.
Needless to say there were robberies all over the place, but at the same time people were dying. I remember the story of a young man being killed in Buxton. The next thing I knew is that I was racing to the village because there was a body, burnt and smoking in the village. Someone had exacted vengeance by killing him for killing the young man.
Those were cruel times. Those were the times when criminals suddenly gravitated to the so-called Buxton gunmen. Inspector Gadget became a household name. Then one night as he was walking in Ruimveldt, some vigilantes caught up with him and killed him. The society breathed a sigh of relief.
There was one man named Monkey Nut. He had just bought a Chinese food in Campbellville and was walking toward Kitty. A group caught up with him and killed him. It was not unusual to hear the sound of gunfire at any hour. And in the wake of the gunfire, to find bodies strewn about.
I remember the morning when the police caught up with Kwame Pendleton and another man. They had just left Buxton and had reached Turkeyen. They died in a hail of police bullets. One man escaped. He reportedly hid in a nearby canal until night then walked out.
The killings had become the norm; people stayed indoors. It was a bad time for night life. I was at work one Friday night when a report came that gunmen had shot up the police headquarters at Eve Leary. That was the ultimate. For criminals to attack the highest forum of law and order was to throw down the gauntlet.
Indeed policemen were shot out of hand. They were afraid to wear their uniforms. Many travelled to work in civvies and changed into the uniform only to undress to the end of the day. There was the policeman who was doing traffic duty when he was shot dead on Regent Street.
A few hours later there was the brutal attack on Lusignan. It was a sleepless Friday night and a harrowing Saturday. The photographs which were uncharacteristically published told of a slaughter. There must be a commission of inquiry into this massacre.
There was the Allen Stanford-sponsored cricket match the night the gunmen attacked the police station at Bartica, killing three of the policemen there. Others were to die in that tiny community as gunmen went on a rampage. It turned out that these were the same gunmen who had slaughtered entire families at Lusignan.
Perhaps the most frightening episode came when a police party thought that it had cornered some gunmen in Ruimveldt. That standoff did not end well for the police who were outgunned. To make matters worse, the gunmen stopped their escape to challenge the policemen who could not respond.
Then came news of Lindo Creek. But even before Lindo Creek became known to the ordinary Guyanese, they learnt that there was a place in Guyana called Christmas Falls. The gunmen had gone there to hide out.
There was a police raid on that hideout and one young man was killed. The police were hot on the trail of the gunmen. Leonard Arokium went to his mining operation at Lindo Creek and found the burnt remains of his son, his brother and others. Nearly all of them were unidentified when they were buried.
Nobody knows for sure what happened, so the government wants to find out. The relatives of the dead men want closure.
Indeed, the Lindo Creek massacre occurred after the Lusignan and Buxton massacres. The question, then, is why hold this inquiry first. The answer is that it’s very newness means that the evidence is still fresh. However, other inquiries are promised.
I am aware that there are many more questions. One of them is whether the nation wants to have its old wounds reopened. Indeed, I would prefer to forget those dark days, and they were dark. Back then I jogged in the early morning. I remember running up behind a limping man heading north on Mandela Avenue.
This individual stopped and bent over, but I jogged past. Sometime later I learnt that the limping man was Jerry Perreira, a notorious bandit who was later found killed in a house in East Bank Berbice, not far from New Amsterdam. He was reportedly shot and killed by Dale Moore, one of the five men who broke out of the Camp Street jail in February 2002. This Perreira once shot Charles Ramson on Sheriff Street.
The people who are suspected of the Lindo Creek atrocities were not the jailbreak five, but they spawned the group that followed. The Lindo Creek inquiry would therefore, go back a long way, perhaps encapsulating the massacres at Lusignan and at Bartica.
Indeed wounds would reopen. Former President and former Prime Minister Sam Hinds says it all goes back to 1997. His testimony would make for interesting reading.