ONE MORE REASON WHY PPP SHOULD NEVER GOVERN THIS COUNTRY AGAIN

Aug 05, 2018 AFC Column, Features / Columnists

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Last week, Justice Donald Trotman presented his long-awaited report of the investigation into the 2008 Lindo Creek Massacre. Based on the comments made during the presentation, we conclude that that gruesome incident presents one more reason why the People’s Progressive Party should remain out of government for a long while yet.
In last week’s column we had said that Guyanese were healed from the wounds inflicted on us during the era of urban terror, the 2000’s, but in truth, we are not quite as well healed, not enough to withstand another decade of non-stop brutality. If for no other reason, that massacre and the callousness with which it was handled at the highest levels of government, presents another reason why Guyanese must keep the PPP away from decision making.
Left to them, the massacre at Lindo Creek would have continued to be passed off as ‘just another’ senseless attack by a gang of domestic terrorists. But according to the recent report, it may have been the work of another bandit gang, or a gang of rogue law ‘enforcers’.
Just after the massacre, we recall, there was widespread belief that some Joint Services ranks who were hunting down the heavil- armed Fine Man gangsters, may have done the deed at Lindo Creek and then covered up their involvement by way of cremation.
The evidence given then by the mining camp’s owner, Leonard Arokium, to the authorities included a detailed description of the topography and geography of that vast, remote jungle along the Berbice River. Extrapolations from all of that information suggested even then that the notorious gang of bandits may not have been the perpetrators of this crime.
Arokium did it again recently when he testified at the Commission of Inquiry. He said that it was logistically and geographically impossible for a rag tag gang of sometimes barefoot terrorists to commit this crime which had to have taken a lot of time, manpower and effort. Fine Man and his gang did not have that time, since they were running, hiding and dodging law enforcement search parties that were a step behind them.
The implications of Trotman’s report span a broad spectrum, but they circle right back to the turbulent times Guyanese lived in, that saw a record amount of extra judicial killings of known criminals; murders of large numbers of ordinary citizens deliberately and by accident; armed robberies; brutal home invasions for material gain and erasure of certain people; open warfare among gangs; and proliferation of the narcotic drug trade, which became Guyana’s counted parallel economy. That epoch was characterized by a fast dwindling population, people fleeing the country in droves.
Some families even took their dead overseas, and then there were the reports of officials and acolytes providing arms and ammunition, bullet proof vests and vehicles to private militias to do police work. The kicker was the criminal (now in a US prison) caught red handed in possession of really high tech spying equipment, the importation of which carried the imprimatur of officials high up in the governing echelons, according to our news reports.
Making brief remarks during the presentation of the report, President Granger vowed that such a period would never be allowed to revisit Guyana. He said, “It was a time of arbitrary arrests; of disappearances and of torture of young men; of the surge in armed robberies, narco-trafficking and gun-running. During that deadly decade, there were 1,317 murders and 7,865 armed robberies”.
Guyanese citizens, he said, do not deserve to live in continuous fear, under the threat of violent death. Their lives should not be “solitary, poor, nasty, brutish and short”. Then he made the nation this promise:
“I commit to lifting the veil of dissimulation and deception surrounding the deaths of so many Guyanese citizens. Human safety and respect for the right to life have never been so imperiled as during the first decade of the 21st century – a period to which I have referred as the ‘Troubles’. I stated, in my address to the National Assembly on 13th October 2016: “The ‘Troubles’ will be remembered as the darkest hour of our history. It was a time of the uninvestigated assassination of a Minister; of the investigation into the alleged implication of another Minister in the direction of a ‘death squad’; of the alleged implication of yet another Minister in the acquisition of a computer to track the telephone communication and location of adversaries targeted for assassination…”
The President could have gone on and on listing the horrors we lived through with compromised top officials in Government, the Police Force, the civil service, the courts and even the military.
Most people would be happy with the recommendation that the families of victims of the mass murders should be compensated. “The basis for recommending compensation is that many of the families have suffered financially from the deaths of their husbands or fathers who were at the time supporting them. They were dependent and now that they have gone there is no economic and financial support and so we feel that compensation should be given them and that has been so recommended,” the report stated.

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