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Truth and reconciliation must come after atonement
Dear Editor,
I have read the letter by Robin Singh, (December, 2018). I cannot from where I stand and from what I have experienced support any suggestion of a reconciliation commission, when Robin Singh’s letter in its posture exhibits the very presumptuous dishonesty on matters that are still alive in the dreams of many of us today. One must first embrace an era in totality regardless of how uncomfortable that process is, and not in selective self serving extracts. Atonement and reconciliation is a process in reference to populations and not to the sinister architects who perpetrated with cold calculative intentions, facilitating mass murder and marginalisation along racial lines, creating an atmosphere that some lives are to be sacrificed on some political cultic altar as in the latter days with the assassination of Courtney Crum-Ewing who was shot three times to the head and twice to the body.
The emergence of the ‘Fine Man gang’ is late in the events that envelop what has to be taken into full analysis in the context of our recent history of the Roger Khan-Jagdeo tragedy.
Atonement is the ancient prototype of the truth and reconciliation idea. It constitutes the ritual sacrifice of animals over a period. Yes, it revolves around a blood sacrifice, perceived by the ancients as a cleansing rite. The 20th century translation of Atonement evolved with the trials at Nuremberg post 1945 and is today further modified at The Hague International Criminal court. Reconciliation exists between populations; in our situation, the constituencies of the major political parties, but is not extended to the political architects who conspired to murder, marginalise, cultivate hatreds, and as correctly defined by Freddie Kissoon, to practice Ideological racism and damage the values of a nation, traumatising a perceived opposition constituency for their own political existence.
The first victim of this racist innate practice was a coconut seller on Mandela Avenue who was randomly shot by newly appointed PPP ministerial guards early in 1993. His crime was his ethnicity. By 1996 we were protesting by the multitude for the murder of Jermaine Wilkinson. During that period I visited the office of Desmond Hoyte and insisted that he come to Albouystown. The above the Law ‘Death Squad,’ the era of extra-judicial killings and the criminalisation of the GPF had commenced, with a severe bias.
This is proven true when in 1997 the GNCB bank at Anna Regina was robbed and a young policeman Richard Faikall fought them off single-handedly and lost his life. The Black clothes were told to stand down because at the head of the Bank robber gang was the known PPP assassin ‘ Dougla Alfred’ Tulsi Persaud among others.
How does anyone tell the relatives of the Lindo Creek massacre to forgive on some superficial pretext? How do you tell the mothers of sons never allowed to bury their children to forgive the high official who George ‘Bumbalay’ Bacchus said on 28 TV had instructed them, meaning he, the informant, and his government death squad colleagues, not to throw the ‘bodies they murdered all over the place.’
Many of the people killed like the Baker brothers were not criminals but citizens with civil contentions with people who had money to pay the death squad members and their affiliates, to commit murder because the State had facilitated this platform.
As a citizen I hold the APNU-AFC accountable, especially when I hear the Leader of the PPP and Leslie Ramsammy, and those people who have damaged this country so much, pretending not to be the twisted demented people they are, masquerading a facade of normalcy. Its tantamount to witnessing Adolf Eichmann as part of the Government of Israel or as an opinion maker of that state. Yes, this nation needs to be cleansed, but not through a Reconciliation Commission, but through our courts and the Hague Court of crimes against Humanity.
Barrington Braithwaite
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