(This is one of a series of fortnightly columns from Guy-anese in the diaspora and others with an interest in issues related to Guyana and the Caribbean)
The ringing telephone shattered the stillness of my Sunday morning reverie. The bandits had invaded Bartica and 12 people were dead. How is our mother? I asked. “She’s okay, I’ve spoken with her, she hid under the bed”, my brother responded.
Bartica, the idyllic village of my childhood, had been brutally assaulted by armed gunmen, to whom robbery seemed incidental, something to do while they were doing what they were doing, creating terror and taking random lives.
I was concerned for my mother, sad that at her age she is forced to endure such trauma, but unlike many of my friends here in Toronto, I am not shocked that this could happen. I’ve spent most of my life in Guyana and have had the ignominious experience of being attacked and held at gunpoint at 9:00 o’clock at night in residential Bel Air Park while in the benign process of making a cup of tea.
I know that it could happen anywhere.
Three weeks ago, it was Lusignan. Eleven lives lost, Indian lives it was emphasized, as though we, who are other than Indian, should take some kind of perverse comfort in the fact that we were safe, we would not be harmed, we could sympathize from the safe distance of our different pigmentation or hair textures.
We were sold the story then, that this was the work of a man infuriated by his belief that the national security forces had taken his pregnant girlfriend. The implausibility of the notion, that this man could somehow convince his friends that they should all unite around his personal injustice and slaughter their brothers and sisters as revenge, seemed to escape us.
We were assured that the perpetrators of the Lusignan horror would face the full force of the law. A fifty million dollar ransom was promptly placed for the capture of the ringleader and the bulldozers were dispatched to mow down the bush where these criminals were hiding. A mere three weeks later, when our security forces must surely have been on high alert, this band of terrorists (the media reports that the President said it was the same group) was able to mobilize resources and move undetected from Buxton to Bartica.
The government of Guyana continues to posture, with misplaced bravado, making unsupported claims that they are in control of the situation, as the dead bodies continue to pile up. How many more lives will be lost while they pontificate? Is it that our security forces, like the rest of us, had shoved the Lusignan tragedy into the shadows of their minds and gotten on with things?
As I write this, the nation prepares to celebrate Mashramani, a “celebration after hard work” one week after 12 sons have been murdered in Bartica, and the news reports around this tragedy trickle down to us in sparse droplets.
It is a bitter testament to the failure of our government that a group of citizens could feel so alienated, so marginalized that they would commit such horrific acts. This is not one deranged individual, this is a collective. A collective of young men who have nothing to lose, who exist on the fringes of society, who have no future, no freedom, and no hope, who know they are marked for death regardless of what they do. Someone with nothing to lose is a dangerous individual. An entire group of citizens who believe they have nothing to lose is a ticking time bomb that is bound to explode into massive destruction. It is our duty to find out what it is that drove these men to behave like beasts in their murderous rampages, and to try and establish ways of making sure the cycle ceases. Should we hound them down and retaliate in kind without at least trying to ascertain their motives, their reasons for doing what they do, there will be many more that will rise up and “another youth man gon take dey place.”
An entire village of Guyanese citizens remains ostracized from mainstream society, while a government and its primary political opponent find in a national tragedy an opportunity to score cheap political points.
Meanwhile, for the five year old child living in Buxton whose only interaction with the national security forces is watching them from his corner where he cowers in fear as they ransack his grandmother’s house or bulldoze his grandfather’s farm, the mistrust and resentment festers and putrefies into the certainty that power is found at the end of a gun and might is always right. What can we expect of him?
We got rid of Dale Moore and Andrew Douglas and the other members of that “group of criminals that was hiding in Buxton.” Why then did the carnage at Lusignan and Bartica occur if, as our President asserts, all we need to do is get rid of the criminals hiding in Buxton?
The President’s outright rejection of Father Rodrigues’ suggestion that the government explore ways of engaging these insurgents and hear what it is they are seeking is an appalling act of arrogance driven folly. The President scoffs at the notion that these men could be deemed insurgents, that they could be fighting for a cause. Whether or not we deem their cause to be legitimate is irrelevant.
They are convinced that they are fighting for a cause and it is this belief that makes them insurgents. In a crisis such as this every possible option must be explored. Father Rodrigues’ statement took immense courage, even as it has resulted in him being pilloried – and predictably, made the target of some racist verbal assaults – in some quarters in the local press and internet blogs. Let us understand. Father Rodrigues did not suggest that these men be absolved of their murderous crimes. He shared his observation that there is a burgeoning group of young people, from a specific segment of society, who, for whatever reasons, founded or unfounded, feel left out and marginalized, and believe themselves to be social outcasts.
He made the point that unless ways are found to engage these citizens and get to the bottom of the matter, the results will be disastrous.
It is a government’s duty to govern and protect all of its citizens.
