Dear Editor,
The Sunday Stabroek (SN) editorial of August 31, 2008, captioned ‘Rawlins’ gang’ has reopened the debate on whether the so-called Fineman gang was engaged in political struggle or crime. The question that comes to mind is whether Rawling and his comrades were part of a wider African Resistance. Individual responses to this question will determine in their minds whether or not the actions of Fineman and his gang were political or were purely criminal.
An objective assessment of this matter is difficult for the following reasons:
1. Most of the information on the group and its alleged activities originated from the government and the state security forces
2. No member of the group was ever tried in the courts for the activities they were accused of and therefore the ‘evidence’ against them has not been subjected to judicial scrutiny.
3. The exposure of a report in Kaieteur News (KN), albeit dubious, that attributed to Fineman a claim in which he allegedly accepted responsibility for the Lusignan massacre as an act of retaliation for the kidnapping of his girlfriend and his unborn child by the state forces.
4. The absence of irrefutable evidence of the group acknowledging or denying responsibility for any of the actions that were laid at their doors.
When the foregoing are removed from the equation what we are left with is a view from one side of the political spectrum that is conditioned by information put out by the regime and its security forces with their questionable credibility.
Having made these initial observations I will now attempt to address the issue of what is or is not political action. SN’s editorial took the position that since the Rawlins’ group never “expounded on the ideology which inspired them; they were not the local equivalents of Shining Path or FARC guerrillas, who use (or in the case of the former, used) criminal means to attain political ends. In this instance the ends themselves were more criminal than any thing else.” For anyone to attempt to compare the Rawlins’ group or the broad African Resistance to the Shining Path or the FARC guerrilla movement is to attempt to compare cheese with chalk. FARC and Shining Path is/were more developed and established movements. Using these groups as the standard to deny the political nature of the Rawlins’ group or the wider African Resistance is not helpful in understanding our reality. “Insurgent activities” have to be understood in their national context. Students who have studied the activities of liberation movements, guerrilla movements or insurgent groups are aware that very often, the information that is available in books and in the public domain are not the whole truth. It is therefore not unusual to find that when books are written, even when they are authored by representatives of these groups, the information accounting for the history and/or actions of these groups is very often the edited version.
The next point I wish to make is that insurgent groups often have an incubation period when they engage in actions without making a grand public declaration of intent – this declaration often came much later. Is the Sunday Stabroek editor saying that in instances where there are people who are organized and are engaged in armed resistance and have not publicly declared that that is the case it in effect means that they are not acting politically?
Some social analysts and political commentators take the conventional position that until a group has declared its political goals its actions are not political. So when they engage in actions that violate the criminal code of the country, their actions are therefore criminal and not political. On the other hand there are some who subscribe to the position that once a group of people consciously organized for political reasons, carries out actions based on that conscious decision they are acting politically, even if they make no public announcement of their intention. These are two contending views. I support the latter.
There is enough evidence (here I am using the word evidence not in a legal sense but in its general usage) in the public domain that supports the contention that Fineman’s group was the manifestation of a process that came to public awareness in 2002 with the Mash Day jailbreak escapees and their encampment in Buxton. Only those with short memories would fail to recall that Andrew Douglas went public with his and his comrade’s cause. It was Douglas who said that he was fighting for the liberation of Africans. A number of handbills explaining that position were also distributed around Georgetown and its environs. In my opinion the issue as to whether the actions of the Fineman gang were political or not depends to a large extent on the interpretation each of us will give to those actions.
The next issue before us is to decide whether all the things attributed to Fineman and his comrades were indeed done by them, and if so whether all of their actions were for political objectives or personal revenge as stated in SN’s editorial. Here again, we only have the call that was allegedly made by Fineman to Kaieteur News and the security forces’ ballistic evidence, the credibility of which has not been tested in a court of law. In the absence of irrefutable evidence which says that they were responsible, I am not willing to make a conclusive pronouncement on this issue.
Finally, I want to say that my assessment of the situation leads me to the position that Rawlins and his comrades were engaged in a political struggle. They were not criminals in the ordinary sense even though they may have committed crimes for both political and personal reasons. Fineman and his comrades were African Resistance Fighters and they had their strengths and weaknesses – after all, they were only human.
Yours faithfully,
Tacuma Ogunseye
