On January 26, the entire country mourned with Lusignan the savage murders of 11 children, men and women. The terror and pain of that morning will forever be with the families of the victims and the community. And while the intensity of the hurt may diminish, the gnawing at the spirit will never end. What remains a wide open question that needs to be answered is who engineered it and what was its purpose? A haze as murky and impenetrable as the darkness that enshrouded Lusignan that morning has spread over this crime, A year later there a few cases in court and the name `Fineman’ rolls easily off some lips while for others there is great skepticism and with it a cold uneasiness.
In a few days it will be time to mourn with Bartica the murders on February 17 last year. On that night 12 men including policemen were brutally cut down by gunmen. The same situation prevails as it relates to the engineers behind this massacre. A few cases have been brought in court and the name `Fineman’ is ubiquitous.
A few months hence, it will be time to remember the eight men who were murdered at Lindo Creek sometime in June last year. Here again the name of the notorious `Fineman’ is peddled and the mystery is even greater.
Three massacres in six months that claimed the lives of 31 men, women and children and yet there is no credible and magisterial account of the nefarious intertwining and mobilization that permitted one or more gangs to do what they did and flee into their hideouts without a single one being caught on the spot. By various estimates at least 12 to 18 men participated in the first massacre, a similar number in the second and an unknown number in third. But none was caught in locus and each and every ascription of responsibility that followed has been based presumably on hearsay as identification and forensic evidence has been hard to come by.
Time will tell whether there is substance to the official line that has been presented by the government to the public. Of course, the subject of these allegations Rondell `Fineman’ Rawlins was cut down in a hail of gunfire. His end came the same way as many other wanted men and dead men simply tell no tales. However, the country desperately needs answers on all three slaughters so that the underground witch hunting and finger pointing that occurs on a daily basis could dissipate.
The best prospect for triangulating all of the various leads and clues has always been the Lindo massacre because of the geography of the area, the several tantalizing clues and the prospect that there may have been at least one person, according to the police and others, who survived and witnessed the mayhem.
If the authorities really want to know what happened at Lindo Creek – and by extension, at least as far as they are concerned at Lusignan and Bartica – then they will make dogged efforts to pursue all of the leads that exist. The geography of the Lindo Creek area and accessibility to it has narrowed down the numbers of groups and gangs that could have been in the area on that fateful day. A careful analysis of the various movements in that area could be very revealing.
Further, two telephone instruments have come back to life from the dead to haunt the perpetrators of Lindo Creek. They signify that the phones were extracted from the killing zone by the murderers. A careful and painstaking tracing of all the calls made to and from those numbers should have yielded a veritable cache of leads on what happened at Lindo Creek. Yet, there is no sign that law enforcement has taken these leads seriously. In any other jurisdiction where professionalism is valued law enforcers would have been able to piece together what happened with those tell-tale phones. As time slips by the trail grows colder. There are other nagging oddities like the `Fineman’ diary that the police said that they retrieved at Christmas Falls. Why has it not been presented to the public particularly as it supposedly implicated him? Then there is the long-awaited DNA testing of the remains of the Lindo Creek victims which could settle how many people were there. However, months later very little has been heard.
Perhaps the biggest surprise has been the police’s failure to process the supposed witness or suspect in the Lindo Creek attack that they said they had apprehended. Why would they not clarify this person’s role? There is now a man with a story to tell and he wants to repeat it to the President, according to information this newspaper has been privy to. Are the authorities prepared to grant him protection? Are there non-governmental organizations which are prepared to rise to the challenge in the quest to find these much-needed answers? Whether this man is the witness the police referred to cannot be determined just like that; it can only be done in the ambit of a professional investigation.
The government has shown little inclination to get to the bottom of any investigation that could potentially bring the disciplined forces into disrepute – from the death squads to torture to brutality to corruption. The country cannot afford to have the massacres swept under the rug or fictionalized accounts attached to it. The country also cannot afford law enforcement agencies that are subjected to superficial reforms. It is time for a real commission of inquiry into the massacres outside of the control of the government and the joint services.
