On the day the attempt was made on Ms Maria van Beek’s life, the airways were full of the suggestion that this was intended to send a message. If it was, then it was the most obscure message known in the history of this kind of attack. Since the perpetrators up to the time of writing were a total mystery, it is impossible even to hypothesize as to exactly what had seized their collective consciousness, and therefore what kind of communication this sordid act was intended to convey. Usually when criminals want to say something through violence, they like everyone to know in a general sense the source of that violence, so the message is clear. But in this case, not only is the message uncertain, but it is not even clear for whom it was intended.
If for the sake of argument, we rule out a message, then we are left with an act of rage, or something in that general category. Ms van Beek’s sister when speaking to the media on Thursday had given the reminder that the Commissioner of Insurance had nothing to do with the Clico collapse, thereby implying firstly, that the attempted killing was connected to the events surrounding Clico, and secondly, that perhaps someone who had suffered as a consequence of what had happened was responsible. No one seems in too much doubt that since this had all the hallmarks of a ‘hit,’ it was in some unfathomable way associated with the Clico debacle. After all, as said in our front-page comment on Friday, Ms van Beek had absolutely no public profile before Mr Lawrence Duprey’s bombshell announcement about the status of his company on January 30.
Where the matter of the motivation is concerned, some pundits promptly dismissed the thesis that it could have been anyone who may end up losing money as a consequence of Clico, because everyone is well aware that Ms van Beek had nothing to do with the company’s derelictions. Well this might be the rational position, but it presupposes that the criminal(s) behind this act were reasonably well informed, and/or that they were rational – a very large assumption. There were conspiracy hypotheses doing the rounds too, but none of them suggested really rational motivation either. In the absence of information, at this stage one is driven to the conclusion that whoever was responsible for the attempted killing really was not operating rationally in terms of motives, otherwise (or in addition thereto) they probably did not have a clue about Ms van Beek’s role as Judicial Manager.
There are, of course, no end of random robberies in this society where firearms play a role, and no one is ever charged. But at least it’s clear that robbery is the primary motive. It is true there have been numerous killings involving guns where robbery was not the motive. However, in the latter instance there has been some general notion that these were either drug related, or perpetrated by one gang or another for reasons which fall into some general category that in theory can be comprehended. But the attempted assassination of a technocrat public servant for no reason that anyone can divine is an entirely new departure, even for Guyana.
It was Ms van Beek’s sister, Ms Fries, who expressed what many people must have been thinking when they heard the news, viz, that you get up in the morning and go to work and never expect that someone is going to come and shoot you. It is because the reasoning behind this crime is so impenetrable, that it is not sufficient for the police to catch those who carried it out; most important of all, they have to ensure that they get the architect(s) of the crime too, since as said above, this has the stamp of a contract about it.
In the meantime the rest of the community wonders whether we have entered on a new era, whereby anybody going to work and doing their job can be targeted by someone with an imagined grouse or for enigmatic reasons which cannot even be guessed at by onlookers. If so, then we don’t have a society any longer; we have a state of anarchy.
