While the Joint Services have maintained a stony silence on the March allegations of torture, the memories are still fresh for a young Wakenaam resident.
Seventeen-year-old Ryan Gordon recalled the horrifying experience with Joint Services ranks in March this year as though it were yesterday.
The young man alleged that he was savagely beaten by the officers who went to the island on the morning of Sunday, March 1, in search of another relative.
Woman Colonel Windee Algernon of the GDF told this newspaper last week that the army had not received any information on the matter. She said an accusation was noticed in the print media about an operation conducted by the Joint Services on the island.
According to the young man of the village of Ridge, South Wakenaam, he was asleep that Sunday morning when he received a phone call on his mobile phone from the wife of an uncle. The young farmer said his uncle’s wife asked if he had any knowledge of her husband’s whereabouts and he answered in the negative. He said he later found out that his aunt was in the custody of the ranks and was in the ‘backdam’ at the time being held by the officers when she called his phone.
This was questioned by the family and other residents on Wednesday who asked why a female officer was not present during the woman’s brief detention in March. He said one of the men took the phone from his uncle’s wife and asked him about his uncle’s whereabouts, and when told that he did not have an answer for the question, the caller started using a series of expletives. Gordon said he promptly disconnected the call and returned upstairs to his bed; it was around 5.30 am.
Less than 30 minutes later, his ordeal began. A group of men, about 15 in number, showed up in front of his home, calling him out of the house. This prompted his stepmother to run upstairs in fear and his three stepsisters trembled on seeing the men with their long guns drawn. He said two of the ranks entered the house and dragged him down the stairs to the parapet in front of the house where the beating started. He said while hitting him about the body, also using their guns to do so, the men repeatedly asked him for his uncle, and he responded that the man lived about a mile away from his home, close to a koker.
This didn’t stop them from continuing to physically abuse him, sometimes hitting him behind his head and in his back with their rifles. He said the officers, some in plain clothes and others in “army clothes,” took him down the road close to his uncle’s residence, where they forced him to kneel on the sharp edges of bricks on the road while a few heavy pieces of wood were placed on his shoulders. He said the men persistently taunted him and made jokes as the beating continued. He was then ordered by the men to lie on his belly and “crawl like a snake” and if he didn’t reach a certain distance as they counted from one to ten, they would hit him behind his ear and other parts of his body with their guns.
Gordon said the ordeal went on for about three hours before the rain came to his rescue shortly before 9 am. He said the group split up and while a few of them returned to the koker, the direction from which they came, a few others took another young man into custody and headed in a northerly direction towards the central part of Wakenaam.
When this newspaper spoke to the teenager on Wednesday, he was about to head into his family’s farm where he works every day. He reasoned that the officers became angry when he disconnected the call but noted that at the time he didn’t know whom he was speaking to.
His stepmother explained, jokingly, that they were of the impression that his uncle’s wife had run off with another man and when she called Gordon that morning, he thought she was at the other man’s home. Gordon said that even if the caller had identified himself, he could not have told him where his uncle was since he only speaks to the uncle whenever he visits their home, which is not a frequent occurrence.
His stepmother told this newspaper that she was terrified during the entire episode. She said two of the ranks were nice to her and her daughters but a few others who “had dreadlocks” mercilessly assaulted her stepson that morning. The woman said they were a poor family and wondered how anyone could torture another human being in such manner. The woman said her stepson sustained severe injuries to his stomach and after visiting a doctor shortly after the incident, she had cause to take him a second time since he continued to experience pains about his body. She said the matter was reported to the police at Parika a few days after the incident but the family has not heard anything since from the authorities.
The family said they also heard of similar treatment meted out to another farmer, Mitchell Thomas, who had said he was placed to lie in an ants nest on a farm as the Joint Services ranks questioned him about the whereabouts of Gordon’s uncle that Sunday morning. They said Thomas lived on the neighbouring island of Leguan but was employed by a farmer on Wakenaam at the time as a labourer, and he would usually spend periods of two to three months on the farm before returning to his family on Leguan. Stabroek News understands that Thomas has since returned to his family as he fears for his life following his encounter with the Joint Services.
