…in anger at all killings
On the day before the 10th anniversary of the Lusignan massacre, when 11 men, women and children were massacred by the Fineman gang operating from neighbouring Buxton, President Granger called once again for an inquiry into the killings of what he calls “the troubles”, between 2002 and 2008.
Whether or not such an inquiry ever takes place, Guyanese cannot let such a day go as low-keyed as on the 26th of January this year.
Have we become so jaded that we do not recall the memory of the guts of those poor children spilling out of their bellies when they were pulled out from under their beds and shot in cold blood? What kind of people are we that this barbarism is already forgotten, as are the other two massacres that were conducted at Bartica and Lindo Creek later that year? Thirty-three persons were massacred before most of Fineman’s gang were killed in a shootout with our armed forces. At the trial of some surviving gang members, there were admissions of the gang’s culpability.
The question to be asked in the present is: Why are there some in our midst who talk of “troubles” and killings by phantom squads and Police squads, but never mention the slaughter of these innocents? And why does Granger want the inquiry to only begin in 2002? Didn’t the killings start with the protests by his PNC after they refused to accept they lost the 1997 elections? Who were the persons described by Eusi Kwayana as “political sophisticates” who were behind the “freedom fighters” of whom Fineman was a member?
But we know that from the beatings and arson of anyone looking like a “PPP supporter” during the PNC protests came the killings of thirty businessmen in 1998. Enemies were defined and marked as outside the pale, who could therefore be killed with impunity. The wages of voting for the PPP were death. The bottom line is that all the persons who were killed in Lusignan were also from the PPP “tribe”. Fineman Rawlins might have wanted revenge for the kidnapping of his child-mother, but if everyone, including the President, is claiming a drug war was taking place, the question has to be asked: Why only people looking like “PPP supporters” were executed at Lusignan? Were they supporters of the Drug Lords?
Today, your Eyewitness wonders what has been the fate of those wives, husbands, and especially the children who survived that fateful day when 20 gunmen from their neighbouring village burst into their homes and committed that mayhem.
And why is it the President feels the conditions for history to repeat itself are being created?
…at God and sugar
Your Eyewitness now knows he’s heard it all. AFC Chairman Ramjattan went out with a band of Ministers from his APNU/AFC coalition to give comfort to the hundreds of sugar workers of Enmore, whom they fired just before Christmas. Your Eyewitness had thought it was callous of the Government to wield their axe at that special religious time of the year. But now he knows why.
According to Ramjattan, seems it was God who wanted the estates to be shuttered!! Your Eyewitness is sure Ramjattan has some direct pipeline to God to lay the responsibility on Him…but all he can say is the Big Fella certainly moves in mysterious ways!! Hasn’t the Government claimed it was those dastardly PPP types who’d caused the estates to be closed down because of their greed and avarice? But if Ramjattan’s to be believed (and he wouldn’t tell lies on God, would he?) God must’ve put them up to it!
And here your Eyewitness thought the PPP were communist unbelievers!!
…at sugar land
Now that sugar workers have gotten their marching orders, like the freed slaves of yore, we hear that after the “valuation” exercise, some lands will be leased to them.
But, by then, will they be around to take up the offer?