Dear Editor,
The Lusignan massacre is shocking in its barbarity. But to suggest, as a PPP press statement and the PPP-controlled IAC have done, that the violence is “centrally directed” is to raise the spectre of terrorism and civil war. To suggest, as the President has done, that the slaughter is linked in any way to a probe into army weapons delivered in the past to the former PNC government and party may be read as casting suspicion on that party and its members and supporters.
What may be a case of criminal vengeance is, by this type of statement, used to feed the bonfire of our racial and political rivalries and thus defeats the calls by all parties and religious groups for restraint and calm.
Unless there is evidence that opposition or other forces (including rogue elements from the PNC) are “centrally” directing this kind of action, this type of statement is not helpful. At this stage, the government ought to arrest the people involved in the “central direction” if it has proof. By decapitating the movement, lives may be spared.
Otherwise, casting aspersions and playing on fears embedded in our collective memory and in the particular history of the PPP will only worsen matters.
It would similarly be useless for Tacuma Ogunseye and the partisans of the “Afro-Guyanese Armed Resistance” to seek to elevate the murder of the unarmed and innocent into some noble act of racial liberation. Sooner or later, violence of this sort becomes the bread and wine, if I may use this term, of some ethnic and political activists among us. We are a people of which each racial component carries its list of grievances. And it is grievance that feeds some of our anxieties and hatred.
Let none seek to profit from the tragedy of these deaths. And in the same way that the political parties and religious leaders have recognised the potential for divisiveness and urged restraint, the government and party in power ought to pay attention to their own responses in the heat of the moment. That there are issues — torture by the armed forces, terrible prison conditions, undermanned and under-trained police — that need to be addressed by the Ministry of Home Affairs, issues that point to other types of violence and barbarity in the society, is acknowledged.
These issues are as urgent in their demand for resolution as is the explosion of violence that all, African, Indian, Amerindian and the rest, have suffered at the hands of the people who committed the Lusignan crime.
Yours faithfully,
Abu Bakr
