The atrocity at Lusignan is another demonstration of the depravity coarsening the society, the Guyana Human Rights Association (GHRA) said yesterday and it urged the armed forces to set an example for the citizenry by committing to standards of law and order.
In a press release, the GHRA Executive Committee said the killings will forever change the lives of survivors though the wider society “is learning to live in denial of wanton cruelty and developing an unwholesome ability to absorb atrocities.”
It said the killings were a demonstration of cruelty out of control. “None of the criminal outrages which have punctuated the past five years, such as the burning of the Chester family home in Buxton while preventing them from getting out and the Agricola massacre, match this latest incident for depravity.”
The cruelty is also contaminating the response of the police and the army in their interaction with civilians. “Well-founded allegations of abuse suffered by villagers in Buxton have been followed more recently by allegations of torture at the heart of the GDF,” the release said. Rather than protect villagers of all races, official responses to the East Coast violence have succeeded in dragging more and more families into the cortex of grief, the GHRA said.
It said the alleged abduction of 19-year-old Tenisha Morgan, “the heavily pregnant child-mother of the leader of a criminal gang,” if proven to be true, would be on a par with the behaviour of criminals in terms of offensiveness.
The GHRA said in the coming days its priority would be “that the political powers pay profound, rather than perfunctory” attention to the grief-stricken families who have lost members to violence on the East Coast. The group said these must now number in the hundreds: families of innocent villagers, of policemen and soldiers, of criminals, of drug-lords and phantoms, of ‘informers’ and of political activists. Virtually none of these deaths have been the subject of an inquest, trial or formal enquiry. Families are left to come to terms with their loss “in an environment which cannot provide judicial closure and is seemingly unresponsive to grief”.
It is paramount that state agencies immediately rid themselves of the image of being callous and disposed to cruelty, by restoring civilized norms and the rule of law as their basic operating procedures.
The GHRA said this is the only way to restore civilian confidence in their ability to end criminal violence. Such a step would also encourage similar standards of law and order to be applied to civilian behaviour, with respect to racial incitement. Without an absolute commitment to law and order, by the police and army, “cruelty and callousness will continue to coarsen the society, extracting a deadly price, mainly from the poor and powerless,” the GHRA said.
