Neesa Gopaul is not the first Guyanese child to have suffered and died because the much vaunted system designed to protect the weak and vulnerable failed to function properly. Systems, however, cannot function in isolation, ill-attended by those who, perhaps, understand little and care less about the real significance of their existence. The evidence of the kind of institutional indifference to protecting the weak and innocent from being wronged and hurt is evidenced both in the absence of protective mechanisms with which to do so and, where such mechanisms may exist, in an indifference to their diligent application by those charged with doing so. As a consequence, victims suffer in silence, terrible crimes go uninvestigated and all that we appear able to do is to await another terrible wrongdoing, another victim whom, had we cared enough, could have been saved.
In Neesa’s case, we have been told the terrible tale of the horrors that preceded her slaughter; and if the public account of the unspeakable cruelty that she endured has made her case a kind of watershed and galvanized the powers that be into an unprecedented enquiry and a threat of consequence for those deemed to have been inattentive to her circumstances, it allows too for sober reflection on those who may have gone before her because we did not care enough to save them.
We should have saved Neesa. At sixteen, she should have been safe in the comfort of a secure home under the protection of people who loved and cared for her and were committed to protecting her. She ought not to have had to lead a life punctuated by abuse, filled with a perpetual terror that must have made her seem as though the world around her was unreal.
Long before her horribly mutilated body was found stuffed inside a suitcase on the Soesdyke/Linden Highway, her life had been taken away from her by the unspeakable cruelty of her tormentors and by the appalling inattention, perhaps even indifference of the rest of us who served as witnesses to her death. Loathe though we may be to admit it, the fate of Neesa Gopaul is a reflection of what we as a nation may have become; some possessed of a capacity to do unspeakable evil and most of us inclined to do no more than watch that evil take its course.
What we know suggests that Neesa could have spared much of her pain and
her undeserving end. We could have given her the chance for which she repeatedly and desperately begged; to make something of her potential, to make her dead father proud, perhaps to make us all proud. Instead, her end came, brutally, the conclusion of a succession of horrors, some, perhaps, unknown. Her unbearably heart-rending provides a poignant microcosm of a culture of barbarism now familiar to our country; the macabre beheadings, the clinical executions and the protracted torture and bludgeoning to death of a sixteen year-old girl. Though Neesa’s death came amidst an orgy of equally hideous crimes, her demise invokes a chilling sense of national shame.
You have to ponder, episode by chilling final episode, the story of Neesa’s unlived life to come to a full understanding of the tragedy that it symbolizes. You have to contemplate the unending loneliness and terror ingrained by savage beatings, wanton abuse and, perhaps, more. You have to ponder too the demonic urgings that drove her tormentors to inflict their protracted and mindless torture and finally to bring the most brutal end to her life. You have to shudder at the thought that there are more monsters like Neesa’s killers and that they will exploit our inattention, our indifference to inflict more pain on innocent children and more shame on those of us who appear unable to save them.
She must have died a frightened, bitter, world-weary child, who, perhaps, continually wondered what she had done to deserve this, and, more poignantly, why her pleadings, her screams did not save her; and that is what we must ponder most for what we know suggests that she reached out in every direction that she could, begging to be spared, to be saved. That no one reached back and saved her is a matter that has left us with a mountain of guilt; for it was up to us – all of us – to save Neesa.
If she had met her demise at the hands of some crazed stranger on some dark night on some lonely road that would have been no less a tragedy. At least, however, it would have been fathomable.
What is unfathomable is her screams for help unfolded over time, they came in broad daylight and were heard by the very people who were best positioned to save her; friends, family and institutions fashioned for just such a purpose. Still, in the end, she was dragged to a hellish demise, battered to a point where initially her head was unrecognizable.
We dropped the ball or, perhaps, we need to ask ourselves whether we ever really held it anyway. Do we care enough about the brutishness the dwells in our midst, the continually shows itself to us in its various frightening manifestations and of which the tragedy of Neesa Gopaul is but a single terrible microcosm. Or are we content to immerse ourselves on a cocoon on self-denial, too weak and afraid to concede its existence far less to confront it. Whatever the reason, we have become expert on minding what we perceive to be our own business, ignoring entirely the reality that the circumstances dictate that being ours brothers’ (and sisters’) keepers is the same thing as being our own keepers. The brutishness, except we stand against it, together, will, sooner or later, visit our own lives in one way or another.
The media’s customary sound bite reporting, was unable, either in its repetitiveness or its detail to grasp and offer us the real significance of the Neesa Gopaul story. It is, in the first instance, a story that mirrors multiple other unfolding experiences that will end equally tragically.
It is, too, the story of a society that is yet to come to terms with its own macabre propensities. Even the grossest, vilest transgressions no longer shock us. We bear witness to them with barely a murmur then return to our cocooned separate existences, all the time seeking to persuade ourselves that the Neesa Gopaul story is disconnected from our own better ordered lives. It is propensity which, ultimately, will consume us.
For a change the buck must stop where it stops though we must wonder whether the enquiry into Neesa’s experience and the consequences for those perceived to be at fault is not as much a political reaction, arising out of subject Minister’s concession that what she described as “the protocols” were not applied rather than a sincere recognition that what occurred was a national tragedy and an overwhelming shame; and we must wonder too why it took the Neesa Gopaul experience to awaken the powers that be to its duty to probe such atrocities………atrocities like mysterious police killings, more accurately, terminal acts not sanctioned under the law; these and more. Moreover, we must hope that Neesa’s death is a watershed and that the official enquiry sets a precedent that will, in the future, be applied with the same measure of diligence; and, perhaps most importantly that the apportioning of responsibility and the application of the attendant consequences will not exempt those who hold real power and, in consequence, the real responsibility to be thorough and vigilant in ensuring, as far as is humanly possible, that horrors like Neesa Gopaul’s are not visited upon us.
We must be clear about one thing; the Neesa Gopaul tragedy has more to do with an absence of conscientiousness, perhaps even caring than with the ‘protocols’ of which the Minister spoke. For, indeed, from all that we have been told, Neesa’s sustained suffering and abuse was a matter of extensive public knowledge and even in the absence of the ‘protocols,’ her circumstances alone should, perhaps, have galvanized those closest to her tragedy into action.
Protocols are paper procedures – whatever else we may choose to call them – that have would have had to have been attended by a measure of humanity; and even if there were no protocols the humanity should have been there to take the process forward. Neesa could have been saved. Others before her could have been saved. To ignore the broader lessons that derive from her demise add the insult of indifference to the injury of her death.
