The handful of fishermen who had congregated on the Number 44 wharf on Tuesday were sitting under a shed sheltering from a brisk drizzle. They appeared melancholy and it seemed that alcohol had gotten the better of some of them.
These days, Corentyne fishermen talk about little else but the scourge of piracy that has taken the lives of many of their comrades and thrown their respective enterprises into a tailspin. The departure of fishing vessels for the fishing grounds of the open seas and regions close to Guyana’s border with Suriname, are, these days, emotional moments. Fishing expeditions can last for nine or ten days at a time and for the families of the crews that usually number about five the wait for the return of the vessels can be hell.
Piracy is about stripping fishing vessels of their hard-earned catch, worth hundreds of thousands of dollars as well as their costly operating equipment. In the dark and desolate waters of the vast fishing area, however, lives are taken too.
It is not uncommon for central government to have to ‘tek blows’ whenever a major crisis afflicts a rural or hinterland community. It is the same with the piracy. Whenever the attacks take place and lives and property are lost the decibel level of the protest rises.
Some of the fishermen on the Number 44 wharf on Tuesday say they want guns. Others want police or coastguard protection. None, they say, has been forthcoming and you sense that they have become frustrated with the meetings and the promises and the hive of activity that usually succeeds every pirate attack and eventually subsides. It is as if the pain of their cumulative losses has rendered them cynical in the face of official gestures that have done nothing to stem the flow of the pirates’ violence.
On Tuesday, a shirtless fishing captain named Derrick was lying under the shed where the other men had congregated. He appeared in a contemplative mood. In October last year his vessel had been attacked by pirates. The vessel had been plundered and the entire crew thrown overboard. Derrick and another crew member had made it to the surface and for some inexplicable reason had been allowed by their would-be killers to board the stricken vessel and try, somehow, to reach the shore. To this day the bodies of the other three crew members have not been found. Derrick say that while it was an ordeal that he would never forget he could not allow it to take his livelihood away from him. Since last October he had gone fishing on four occasions. He was due to take to the seas again last Wednesday.
It is the same with the other fishermen. There is a compulsoriness to their pursuit that renders it necessary for them to put every successive act of piracv behind them.
In other countries these men would benefit from grief counselling. There would also be counselling and other forms of support for the families of the men who lose their lives. The people in the Corentyne fishing communities have no such services at their disposal. They must find their own means of processing their grief, their fear and their frustration and sometimes all that the fishermen can do is drown their sorrows in alcohol. The families of the victims, the wives, mothers and children appear to rely on the informal community networks to help make the pain more bearable.
At Number 44 Wharf on Tuesday about a dozen fishing vessels were berthed. They appeared calm and it was hard to imagine that those small spaces were sometimes the scenes of murder and mayhem. When their fishing pursuits had not been cut short by the pirates they would return to shore amidst scenes of muted celebration and the hive of activity associated with disposing of the catch. You have to live in a fishing community or otherwise become familiar with it to understand the socio-economic bond that exists between the sea and these communities.
Ram
Ram lives at Number 79 Village. He is not a fisherman but is at the very centre of a personal family crisis spawned by piracy. In the two preceding years he has lost two nephews. Both of them were the breadwinners in young families. Even over the telephone there was an intensity to his anger. He agreed to talk but refused to meet us face to face. He told us that the fishing communities that had been victims of piracy had felt betrayed by the slew of broken official promises that had come and gone even as the fishing villages continued to count their losses and bury their dead.
The men who had congregated at the Number 44 wharf were not all fishermen. The fishing industry offers various types of employment so that piracy poses a threat to various sub sectors of the wider fishing economy. Readying his seines to trap and hold the weighty catch is not a requirement that can be taken for granted. Some of the men were mending seines in preparation for fresh fishing trips, fresh excursions into danger.
One of the men who was mending seines ventured a comment about equipping fishermen with automatic weapons. When the remark got little traction among his colleagues he raised it again. He seemed deadly serious. It is, it seems, a reflection of the desperation of some of the victims that they are prepare to risk more bloodbaths to beat back the pirates. The man mending the seines persisted with the idea of guns, pointing out that no one, not least the government appeared to have any clear idea as to how to stop the pirates.
Not everyone talks. Some appear fearful. It seems that there may well be a conviction that in some cases pirates may be under the very noses of the victims. The fishing communities no longer subscribe to the view that the pirates, at least all of them, come from Suriname.
Pirate raids are swift and clinical. The pirates work with smaller, swifter vessels. They appear alongside the fishing vessels armed (with guns and cutlasses) and masked. The crews are subdued and bound. The pirates take the catch, the seine and the boat engine leaving the boat to drift. The luckier fishermen manage to make it ashore in their stricken vessels. Some are found drifting. Empty vessels tell their own grim stories. The more ruthless pirates simply dump their hapless, bound victims overboard.
Krishnanand Ramnarine aka ‘Sato’ owns five fishing vessels and operates a supermarket inside the Number 79 market. He also sells fish on the Number 44 wharf and at the Number 79 market. The ill-fated fishing vessel which Derrick had captained when it was hijacked is now out of service. Derrick swears he would not ever work the boat again. On Tuesday it was nowhere to be seen.
The fishermen concede that they have little choice but to suppress their fears though they must deal as well with the tensions that arise within families and communities every time a vessel with fathers and sons sets off on a fishing trip, As it happens the tensions associated with the recent fresh pirate attacks coincides with the decline of the sugar industry and the impact on employment with GUYSUCO.
One of the fisherman on the Number 44 wharf tried to sum up the human cost. The victims are not only those fishermen whose lives are brutally taken from them. There are homes left grief-stricken and vulnerable by the loss of husbands, sons and breadwinners.
When we left the Corentyne on Tuesday the men to whom we had spoken still seemed resigned to having to fight off the challenges that piracy has brought to their communities.
