Government has not made a final decision on the payment of compensation to the relatives of the Lindo Creek massacre victims, according to Minister of State Joseph Harmon, who has maintained that the Commission of Inquiry (CoI) into the killings was not a waste of time and money.
“There are some recommendations that have been made by the [CoI] into…the deaths which occurred but there has been no formal ruling on compensation as yet,” Harmon said when questioned about compensation for the families last Friday during a post-Cabinet press briefing.
The CoI was established to inquire into the circumstances surrounding the killings of the men and to report its findings and recommendations to President David Granger.
Justice (ret’d) Donald Trotman, who led the CoI, had noted during the handing over of the final report last August that one of the main recommendations was that the families of slain miners, Cecil Arokium, Dax Arokium, Horace Drakes, Bonny Harry, Lancelot Lee, Compton Speirs, Nigel Torres and Clifton Wong, receive compensation from the state.
The eight men were mining for diamonds when they met their gruesome deaths, sometime between June 9th and June 10th, 2008. After the miners were slaughtered, their bodies and belongings were burnt.
Burnt human bones and skulls had been discovered on June 21st, 2008 by Leonard Arokium, owner of the Lindo Creek mining camp. DNA tests done in Jamaica several years later confirmed that the remains had belonged to his son Dax, his brother Cedric and the other miners.
Relatives and observers have recently expressed concern that the report is yet to be made public though it was handed over to the president more than six months ago. They had also stressed the fact that millions of dollars were spent to conduct the inquiry.
Asked to comment on the fact that a large sum was spent on the inquiry and the recommendations made are yet to be implemented, Harmon said that it was not a waste of money and informed that administrative recommendations were implemented already.
“It’s a lot of money indeed but the value of the life of every Guyanese, we cannot put a price tag on it. Several Guyanese lives were lost. Many years have elapsed from the time that occurred until the time the Commission of Inquiry was put into place,” he said, before adding that the commission made several recommendations, including several that are administrative in nature. “They have been acted upon at the level of the Guyana Police Force and the Guyana Defence Force. Some of them have peculiar implications and those matters are still to be acted upon,” he added.
Harmon also told reporters that such inquiries usually produce a huge amount of recommendations, which then need to be examined. “So you now have to look at every one of these recommendations and see which ones can be implemented now…in the medium-term… and in the long-term,” he explained.
With regard to Lindo Creek, he said that some of the recommendations regard the restructuring and reorganising of the way the Guyana Police Force and Guyana Defence Force operate. “There are some administrative arrangements that have been made to ensure that these operational matters are dealt with in a different way,” he said, before adding that administrative lapses that occurred should not happen anymore because the inquiry has given clear directions in that regard.
Trotman has revealed that he recommended that some parts of the investigation be re-opened and while noting that no one has been found culpable, he recommended that senior security officials during the time of the killings be called upon to explain their conduct.
Granger previously said that the report raises “troubling questions” about the roles of the police and defence forces as well as the reticence of the political administration of the day to provide useful evidence to the CoI.
He assured that the report’s recommendations were being studied and “will be acted upon” in due course. Granger would later inform that the report is being perused “in detail.” He had said, too, that there is a lot of evidence and although there are some brief recommendations “we need to ensure that they are enforceable.”
A few weeks ago, relatives of some of the men warned that they are contemplating “taking to the streets” to protest, given the delay in the release of the report to the public.
This newspaper spoke to Jackie Arokium, Carmen Gittens and Kellisa King, who all said that they expected that by now the recommendations contained in the CoI report would have been implemented.
“I don’t want to judge. A promise was made to us and I am expecting to hear from them…I don’t want to suspect this or that,” Arokium, who lost her son Dax said. “It’s not about the money and those things. I really don’t care about that but I just want to see those people [those responsible] put in the slammer and that is what I call justice,” she added.
