Dear Editor,
Instead of asking ‘whodunit’, it is better to ask: who is responsible for it? That would be the death by gunfire of one Courtney Crum-Ewing. It seems that, other than for his loved ones, Guyana gets ready to move on, from what looks doomed to be consigned to that dank expanding Guyanese storage reservoir called cold cases. It would be one more mystery to add to the long litany of suspicious domestic tragedies. The media was awash with a man freed after some forty years for involvement in the most high-profile murder, a political assassination, in this country. It does not get any higher than that of Dr. Walter Rodney. Nor more arctic in the chilling nature of justice in this country. I would contend that it is more of injustice: leadership evils and injustice, governmental injustice, political injustice.
The PNC has its decades-old albatross that hangs around its neck, and hangs it, however probed or analyzed or concluded. And by that identical yardstick, the PPP has its own footprints and fingerprints that similarly damn it. Twist it or turn it, the leadership of both groups are burdened by those two murderous legacies. And that is just the start, the highest profiled among many others of less glaring luminosity. Editor, the question I asked in the very first sentence of this writing still stands. It was two questions blended into one: not just whodunit, but who was responsible for Mr. Crum-Ewing’s well-orchestrated murder? We have copied well from outsiders in a bow to literary imperialism, when we label those behind such suspicious and supposedly mysterious murders as “the intellectual authors.”
Editor, what we have are more than cold cases condemned to the tormenting suspension of judicial purgatory. I never knew Courtney Crum-Ewing. But I know his people well enough, and someone who cared for him in his traumatic days. They have relayed some stories, with fingers firmly pointed. The Sicilian Cosa Nostra has a brotherhood, too; a most murderous one. The question remains: not whodunit, but who is responsible for the murder of Courtney Crum-Ewing.
Sincerely,
GHK Lall
