WE ARE essentially a nation that prefers to shift social concerns from a personal responsibility to a quick psycho-religious clarification of Angels and Demons; void of the diverse shades of reality that life is actually composed of. Extra-judicial killing is one area we have stepped away from having a deep social opinion about. If you are reading this article then you are engaging the subject and will soon recognise that it concerns a broader look at contributing factors that we ignore. This is not a new social phenomenon, but that it existed before, it was easy to have it escalate over the last 20 years.

This is an administrative period of sanity in this country and sanity demands a fixing of the insane. There are emotionally justified reasons that people want people who violate their lives through criminal invasions physically hurt or dead. But this is the part that the media resonates, with declarations of the individual’s past, to justify the murder of that accused individual, that sometimes mask the truth that he may have died for the secrets known of those accepted as respectable. Thus, we must understand that there are wider consequences that that approach conceals. For the small groups who have been paying attention to the casual approach to the dismissal of human life in Guyana, other matters have come to the fore. Politics, ethnicity and the recent nouveau rich business upsurge, to which some 400-700 persons are of interest to international law enforcement also exist, are striving, and some have the promoted status as stakeholders of the national wellbeing. Their names are submitted to infiltrate the uphill task of the current administration in bringing Guyana from the state the World Bank described in 2003 as, “Guyana suffering a ‘crisis of governance’”, and we know what was happening back then.

The amazing contradicting presumption was in February last when Anil Nandlall declared in the media that the “Main objective of the crime spree Commission of Inquiry is to link the PPP/C gov’t with criminality”. This offers an insight into the barren landscape that exists for a consciousness of this person. What about mothers who still do not know where their sons’ remains are? The PPP was involved. Wasn’t Leslie Ramsammy the government minister who was the go-between with Roger Khan for the PPP/C government? Did Ramsammy not purchase sensitive equipment and hand it over to the drug dealer, which the Defence Force seized? Did the delusional Roger Khan not declare to the world that he was fighting crime for the PPP/C government of Guyana? The COI on the troubled era is to bring closure and demonstrate that justice is still absolutely relevant to this country.
Human life in that period had become cheap. Many of the killings during that era and today are privately funded, with the then government declaring a platform for money laundering, drug trafficking, the execution of public servants that did not give-in to bribes against their professional judgement. Cite ‘Alicia Foster’ and the young GGMC employee, paints a horrific scene of that period and the creatures of that era are still among us. The COI into the assassination plot against the president has been the most revealing ‘inquiry’ so far at completion. It exposed the condensed legal framework and the police support for Guyana’s blood-soaked criminal business community. It revealed how criminalised the Police Force had become. If the reader has knowledge of the players involved in that COI, both the accuser, the accused and their lawyers, then it would be much easier to understand why the atmosphere of police involvement or connection with extra-judicial killings today, should not be allowed to exist.

The wards of Georgetown have been populated by low-income families for the past 100 years, traumatised and pushed into evolving survival mechanisms of street cleverness and hustle. They have sold stolen jewellery to reputable jewellery establishments; have worked as enforcers for shady businessmen who have relied on their street savvy to get not so legal things done, from burning properties to murder, and are the prime subjects for prison and, of late, extra-judicial execution.

If you commit crimes then you should pay. But crime in Guyana has both political, economic and racial connotations. For example, some years ago a businessman with ‘phantom’ political-entitlement connections went to a source (this source was a former policeman) who took them into Albouystown to recruit a crew to murder a woman, who he thought stood in the way of him obtaining a property. The elderly woman was murdered, the suspects arrested and eventually sent to prison for a long time, but it was not so for the provider of the weapons or the recruiter who is the intellectual author of the act. Because of a highly compromised police situation, they were not even charged, even with circumstantial evidence. Then there is the damage done to policemen. Ex-policemen are responsible for a significant volume of paid murders including beheadings. Others have dwindled into shells of themselves. I knew the policeman who shot George Butcher (a criminal from South Georgetown) and left him in a wheelchair on the streets for the rest of his life. I was working at GRB when he and a squad also shot a resident of Laing Avenue who was not dead when they stopped at German and ate while this young man bled to death. I came to know that policemen through phases of hostile communication over time, then in the 90s I saw him at a hospital. He was in a wheelchair and was trying to tell me something. He had suffered a stroke. I think he was crying because the condition inhibited his speech, though he was trying hard. His relatives or friends took him away, he passed away some months later.

Bad people exist, so do mental cases. A young man does not join the police force to be conditioned as a murderer of a bad record, but non-threatening suspects and a fool of the streets should be guided by justice to wrestle with his demons. The Police culture of entitled citizens will impair judgement. Had the two policemen killed by an obviously insane Deryck Kanhai on Middle Street in 2013, practised standard engagement procedures instead of rendering entitled-money man privilege to him, they would still be alive today. Their deaths rest with those who taught them ‘this law is fo dis one, and that law is fo dem.’