IN remembering the 43 innocent souls of those who perished that fateful day, 55 years ago, when the Son Chapman launch was blown to pieces, Minister of Legal Affairs and Attorney General, Basil Williams, joined Lindeners on Saturday in a commemoration ceremony. Present were several regional officials including Member of Parliament, Jermaine Figueira and Regional Chairman, Renis Morian.

In his feature address, Williams pointed out that never again must terrorist acts such as those, fueled by racial and political hate, must occur in Guyana and that the coalition government has made significant strides in countering terrorism to ensure that they do not occur again.

This, too, can be very difficult to pull off since Guyana can now tap into technology that can solve such terrorist mysteries.

“We have the technology today to run that down. We have actually looked at countering terrorism and there are many weapons to counter terrorism and one of the things is that people don’t know up to this day who did it … but we could be able to pinpoint it with the type of technology we present today in my area of countering [the] financing of terrorism, we could be able to get to the root of the matter,” he said.

Countering terrorism acts has been one of the hallmarks of the coalition government and those strides made have been given international recognition.

Among the measures has been the enactment of the Anti-Money Laundering and Countering the Financing of Terrorism (AML/CFT) (Amendment) Bill, which has seen Guyana moving from a place of being blacklisted to being in compliance with international best practices.

Since then, significant strides have also been made in ensuring that Guyana enacts and enforces laws which can protect the country from financial crimes such as money laundering and the financing of terrorism.

To ensure there is no regression, Guyanese, the attorney general said, must ensure that such terrorist acts of the past must never again occur.
He contended: “As we commemorate, the reason is not to incite hate but to not to forget our past”.

The massacre was as a result of a series of racial unrest around the country in the 1960s. While there are forces still trying to incite racial tension, especially during this election period, citizens must ensure that those fateful events are not repeated.

The APNU-AFC government would have made significant strides to ensure national unity and cohesion have been restored, said the attorney general, who urged citizens to stay the course and not return to the dark days of the past.

“We could safely say that 55 years later, those tensions continue to exist because they have been kept alive and fueled. Guyanese must stand against these forces and remember that racial division was a system adopted from the pre-Independence era where the divide and rule mechanisms succeeded.

That mentality resulted in incidents such as the Son Chapman massacre. We are on a trajectory to happiness,” Williams told the gathering as he reiterated the government’s strides to ensure Guyanese live as one people, one nation and with one destiny.

The attorney general also expressed happiness that the government would have put in place funds for those who perished to be honoured by erecting a monument at Christianburg, Linden. A model of the Son Chapman vessel is currently being designed. A monument of the Linden martyrs who were gunned down during the Linden unrest in 2012 is also being erected.

Member of Parliament Jermaine Figueira said that commemoration of the massacre is important as it is a part of local history and it should be honoured and remembered. He, too, expressed satisfaction that a monument will be erected.

INHUMAN ACT
“This most heinous act of terrorism is arguably the most inhumane act to have been committed on so many people at the same time and in the same space in our country’s history and the Caribbean,” he said, adding: “This terrorist act had certainly left many invisible, deep-rooted scars etched in the hearts, and memories of surviving loved ones, friends and by extension, fellow Lindeners.”

Regional Chairman Renis Morian encouraged Lindeners to use the template of coming together as did those who executed the plan to bomb the vessel, not for destruction, but for good.

The Son Chapman massacre, he noted, was a well-orchestrated plan that aimed at destroying the lives of Lindeners. In the same way those responsible came together to destroy, Lindeners were urged to use the same spirit as a catalyst for progress and to shun division among themselves.

Chairman of the Commemorative Committee, Charles Sampson, gave anecdotes of events that occurred in Linden that led up to the Son Chapman massacre. While these events are often peddled as the Wismar massacre, which reports say claimed the lives of hundreds of East Indians who were forced to flee the mining town, Sampson said that those events were exaggerated and aimed at labelling Lindeners as murderers and vicious people. It is these false stories, he opined, which resulted in retaliation, causing the Son Chapman massacre.

VICIOUS ATTACK
According to a Wismar report, the Wismar massacre stemmed from racial violence on May 25, 1964, by Africans against the minority East Indians in Wismar. In the course of these attacks, a number of Indians were murdered, scores of others brutally beaten and injured, and women and girls publicly raped. These violent acts were accompanied by large scale arson which saw the destruction of more than 200 houses and business places owned by Indians.

According to Sampson, who lived in the Wismar Housing Scheme at the time and witnessed the events first hand, there must be a re-writing of history as the truth must be told of what occurred during the 1960s in Linden, which has somehow downplayed the seriousness of the Son Chapman massacre. After the Son Chapman tragedy, the report also noted that despite the presence of heavy military troops in Linden, retaliation continued on the Indians who remained in Linden.

As the story goes, approximately 16:00 hrs on Monday, July 6th 1964, the Son Chapman vessel, which was a wooden cargo vessel owned by the late Norman Chapman, had just left the docks of Hurudaia, a timber grant settlement 16 miles up the Demerara River, after letting off three passengers.

The vessel was captained by Herman Softleigh on that day. The persons on board, inclusive of passengers and crewmen, were all enjoying the cool afternoon breeze and the surrounding scenery of the banks of the river.

Unfortunately, this solitude was shortly interrupted about 300 yards from Hurudaia by a loud explosion which took the lives of 43 persons, inclusive of two children and six Demba employees– all Africans. Pandemonium broke out as the 27 persons and six crewmen, who were on the decks of the boat, survived the explosion by swimming to shore while others were rescued by nearby vessels as they watched the “Son Chapman” sink.

It was a titanic scene in the Demerara River as news spread of the horrific tragedy.
An inquest into the tragedy revealed that because of rumours that persons were planning to bomb the vessel, it did not leave with a full complement of passengers as some were scared to travel. Some passengers opted to travel with another launch, The Emperor, or the regular Sprostons-owned steamer, The RH CARR

Sixty-two witnesses testified during the six days of the inquest which began on March 16, 1965. Among those who testified were survivors. Some testified that they had heard the rumour prior to the bombing of the launch.

One witness testified that he had heard a conversation in a hotel room in Lombard Street and that he knew the voices, and later saw the same men he identified the following morning. Some witnesses testified that they saw three suspicious men on the Son Chapman who came off the vessel at a stop shortly before the launch was blown up.

The theory that a bomb was thrown into the launch was refuted as it was established that the bomb had to be placed with the cargo in the boat for the vessel to have sunk the way it did. The attorney general contends that the truth will be revealed. Sampson also reiterated that it is time the Son Chapman commemoration be given national recognition.