Leader of the opposition, David Granger, recently tabled a Motion in the House in which he is asking for the establishment of a Commission of Inquiry (COI) to investigate certain killings, deemed extrajudicial in some quarters, in the early 2000s.

During the period at reference, political analyst, Freddie Kissoon, had written a seven-part series on the subject at reference, in which he also looked at the integral role some prominent members of the Guyanese society played in the matter.
It is now opportune, perhaps, to revisit these essays, beginning today.
IS the Buxton conspiracy over? Troy Dick is the only member of ‘Ocean Eleven’ alive today. Ocean Eleven was the combination of the five escapees joined by six other diehard Buxton-based conspirators that included Vibert Cambridge, who helped to burn down the house of Idris Chester and Melroy Goodman, who burned Haroon Rasheed alive at Non-Pariel. Ocean Eleven, of course, became larger with every passing day.
Most of the members of the Buxton conspiracy are young men between the ages of 14 and 22. There are some even as young as twelve! They normally help to create confusion by robbing minibuses but they do not carry guns. Since the February jailbreak, a certain former army officer has been recruiting these youngsters. A large question mark hangs over the future of the Buxton conspiracy now that a majority of the senior members of this unusually savage criminal group have been killed.
This series traces the origin of the Buxton conspiracy, examines how it started, how it operated, who sustained it, why it lasted for almost a year, why it operated with the impunity it did, why it killed its victims with such bestial sadism, and why is it about to collapse.
I would like to say many thanks at the beginning of this series to members of the security forces, some of the people I know who still live in Buxton, and some of my colleagues in the media community whose interaction with me enabled me to put the pieces together.
What is about to unfold in this analysis is frightening. Never has something like this happened in the world before. And if there is anything readers should know about the Buxton conspiracy it is the frightening merger of criminality and politics.
Some people, particularly in the WPA (and if you read Clive Thomas’ recent columns in Stabroek News, a similar angle is there), take the view that the state in Guyana condones some dubious type of activities by dubious characters.
While one can argue that hard, concrete, tangible evidence needs to come out so commentators can comment on this accusation, the glaring fact, the incontrovertible fact, remains that a group of seasoned criminals with no scruples or remorse in raping innocent women, robbed and killed people savagely because of their ethnicity. Such bestiality was interpreted by a not so small percentage of opposition people and members of the Afro-Guyanese community as legitimate political action.
What this revealed is the extent of opposition emotional anger against the state and how that anger has been sold to its constituencies. This article is not about that dimension of the politics of this divided land but about how that disunity gave rise to a social pathology that almost destroyed Guyana but didn’t, thanks in part to the American government.
I said above that the Buxton conspiracy is a phenomenon that has no parallel in Caribbean history and as the series unfolds the reader will come to see why. But let’s briefly back up this point.
In Grenada, you had the New Jewel Movement; in Trinidad the National Union of Freedom Fighters (NUFF) and the Muslimeen sect; in Guyana, the WPA and the PPP. In these countries, violence was used against the state because the state was seen as oppressive. But in every instance, the violence was based on political theory that had liberation of the poor and the oppressed as the goal, and the membership of all these groups were highly politically conscious humans whose political praxis was worthy of emulation.
In the case of the WPA in Guyana, a multi-racial platform was the axis on which the movement revolved. NUFF in Trinidad was eliminated by the security forces. In Guyana, the WPA was decimated by the Burnham regime with the movement devastated by the assassination of its leader, Walter Rodney.
In Grenada, the New Jewel Movement came to power, and in Trinidad, the Muslimeen were tried for treason and freed. The Buxton conspiracy has nothing in common with these movements. It is a desecration of political theory and revolutionary philosophy to classify the Buxton conspiracy as a political movement. But this is where the situation becomes complicated. When Tacuma Ogunseye ragingly replied to me elsewhere and asserted that the Buxton conspiracy was an armed resistance, he wasn’t just propagandizing.
The Buxton conspiracy did indeed commit acts of political violence, as when it stormed Nathoo’s beer garden and indiscriminately shot to death four persons and no robbery was done. And when it attacked the PPP congress in Port Mourant! But these isolated acts of political violence need special and separate analysis because the motive that drove the members of Ocean Eleven to attack these symbols of state power was not purely political. Intelligence that I have been given suggests that only one of these assaults was planned, that is, the Port Mourant invasion.
The Nathoo massacre was an afterthought by members of Ocean Eleven who had committed a murder in Campbellville. One member of the group said, “Let’s pass by Nathoo and kill some of dem PPP people!”
The difference with the WPA under Burnham and the Buxton conspiracy is the difference between Mahatma Ghandi and a Serbian war crime killer. Under Burnham, both the WPA and the PPP were alleged to have committed acts of violence. But in no instance was their motive driven by a group of teachers who were political morons.
In the case of the Buxton conspiracy, the people who were teaching members of Ocean Eleven the arts of politics were feeding them with voodoo political theory. These persons know nothing about Guyanese history, the political sociology of this country and how to define oppression. It is frightening what the violent youths of Buxton were educated in.
They were told the most untruthful things about the government, the business class and the East Indian community. One night five youths, including “Chip Teeth”, who was recently killed in Buxton along with Romel Reman, left Buxton and went up to Mocha. While in Mocha, they said, “Let’s go and burn down some coolie gas station.”
They then went to TWO BROTHERS at Eccles and tried to torch it. Then they came to Georgetown and tried to burn a Portuguese-owned gas station at the corner of Camp and New Market Streets and which has some close connection to one of the leaders in the REFORM wing of the PNC/R. These youths were being taught by men who were politically ignorant, extremist and essentially racist. The voodoo theory they taught the Buxton conspiracy was simply the language of self-destruction.
Who were these teachers? We’ll discuss them and their role in the February jailbreak in Part Two.