I REFER to a letter penned by one David Hinds in the January 31 edition of the Stabroek News as well as the Kaieteur News, which seeks to justify the riotous display of a bunch of hooligans at Linden to the Number 48 protest.He is making a deliberately fictitious comparison that the predominantly Indo-Guyanese community of Number 48 Village was treated differently from the Afro-Guyanese at Linden: That because of their ethnicity, and by extension their assumed support for the PPP/C Party, the former were singled out for special treatment.
But this is far from the truth, because if someone is to carry out an honest assessment of the incidents at the two places, the facts of the two scenarios would certainly reveal a totally different story. In my analysis of the facts, I shall lay down the main reasons for my disagreement with Hinds’ remarks.
Let us view the facts objectively:
(1) Evidence shows a people who were severely affected by armed thefts and murders through home invasions and when they sought redress from the police they were either slow to respond or they did not show up at all. Further to the issue – and this can be verified from firm circumstantial evidence, that some police ranks were in league with some of the very same criminal elements.
(2) Faced with such extreme provocation, the People of Number 48 Village mounted a peaceful protest to gain the attention of Central Command. This is a stark contrast to Linden where the residents there were politically motivated into carrying out an armed unrest. If one judges from the facts Linden’s so called protest turned out to be nothing less than mayhem – an unprovoked situation that became deadly. The people of Number 48 Village were peaceful, whilst those from Linden were not.
(3) The villagers in the Number 48 incidence had no weapons. They were unarmed civilians who kept up a vigil with blocked roads until help arrived. Linden’s mobsters were well armed who, in the ensuing confusion shot three of their very own. Their unbridled fury which knew no bounds led to the demise of three of their numbers and much destruction to private and public properties, including the school that educated their children and a building belonging to the bauxite company that provided them with jobs. The facts concerning the three murders were established by expert testimony from a ballistics expert of their choosing.
(4) The Government was forced to pay out huge sums of axpayers’ money as compensation to the people of Linden in spite of all the heinous crimes they committed. They did this so as to restore peace and stability to a community who were tired of the death and destruction. On the other hand those residents on the Corentyne will never be able to recoup from the heavy losses they sustained at the hands of some rogue cops and other criminals.
So, in his diatribe of a letter, Hinds is trying to equate a situation of violence and naked aggression against that of a peaceful people’s protest. It is ludicrous to even entertain the thought of a comparison between the two and I am at a loss to understand what Hinds is really talking about.
We have examined every piece of evidence in both areas and thus we can safely conclude that Hinds is trying desperately to avert the shame of an embarrassing piece of history to the parties he support, using the delusional escape ruse. The victims of their perfidious actions are always their supporters.
Written By Neil Adams