Dear Editor,
THOSE eight miners at Lindo Creek, based on given accounts did indeed suffer a most brutal ending to their hard-working lives. Rightly described as a massacre, because of its multiple nature, a horrific ending, of a cruelty that is only surpassed by the perpetrators’ evil minds that fits the description of cruel, wanton killers.

Thus, one can understand and appreciate the painful emotions for their immediate families, as they suffer daily not only at the socio-economic consequences/loss that each murdered member would have caused his respective family; but in mentally re-living their loved ones’ horrible last moments, as they were brutally bludgeoned to their ghastly endings.

Editor, these family members and relatives have been living, daily pained and saddened lives for all these years, as evident from the most recent comments made, during observances for the 10th anniversary of the deaths of their slain family members.

But it is their comments about the callous and beastly treatment meted out to them by the then PPP/C government that are interesting to note. Editor, I stand to be corrected when I say that based on accounts given, none of those families ever received a visit, from any member of the then PPP/C government, under whose watch the gruesome deed occurred.

Compare the attention given to the surviving families at Lusignan, which was the right thing to do, and the subsequent predictable politicizing for all that it was worth, of that Lusignan Massacre, with its yearly observance. They, as a government, never mentioned about the Agricola Massacre, after its occurrence.

Are not these victims also Guyanese?
The account of the funeral home proprietor of the police suddenly releasing the bodies for interment, without the courtesy of informing the families; and also deciding that all of the remains should be placed in one coffin, can only be described as the continuation of a calculated disrespect, and emotional abuse of the families. They were deserving of a decent burial, as any other citizen who had died.

How can persons who had suffered such trauma, be made to undergo such emotional maltreatment at the hands of the state, and one of its service arms? Where was the humanity from the government at that trying hour, and even after? It further begs the question, what qualified a Guyanese family collective for compassion from the government in existence, at that material time?

The Lindo Creek Massacre, and the state’s response to the families of the victims, and the refusal to initiate even an inquest into their deaths is instructive of the then government’s treatment of a particular section of this country’s population.

As a party and former administration, the PPP/C never cared. Since they were not then, how can they be now, or ever? We were outside the pale of their national consideration and responsibility, as bona fide citizens. The cold-blooded treatment of the surviving families of the massacred victims is indeed indicative of the well-known PPP/C record of discrimination.

Regards,
Earl Hamilton