…cultural activist urges full probe into Jagdeo-era killings
…says the era of extra-judicial killings commenced with a severe bias

IT may have worked in post-Apartheid South Africa and elsewhere, especially where promoting healing in racially divided societies and conflict situations are  concerned.
But the unbridled truth is, says cultural activist Barrington Braithwaite, there can be no truth and reconciliation unless there is atonement.

He was speaking about calls to probe the Jagdeo-era killings with some persons suggesting a truth and reconciliation commission. Only last week, a New York-based group urged the government to move swiftly to launch an investigation into these killings. Various persons have estimated that over 400 persons– mainly men– were hunted down and killed by a death squad nick-named Phantom Squad by former Head of the Presidential Secretariat under the PPP, Dr Roger Luncheon.

“Atonement and reconciliation is a process in reference to populations, and not to the sinister architects who, with cold, calculative intentions, facilitated mass murder and marginalisation along racial lines, creating an atmosphere that some lives are to be sacrificed on some political cultic altar…,” he said.

In an interview with the Guyana Chronicle,  Braithwaite said:
“I cannot, from where I stand and from what I have experienced, support any suggestion of a reconciliation commission. One must first embrace an era in totality, regardless of how uncomfortable that process is, and not in selective, self-serving extracts.”

THE TROUBLES 
Speaking specifically to what obtained in the wake of the 2002 jail-break, an era that President David Granger has taken to calling ‘The Troubles’, Braithwaite said: “The emergence of the ‘Fine Man’ gang is late in the events that envelop what has to be taken into full analysis in the context of our recent history of the Roger Khan-Jagdeo tragedy.
“‘Fine-Man’ and his gang are a consequence; not the genesis.”

Delving into the genealogy of the words themselves, Braithwaite said:
“Atonement is the ancient prototype of the truth and reconciliation idea; it constitutes the ritual sacrifice of animals over a period. Yes, it revolves around a blood sacrifice, perceived by the ancients as a cleansing rite.

“The 20th Century translation of atonement evolved with the trials at Nuremberg post-1945, and is today further modified in the Hague at the International Criminal Court (ICC).
“Reconciliation, on the other hand, exists between populations; in our situation, the constituencies of the major political parties, but is not extended to the political architects who conspired to murder, marginalise, cultivate hatred, and, as correctly defined by Freddie Kissoon, to practise ideological racism and damage the values of a nation, traumatising a perceived opposition constituency for their own political existence.”

MEMORY LANE
Taking the Guyana Chronicle down memory lane to a time that preceded ‘The Troubles’, Braithwaite said, “The first victim of this racist innate practice was a coconut vendor on Mandela Avenue, who was randomly shot by newly appointed PPP ministerial guards early in 1993.

“His only crime was his ethnicity. By 1996, we were protesting by the multitudes against the murder of Jermaine Wilkinson. During that period, I visited the office of Desmond Hoyte and insisted that he come to Albouystown.
“Leon Fraser and Steve Merai– Merai especially– would emerge in the forefront of these killings, to lead the above-the-law ‘Death Squad’.

“The era of extra-judicial killings and the criminalisation of the GPF had commenced, with a severe bias.”
Speaking specifically to the schools of thought back then, Braithwaite said:
“The existing attitude with the ‘Black Clothes’… was a political conclusion that grassroot Afro-Guyanese constituted the thug elements of Georgetown protests.
“Thus, they would be eliminated under any suspicion of wrongdoing, without any recourse to the laws of the Land.

“This was  proven true when, in 1997, the GNCB Bank at Anna Regina was robbed, and a young policeman named Richard Faikall fought them off single-handedly and lost his life.
“The ‘Black Clothes’ were told to stand down, because at the head of the bank-robbing gang was the known PPP assassin,  ‘Dougla Alfred’ Tulsi Persaud, something that the GPF is still to acknowledge to this day.”

Turning his attention to more recent developments, Braithwaite said in closing:
“I can understand, knowing all this, why Minister Volda Lawrence lost it and said what she should have done rather than said. “As a citizen, I hold the APNU+AFC accountable, especially when I hear the leader of the PPP and Leslie Ramsammy, and those people who have damaged this country so much, pretending not to be the twisted demented people they are, masquerading [behind] a facade of normalcy.

“It’s tantamount to witnessing Adolf Eichmann as part of the Government of Israel, or as an opinion maker of that state. “Yes, this nation needs to be cleansed, but not through a Reconciliation Commission, but through our courts, and the Hague court of crimes against humanity.”