Private war
Editorial
Stabroek News
April 6, 2003
There is currently a private war in progress involving what are clearly two distinct gangs. It has been in progress for some time, but it is just that the general population, being out of the loop, was not able to put any context on the killings until recently. Now that it has reached some kind of a crescendo, however, there can be no doubt about the character of what we are dealing with.
It doesn’t take much to deduce either, that one side, at least, has a Buxton base, and the other has been operating there at some level, although the events have by no means been confined to that village. Now we have bullet-ridden bodies littering Guyana’s coastland - four from yesterday and the night before alone - and houses being torched both in Buxton and the city. It is as if Guyanese are living in the middle of the New York mafia wars of a few decades ago, or in the Chicago of Al Capone.
The arsenals which are being employed on both sides, seem more appropriate to the Iraq War than to an underdeveloped, not particularly bellicose society like Guyana, while the communications equipment being utilized by the criminal fraternity is worthy of a nation coasting on the information superhighway - which this one is certainly not.
While a puzzled and nervous public tries to analyse what is going on, they can still conclude that this ‘war’ is not about to end soon, although whether it will continue in this intense form in the immediate term is anyone’s guess. As usual, however, the Government has had nothing to say about the recent spate of killings, let alone announced any measures in relation to them.
So here we are, in crisis all around - the electricity situation in Georgetown and Linden, the economy in general, a crime wave and now a private war on the lower East Coast. Will the Government not acknowledge the crisis, and say something about these latest developments; they are, after all, the ones elected to govern, and they owe the voters some statement about what is going on. They cannot plough on forever pretending as if nothing out of the ordinary is happening; the people know otherwise.
The President has just breezed in from a trip to China. Let him be warned: no one is interested in one of those bland press conferences about what was signed in Beijing and Guangdong. Let him tell us instead about exactly what is happening here at home.
