Two years ago, Guyana witnessed some of the most daring and brutal crimes of violence after five inmates of the Georgetown Prison blasted their way out of the institution on February 23, leaving a 21-year-old male Prison Officer dead and a 30-something female Prison Officer impaired for life. The crime campaign waged by the Mash Day prison escapees and other gangs was chillingly cold-blooded and ruthlessly efficient. Children were robbed of parents, wives were widowed, and mothers of sons were left with only their memories of happier times. Businessmen and women were kidnapped with their families being forced to cough up millions of dollars if they hoped to see their loved ones again. Humble taxi drivers were shot dead by bandits, who demanded their cars for high-speed getaways after spectacular hold-ups and robberies. Criminals cold-bloodedly murdered over 20 Policemen and two CANU personnel during that killing season.

Today, just two years after the February 23, 2002 jailbreak, citizens are struggling to make sense of some recent incidents, in which lives were snuffed out seemingly in the most senseless manner. The first victim, St Stanislaus College student, Trevor Julius Fung, was knifed to death by bandits on Abary Road, Bel Air Park, on St Valentine’s Day. The second gratuitously brutal killing occurred on the evening of Republic Day, February 23, when taxi driver Bronson Rutherford was reportedly stabbed, thrown into a trench and hit repeatedly on the head during a fracas on Irving Street. While several scenarios have been emerged as possible motives for Rutherford’s death, his relatives and friends remain mystified with little hope of finding closure to the circumstances of his demise. Then we come to Monday’s shooting spree at the Brickdam Police Station in which a mentally troubled former member of the Tactical Service Unit (TSU) of the Guyana Police Force killed two officers and wounded two others. The chaos and mayhem stopped only when another Policeman discharged a round to the shooter’s thigh, thereby disabling him and then disarming him.

“What is it in the human psyche that compels people to descend to such depths of evil?” was the rhetorical question Vatican Archbishop John Foley put to BBC broadcaster Tim Sebastian during a HARDTALK interview aired late in November 1999. Archbishop Foley and Sebastian were participating in a wonderfully cerebral discourse on the historical role of the Catholic Church in speaking out for the oppressed during periods of conflict and seasons of injustice. The Archbishop explained very reasonably that on many occasions during the 20th century, when the church appeared to be silent on critical issues, more often than not, a lot of work to redress injustices was going on behind the scenes. This was so, he explained, because in some situations victims of injustice were made to suffer increased brutalities after the church had taken a public stand against the perpetrators of hate crimes. At other times, he argued, the voice of the church was loud in denunciation, but no one was paying any heed!

Later in the discourse, the cleric lamented the blood-soaked events of the 20th century. He listed the First World War, which he felt had served no purpose and could have been avoided with greater negotiations; the killing of millions of Jews in the Second World War; and the genocides of Kosovo and Rwanda. He was especially baffled by the Rwanda slaughters, because, as he noted, “Both the Hutus and the Tutsis are Catholic. It is a great tragedy.”