How many guilty players populated both sides?
Dear Editor, Even unlettered as I am I have long grown to love the challenging English language, its tough nuances and its extensive, sometimes sophisticated vocabulary.
Yet, I have to make up my mind to read one of your daily letter-writercontributors, Gabriel H K Lall, lasting re-migrant and a state entity chairperson. I suggest that some of his missives are not for the linguistically faint-hearted. However his recent ‘Former PM Hinds’ letter is acknowledgment that the government had no answers in terms of security’ (SN, February 5) has prodded me into this rare intrusion into your letter columns.
Besides his recognition of Sam Hinds’s usage of the term “counterforce” he finds that the PPP Jagdeo administration of the post-2002
jailbreak period had no adequate response to the organized criminal enterprise sustained by known and secret forces. Mr Lall then refrains from speculating about who were the “intellectual author(s)” behind Sam Hinds “emerging counterforce” of that period pitched into battle against the murderous escapees, their disciples and associates.
But he shared his view that the then government’s alternative counter offensive was funded in part by governmentfriendly donors. Saying that today “money is being withheld and stashed away to force [this] government to its knees…” Lall opines that during the “Jagdeo era” crime splurge, “money permitted the substitution of a surrogate security counterforce (with the unwritten understanding of a free rein later)”.
I find his analysis and findings largely competent and mostly accurate. However, in this imminent season of crime-spree inquiries, I see in the debate (of views and “counterviews”) on the myriad issues, contending perspectives. I’m no fan of Sam Hinds, but I find it quite possible to appreciate his slant on many causative factors leading up to the then prolonged mayhem. So amidst all the testimonies, witnesses and findings with “recommendations”, I plead for the provision of some balance, open-mindedness and if at all possible, political “bi-partisanship.”
Minister Gajraj once told me in the height of the murderous lawlessness, that he and the GDF Chief of Staff were at their wits end in terms of surprise raids in Buxton. By the time the “surprise parties” got to Kitty, Buxton knew. Safe havens were activated. An officer’s aunty was even leading protective protesters on one occasion. Of course, Mr Gajraj never told little me of any alternative or parallel nonpolice strategies.
But Desmond Hoyte’s famous “kithand-kin” pitch regarding the armed forces, and his later “slow-fiah, mo-fiah” strategy did come to mind. So was it Khan to counter both Hoyte’s Joint Forces “kithand-kin” and the escapee bandits? And how many guilty players populated both sides?
I suppose those citizens still interested might find out as this year progresses. After all, there are to be expensive inquiries like peas!