The Casualties of WAR!
“The child, the young girl who I believe is 7 years old, is the stepdaughter of my driver and so it certainly produced for me a very painful sense of having to deal in a fairly immediate way with this terrible depressing reality.” – Hon. Dean Barrow The Prime Minister of Belize Dean Oliver Barrow was interviewed this week by Keith Swift from Channel 7. This is the first time in recent memory that the PM has deigned to speak on critical issues like crime and oil. It was not a good interview for the leader of this nation. He came across like a cold fish, uncaring and unfeeling. He seems to have lost sight of the real issues plaguing his people. He came across as a man with little regard for the intelligence of the Belizean people and utterly comfortable in the belief that any and all of his utterances will be received as the gospel truth. As a seven year old child, the innocent casualty of yet another shooting in the city, faces the prospect of paralysis for life, Dean Barrow in his interview could not even mention her by name. It appears that to this robotic PM, young Janay Moguel is just a statistic, and an unimportant one at that. His quote reproduced above is ghoulish, insensitive and absurd. According to Barrow, it is only now that he is a little more familiar with the victim through his driver, that he realizes a little more the ‘depressing reality.’ He said that he has now been made aware that he will have to deal ‘in a fairly immediate way’ with the issue of crime. His words appeared meaningless and lacking in any discernible emotion. What will surely stick in the mind of Belizeans, though, is that it is just now, as we enter year two of unchecked and unprecedented violence and bloodshed in the city, that our Prime Minister claims he now realizes that he has to do something. The comments of the Prime Minister were an insult to all those families left grieving for their loved ones, victims of the violence which has overtaken the nation. Last ...







