The case of Mr Britton
Editorial
The story of forty-year-old Mr Franz Britton, also called Collie Wills, is a disturbing one. According to the report carried in our issue of April 29, Mr Britton has been missing since January 25, 1999. The man's mother, Ms Irma Wills, told this newspaper that her son had been detained by a senior police officer at Cove and John Police Station on the East Coast, where he had been held for two days before being released on $25,000 bail. Subsequently he had gone to collect his belongings which had been removed from him at the time of his detention, and once again had been taken into custody by the same police officer. This time, however, he had been transported to the city and ordered held in the Brickdam Police Station. Thereafter, the accounts of what transpired diverge. Ms Wills said that following enquiries she had been informed by officers at Brickdam and Eve Leary that Mr Britton had been released by the same senior policeman who had taken him into custody. However, in a more sinister version of events, she claimed that she had been told by a man who had since died that after leaving Brickdam he had seen her son being assisted by a member of the Quick Reaction Group into the car of the senior officer at the centre of the case. Since then, she said, she had been receiving messages on her answering machine alleging that her son had been killed and had been buried somewhere along the Soesdyke-Linden highway. Ms Wills sent letters to the relevant officials about her son's disappearance, but got no satisfaction. Then she went to court. At a habeas corpus hearing the court was told by the senior policeman involved that after Mr Britton had been released, he had travelled to Suriname. Although the case was dismissed, the judge ordered that the officer locate her son in Suriname. He has not been located, and Ms Wills has taken her case to the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights which has since written the Guyana Government seeking assurances about Mr Britton's safety, and notification of his whereabouts if he is being detained by the authorities. The letter was sent on April 4, and the administration has 90 days in which to respond, following which the Commission will issue a report identifying the person(s) to be deemed culpable in the matter of his disappearance. Guyana is not a Latin republic under military rule; it is an open society with a democratic government. Any suggestion, therefore, that someone has mysteriously vanished after a sojourn in police custody should be as great a matter of concern for the administration, as it is for the various human rights bodies. Mr Britton has been missing for well over a year now, and yet no serious efforts to locate him or establish what has happened to him appear to have been made by the powers-that-be. Why not? Is it that they suffer from the bureaucratic lassitude which seems to afflict so many of our officials, or is it that they fear the possibility that something unsavoury could be unearthed? Given the fact that the police force (or a segment of it) has been the target of allegations of extra-judicial killing for some time now, the average Guyanese would have wasted no time in coming to a conclusion about Mr Britton's fate. Either that conclusion is wrong, or it is right. If it is wrong, then the Government had nothing to fear by investigating his disappearance, and if it is right, then it still had nothing to fear by investigating his disappearance. After all, a preparedness to unearth the unsavoury certainly would have been a public demonstration of its commitment to human rights in all its aspects, as well as to 'strengthening the fabric of democracy' which it is so fond of talking about. As it is, the Government's inertia has brought it some none too welcome attention in the international spotlight. However thorough and sincere its inquiry now, it has opened itself to the accusation that it was forced into an investigation by pressure from outside. The administration does not yet seem to have recognized that human rights issues are no longer local matters; they concern the world. If it wants a clean sheet at the international level it will have to pursue all cases like those of Mr Britton with some vigour; it has a great deal to lose political-wise and image-wise if it doesn't.
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