Minister Musa Says S.O.E. is Serving its Purpose

Kareem Musa

In late July, a state of emergency was declared for Lake Independence as a reaction to the increased tension and gun violence in that area of south side Belize City.  It is a band-aid solution which will expire at the end of the month, but how effective has it been? Over the past two weeks, while there have been no reports of murders in the city, Minister of Home Affairs Kareem Musa says that it is difficult to measure the level of success of the S.O.E., so there are interventions still being carried out by William Dawson of the Leadership Intervention Unit. Minister Musa says that the S.O.E. was not the first option, but it is serving its purpose. 

Kareem Musa, Minister of Home Affairs

“The state of emergency is not our first recourse as an administration and certainly not for the police department either, but in terms of saving lives, knock on wood, we haven’t had any retaliation since the S.O.E. was called. But again, I don’t want to say that the S.O.E. is a solution. I don’t want to ever be misconstrued as saying that. It is just that the intelligence and information that the department was receiving at the material time suggested that there was going to be a series of retaliations and we had a duty and obligation to stop that from taking place. We still have interventions going on; Mister Dawson from the L.I.U. continues to do his work – he and his team – and I want to thank him for his work, but at the end of the day, it depends how you measure the success of an S.O.E.  At the end of the day, it has served its purpose in my opinion in quelling the violence at least temporarily. It’s not a fix, but hopefully cooler heads can prevail and when the young men are released at the end of the month, hopefully there is no retaliation.”

Minister Musa says that three individuals who were initially detained in the sweep of the state of emergency were released from custody following a risk analysis.