Jonestown massacre

About a dozen years ago, I went into a studio in Nairobi to broadcast what was almost to be called 'A Letter From Kenya.' But, just in time, I noticed a boldly printed sign under the studio clock, facing the microphone. It said, 'This country is to be called 'Kenya, K-E-N-N-Y-A and, by no means, to be pronounced "keenya".' It was signed by the great Kenyata himself and was evidently meant to impress on the world a national identity freed from the stigma of colonialism. Many other former colonies did the same, either creating new names or changing the pronunciation of the old. I don't know whether the independent nation of Guyana ever made a similar proclamation but, in my time, whether you were talking about the British or the Dutch holdings, it was always 'Gui-ana'.

However, today, the country by any other pronunciation has passed, I'm afraid, into the history books, along with Lidice, Dachau and Belsen, as one of the unforgettable place names in the catalogue of crimes against humanity. 

The story begins in 1931 in a small town in the Middle West, in Indiana, with the birth of James Warren Jones, to a railroad worker whose spare time was given over to the Klu Klux Klan and its fiery crusade to rid America of Negroes, Jews and Roman Catholics. The father was said to be a stern, Bible-spouting parent, who bore many grievances, not the least of which was his bubblingly bright, irreverent and foul-mouthed son. The son, however, had a passion for sheltering stray animals and whenever he heard of the death of a neighbour's pet, he would beg to become its minister and conduct a funeral service over its grave. And this childlike pretence was never shed, in the sense that once he'd taken bachelor's degree at a small university, he began to consider himself a minister. He joined a well-known religious sect, the Disciples of Christ, and called himself the Reverend James Jones. 

In his early twenties he apparently grew restless with the discipline of the disciples and decided to set up his own. So he took in all sorts of people that his father had feared and hated, and many more, the lame, the halt, the very poor, retarded children, pimps, prostitutes, the needy of all kinds and he set up two of his so-called People's Temples in Indianapolis, and a nursing home for the mentally retarded. He found jobs and food and clothing. He shamed restaurants and theatres into abandoning their policy of separating blacks and whites. Now this was in 1961 and by that time his work was getting to be known around the country and, to give himself a more recognisable authority, he became an ordained minister. At that time, too, he began to terrify his flock with prophesies of an American fascist state and a coming nuclear holocaust. 

In 1965, he looked around, like the Mormons, for an emptier landscape where he could run the only perfect society. And he moved to a quiet valley in California and set up there a People's Temple community where the faithful could spend their whole lives worshipping and toiling in the vineyards and serving the sick and the needy. A few years later, he bought empty synagogues in San Francisco and Los Angeles, incorporated new People's Temples and attracted thousands of adherents, all of whom by now had either, again on the Mormon principle, to give a quarter of their income to the church or, on the Jones principle, deed to him all their property, their goods, even their social security cheques. 

By the early 1970s, Jones's cult had attracted, at the safest estimate, about 20,000 people. It never had the scope or power of anything you could call 'a mass religious movement' but because the disciples were ready to take the word of the leader on any social or political issue, they became a small, but dependable, block of votes in elections. Their bias was left of centre and Democratic politicians were grateful to them. More than that, the reputation of the Reverend Jones, a reputation for selflessness, for compassionate social work, spread to Washington. He came to know and to be publicly praised by, among others, Vice President Mondale and President Carter's wife. 

Now, some of you whom have read by now the testimony of defectors and relapsed disciples are bound to marvel at the seeming gullibility of these responsible people. For the past two years at least there have been articles in newspapers and magazines exposing the Reverend Jones as something less than a Christian disciple, as a tyrannical boss of people hypnotised into total submission to his manias and his doctrines, his fears and even his sexual whims. In the past year, the State Department alone has had over a thousand letters from former members of the cult or helpless relatives begging for an investigation. Certainly there are officers of the State Department who decided, some time ago, that the Reverend Jones was a fraud and a dangerous one. 

But there are many other cults which demand and get the total subjection of their disciples to the will of the leaders, and it's not the job of the State Department or of the Justice Department, or of any other branch of the government, to violate the right of free belief by intruding into any cult, however crack-brained, unless there's strong evidence of actual crime. And, as for the newspaper and magazine exposés, well, never a week passes but we read lurid revelations about obscure movements that bind the gullible to their particular nostrum. 

Moreover, since Watergate, the once honourable trade of muckraker, the careful digging into a public matter with the purpose of exposing corruption, has been taken on by every sort of tattle-tale journalist to the point where the well-meaning outsider becomes puzzled, at best. Will Rogers used to say, 'All I know is what I read in the newspapers.' In the past decade, many a sensible, sceptical reader might have said, 'All I distrust is what I read in the newspapers.' It's important, I think, to try and separate what we know now from what even interested people could know for sure before – well, before the weekend before last. 

I know a minister, a shrewd and sophisticated man who has given much of his life to working among the sick and the dispossessed. He came to know the Reverend Jones well and he told me the other day that, until the atrocity at Guyana came out, he can recall only a grateful friendship and a man who was gentle, reasonable and apparently wholly devoted to his flock and to desperate or impoverished people who chose to join it. Today, this man is reeling with disbelief. 

Well, there came a time, a year or two ago, when the Reverend Jones became increasingly disillusioned with the cities and the society in which he tried to maintain a sanctuary of faith and good works. He looked abroad for some Shangri-La to which he could take all his people. He found it deep in Guyana, in the jungle. The spot, incidentally, was not many miles away from the place chosen as Shangri-La by the company that filmed 'The Lost Horizon.' And there he went and took with him about a thousand of his disciples. And there, so far as the vast majority of us knew, the Reverend Jones had set up his ideal of a dedicated, toiling, Christian society. 

However, there was one congressman, Mr Ryan, from California, whose office came to be besieged with desperate mail from relatives of the Guyana exiles. Now any congressman can institute his own investigation of anything and, if he gets permission from the chairman of a congressional committee he sits on, his investigation would be paid for with congressional funds. Representative Ryan, however, went off on his own with a small posse of television reporters and a cameraman. He had trouble getting permission from the Guyana authorities but, at last, after three days' wrangling, he was allowed to fly down to an airstrip and then jog in a car 40 miles to the Jones's compound. And the first evening they staged for his team a festive party and the congressman was so impressed that he told everyone the Jones jungle temple was the best thing that ever happened to its inhabitants. 

The next day things were different. Letters were smuggled to him by people who wanted to get out, alarming charges were whispered about the Reverend Jones's brutal treatment of children, his absolute political and sexual domination of the whole society. It's still a question whether or not the Reverend Jones had plotted to kill the visiting team but... the rest you know. The weird shooting of the team as it was boarding the airplane for the journey home. Then the discovery of 400 bodies and then hundreds more under them, at last, over 900 silent humans littering the jungle clearing. The incredible proof of one of the most seemingly vicious rumours that Jones had, indeed, held many rehearsals for a mass suicide. 

The United States asked the Guyana government to bury the bodies on the spot but the Guyanans, fearing endless and bitter litigations with relatives, possibly fearing an epidemic, refused. So, it was up to the State Department to ask the Department of Defence to send its relevant branches, the southern command in Panama, the military air lift command, the army graves commission, to bring the rotting bodies back to the army's largest mortuary in Dover, Delaware, where there are laboratory technicians, expert in identifying corpses and preparing them for despatching to their hometowns. The expertise of these people will be tested to the hilt, for many bodies were far gone in decomposition and very many cult members changed their names when they were initiated. 

It's going to cost many millions to finish this grizzly operation. The money comes, with the President's consent, from executive funds, that's to say foreign aid, contingency funds and the like, which are at the disposal of the president. But there's already the beginning of a huge and complicated wrangle over who is to pay for sending the bodies to the home towns of the relatives who want them. There will be, for months, perhaps for years, a burden on the government to liquidate its responsibility, if any, to a thousand citizens who willingingly embraced a hideous death on the solemn word of one madman. 'The Emperor Jones' of the Guyana jungle.

This transcript was typed from a recording of the original BBC broadcast (© BBC) and not copied from an original script. Because of the risk of mishearing, the BBC cannot vouch for its complete accuracy.

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