“The British are coming!! The British are coming!” Those were the words of Paul Revere to warn of the approach of British forces before the battles of Lexington and Concord in the American War of Independence, as dramatized in Henry Wadsworth Longfellow’s poem, “The Midnight Ride of Paul Revere”.
In Guyana, the British are indeed coming, but in this instance, they have been invited in by President David Granger to resuscitate the “Guyana Security Sector Reform Action Plan” (GSSRAP), which had been abandoned back in 2009 by the then PPP Administration.
That plan was first mooted in 2007 at a time when Guyana’s security forces were in the throes of confronting an armed uprising emanating from Buxton and led by five prison escapees. The escapees declared they were “African Freedom Fighters” and targeted in particular the Guyana Police Force and civilians assumed to be supporters of the PPP Administration. One ideologue, supportive of the group’s agenda, publicly made these assertions over the TV airwaves. In light of the foregoing situation, it was not surprising that some of the short-term objectives of the GSSRAP were to establish a “Special Weapons and Tactics” (SWAT) Unit, boost crime intelligence, and develop forensic capacity.
By Jan of 2009, Major General (Ret) Michael Atherly had been appointed to coordinate a Secretariat within the Office of the President to oversee the GSSRAP. An “Oversight Committee” had also been created by the National Assembly. The Plan was very comprehensive, and was to complement an ongoing IDB-funded “Citizen Security and Justice Reform” programme, so that the entire law and order system could be integrated and reformed.
One of the PPP’s major concerns in the scrapping of the SSRAP later in 2009 was their claim that the British were insisting their personnel become embedded in the local operations. This, the PPP claimed, implied that Guyanese were incapable of implementing and executing the SSRAP. The PPP eventually launched a SWAT unit in 2014 with a US trainer.
The GSSRAP was to improve the operational capacity of the Guyana Police Force (GPF), and this mission was reiterated last week at the handing over of the new iteration by the British security expert. He had spent a year in Guyana, working from the Ministry of the Presidency quarters. The upper echelons of the GPF were severely shaken up, and hopefully will settle down soon. But after the formation of several other new crime fighting units, State Asset Recovery Agency (SARA) and Special Organised Crime Unit (SOCU), it is not clear at this time whether policy making across the security sector would also be included in the new plan.
Another British expert was quite instrumental in the establishment and training of SOCU personnel, and the Opposition PPP had accused him of becoming operationally involved. From all indications, it would appear that the present APNU/AFC coalition Government is much more sanguine about British personnel becoming directly involved in the security sector. The official who helped launch SOCU is back in the country in a second stint, and has been rather scathing about the Police Legal Advisor and the Director of Public Prosecutions working as assiduously on cases as he would have liked.
At the presentation ceremony of the new GSSRAP, President Granger accused the PPP regime of not focusing on the “root cause” of crime in Guyana, which in his estimation is narcotics trafficking. Presumably, the plan would address this claimed lacuna, which implies that the Customs Anti-Narcotics Unit (CANU) under the new leadership appointed by the Government is still not executing its mandate effectively.
The President did not allude to the potential for political violence that periodically punctuated our post-independence history, most intensely during the 1999-2008 decade, when the PPP was in office, and which the first GSSRAP took in its sight.
There is no question that crime in all its manifestations is a pressing concern of the Guyanese people, and it is hoped that the new GSSRAP would be “holistic”.
