By Ryhaan Shah
Everyone would agree that the security sector has been in urgent need of reform, and that for decades. The British are probably being a bit tongue-in-cheek when they hope that their current recommendations for security sector reform in Guyana will not be “sitting on the shelf gathering dust”.
These latest recommendations from British expert Lt Col (Rtd) Russell Combe follow previous reports, such as the International Council of Jurists’ in 1965, and the Disciplined Forces Commission Report of 2003. Both of these reports, which provided strategies for professionalising the security sector at the respective times, have been gathering dust.
Granger said that when offered assistance from the UK Government, he suggested security sector reform. “That’s all I asked for,” he said. With him being a military man, he has a keen personal interest in the development of this sector, and questions have been raised about the many military personnel now appointed to administrative positions in the public service.
The increased militarisation of the Coalition Government is viewed as part of Granger’s programme to return Guyana to Burnhamism. As PNC leader, he heads a party that has boasted publicly about the armed forces being its “kith and kin”, which places the forces’ primary loyalty to party, and not country. This was evident as far back as the 1960s, when the Commissioners’ Report on the Wismar Massacre noted the lack of Police presence and intervention during the 1964 assault on Indian Guyanese by PNC supporters.
The GDF’s allegiance to the PNC has never been in question, and the army’s formation in 1965 was geared in great part to protecting the Burnham dictatorship at a time when the Government practised open thuggery on Opposition forces and condoned assaults on Indian Guyanese.
The army was pivotal to the electoral rigging that kept Burnham in power, so Granger’s announced restructuring of the army is hardly surprising, since it appears that the PNC’s electoral fraud will be a feature of the next general elections.
As a career soldier in the GDF, Granger was a loyal servant to the ethos of the Burnham era, and even as he accepted Combe’s recommendations, his remarks about the need for reform in the security sector were wholly disingenuous.
He referred to the “escalation in narcotics trafficking, which brought with it a horrific spate of violence” at the turn of the century, and referred to the surge in execution killings and the surge in the corruption of the security forces.
Conveniently absent from his remarks was the ethnic violence against Indian Guyanese at that time, which was openly supported by the PNC and its supporters in their cry of “African marginalisation”.
This was the violence that sparked the terror which escalated and spawned a lawlessness which did spread to include other crimes, such as drugs warfare and extra-judicial killings.
The PPP/C Government was pushed to the brink to restore order, especially given the armed forces’ loyalty to the Opposition PNC.
The truth is that the armed forces have been corrupt since the 1960s, and the major corruption derives from their partisan political loyalty and their usefulness to the PNC as a political tool when the party is both in and out of Government.
This corruption consumes them, and a recent letter to the press by Taajnauth Jadunauth of Enmore highlighted the daily double standards practised by police across Guyana, which allow, for example, noise nuisances and illegal car tints that openly favour “kith and kin” above law and order.
There is no level playing field in law enforcement, and there has not been since the 1960s. Any recommendations that start off on the false premise that Police corruption is a recent phenomenon and that racial bias is not routinely practised by the armed forces in the execution of their duties will not be effective in changing the corrupt culture of the sector, since it would be ignoring major root causes of Guyana’s security issues.
Another root cause of crime, as Combe pointed out, is economics. Here, again, Granger showed a decided lack of sincerity in touting Combe’s recommendations, since his Government is wholly responsible for continuing to fire sugar workers without any regard for their future financial security.
The causal link between economics and crime is so fundamental that no political leader can claim to be truly concerned about reforming their country’s security sector while brutally throwing thousands out of work.
If any of Combe’s recommended modules on security sector reform is introduced, it would only be because they suit the PNC’s agenda, and the UK could find itself colluding with the Granger Government in securing Guyana’s continued insecurity.
