Now that the dust has settled on the protests against the killing of Quindon Bacchus by Police on the East Coast of Demerara, and its violent denouement at Mon Repos, it behooves the nation to consider the causes and effects of the conflagration that has shaken it.
What have been exposed are two issues that have been plaguing the nation from its birth in the sixties: the professionalism of the Police and law enforcement forces, or the lack thereof; and the opportunism of the political Opposition, from whose constituency most of those forces are drawn. We address the first issue today.
In 1964, before our Independence, the role of the Police Force and Volunteer Force came under scrutiny during a Commission of Inquiry into the Wismar Riots of May 25-26, which were claimed to have been precipitated by the murder of an elderly African Guyanese couple at the back of Buxton on the East Coast of Demerara. It reported: “The men in the B.G. Police Force (and “D” Company of the Volunteer Force) are predominantly Africans. A variety of allegations were made by witnesses against the security forces – the Police and Volunteers. These included bribery, partaking in loot, standing by and refusing to give assistance whilst rape and assault were being committed, refusing to extinguish fires, supplying gasoline to arsonists, and being politically partial by telling people who were beaten and stripped to go to their political leaders.” The Commission clearly intimated that because of the rioters’ ethnic/racial commonality with the African Guyanese residents of Wismar, the loyalty of the Armed Forces was tested and placed in an untenable position.
Even before this horrific tragedy, as the violence had unfurled from early 1964, the British Governor had recognised the dangers of the ethnic imbalance in the security forces, and had formed a Special Services Unit (SSU) as a specially trained part of the Guyana Police Force. It was ethnically balanced, with 72 recruits each from the Indian and African Guyanese groups, and 2 from the Mixed group. This unit was supposed to be the core of a new Guyanese Army that would be formed after Independence.
Flowing out of this in 1965, before Independence and as part of the agreement for same, a team from the International Commission of Jurists (ICJ) examined the composition of the Armed Forces and the Civil Service, and recommended changes in the recruitment policy of the Volunteer Force, which focused on urban centres where African Guyanese were the overwhelming majority, to ensure a greater number of Indian Guyanese were recruited. In terms of the Police Force, the ICJ recommended that, for the next five years, 75% of recruits and cadets be Indian-Guyanese, until they reached their proportion in the populace. However, Prof Ken Danns showed that between 1970 and 1977, while the size of the Police Force was doubled by the PNC Government, 92.2% of recruits were African Guyanese, with only 7.84% being Indian Guyanese. The same was true for the other reserve and paramilitary forces launched by the PNC.
After strident agitation following the decade-long violence directed at Indian Guyanese and precipitated by PNC protests from 1998, a Disciplined Forces Commission (DFC) was constituted in 2004 to take submissions and make recommendations on the composition of the forces. On the matter of ethnic representativeness, the DFC declared: “The Commission…is of the view that the allaying of ethnic security fears which stem from the predominance of Afro-Guyanese presence in the GPF must be addressed.”
More specifically, it recommended: “It should be an aim (of the GPF) to achieve a Force representative of the ethnic diversity of the nation without employing a quota system. To achieve this, ethnically-diverse recruitment teams should be employed as openly and extensively as possible. The report also suggested that a study be conducted on how to address the ethnic make-up imperative.
Since then, there have been countless instances of “Police unprofessionalism”, like the Police killings of Quindon Bacchus and Deanraj Singh, which invariably have a “racial” impact in Guyana. Interventions have been made to rectify the problem, but no permanent improvement is visible because the powers that be continue ignoring the elephant in the room.
(To be continued)
