Addressing newly-commissioned military officers last week, President Bharrat Jagdeo contended correctly that, if the security challenges currently facing Guyana were not adequately addressed, they can compound the difficulties related to the economic challenges which need to be addressed.
Referring to crime-fighting and crime-prevention as parts of what he called his administration’s security strategy, he promised to provide the concomitant material, financial and technical resources. He pointed out that during his eight-year tenure of the presidency, tasks have been expanded to more fully reflect the challenges facing Guyana today: “The challenges are varied. They include economic and security changes likely to affect national well-being.”
Even as the president was speaking, however, a three-day seminar in Civil-Military Relations, conducted mainly by the United States Centre for Hemispheric Defence Studies, was being held on the East Coast. The seminar is the result of a request made by President Bharrat Jagdeo to the US Ambassador David Robinson for increased assistance to help Guyana combat military threats, including narco-trafficking and terrorism.
It is ironical that the president should have made such a request at this time. In was in April 2000 that he himself opened a similar seminar conducted by the same the Centre for Hemispheric Defence Studies on national security under the theme ‘Guyana: Developing a Sustainable National Security Strategy,’ in Georgetown. At that time, the president declared that his administration was “trying to capitalise on the methodological approach that we used when we started our work on the National Development Strategy.”
This approach was emphasised by Mr Ronald Gajraj who was Minister of Home Affairs at that time. As chairman of the National Security Strategy Organising Committee, Mr Gajraj expressed the hope that the seminar would provide a stimulus for meaningful dialogue from which a Guyanese National Security Policy and Strategy could be developed.
Not much has been done in the seven years between the seminars to draft a national security strategy and not much is expected to happen now.
The administration continues to behave as if the menace of internal instability and external security threats remain two separate and distinct issues. A national security strategy that embraces only the validity of internal security, but ignores the reality of external security – a policy that has as its core the employment of the defence force to saturate the coastland at the expense of the hinterland – is unlikely to succeed.
Such a posture fails to forecast the future capabilities needed if the central government is to enable this country to meet the plethora of problems which plague it. Internal and external security challenges are interconnected. In simple terms, failure to protect the frontiers from foreign narco-trafficking, gun-running and commodity smuggling would inevitably have an impact on gun-related criminal violence in the towns and villages.
It should not be surprising that an administration which has been able to ignore its own voluminous National Development Strategy and the vaunted National Drug Strategy Master Plan Guyana has failed to draft a national security strategy. If by ‘security strategy’ the president means the menu of measures he promulgated in June 2005 at the launching of the National Drug Strategy Master Plan, much more needs to be done.
The president’s ten-point menu then included the establishment of a National Commission on Law and Order; establishment of a Community Policing Ministerial Unit; establishment of the Neighbourhood Police Unit; tougher action against racial incitement and violence; tougher gun control; penal reforms; heightened attention to vulnerable groups; a modern traffic control system; increased attention to white-collar crime; and modernising and enhancing the law-enforcement agencies’ anti-crime capacities.
All these measures are necessary but not sufficient. Whether there is a separate strategy to curb narco-trafficking, gun-running, contraband-smuggling and trafficking in persons – all crimes with trans-national ramifications – remains to be seen.
After seven years, the administration is still no closer to drafting a national security strategy. As Dr Laurence Peter once advised, “If you don’t know where you are going, you will probably end up somewhere else.” The administration seems not to realise that if it does not go on to draft a strategy, it will probably end up not achieving the goal of national security.