None but the most inhuman would be unmoved by the slaughter of innocent villagers at Lusignan on bloody Saturday. Sad as it was, the tragedy was made worse by the administration’s absurd attempts to evade its responsibility for public safety.
Although the entire country was shocked by the savagery of the slaughter, it should not have come as a surprise to the security forces. Those familiar with the degeneration of security and the administration’s public safety policy on the lower East Coast Demerara over the past seven years ought to have expected a catastrophe.
The scene of the tragedy, of course, was well known to the security forces. It is the same small, high-risk coastal area that witnessed the high-profile assassination of a government minister and the kidnapping of a United States diplomat!
The troubles on the East Coast started in a small way seven years ago. The occasion was a minor misunderstanding in Buxton-Friendship in wake of the March 2001 general elections to which the Guyana Police Force responded by dispatching its dreaded Target Special Squad. The police proceeded to discharge tear smoke and shoot residents with anti-riot pellet guns indiscriminately.
At the outset, the battle for the hearts and minds of the community was lost. Coming after years of extra-judicial killings and harassment, this new police provocation precipitated a spate of angry incidents in which some villagers attacked innocent commuters, many of them Indians, using the public road and railway embankment. The situation deteriorated in April 2002 when the same police squad returned to the same village and shot Tshaka Blair dead in his home.
By this time, though, the Mashramani jailbreak had occurred and the five notorious escapees found friendly refuge in Buxton-Friendship still reeling with resentment against the police. Official intervention derailed the coroner’s inquest into Blair’s killing; obstructed legal action against the culpable commander, and brushed aside public appeals for the disbanding of the police squad. This partly explains why retaliatory homicidal attacks were directed at policemen in record numbers.
The crisis briefly passed through a political phase when President Bharrat Jagdeo and then Opposition leader Desmond Hoyte met in the same month as Blair’s death. They issued a joint statement condemning the spiralling violence and agreed to establish several committees to make proposals for the improvement of living conditions in ‘depressed communities’ among which Buxton-Friendship was listed. But this process was not allowed to function as intended; the proposals were abandoned and, unsurprisingly, the problems persisted.
The president next promulgated the first of several counter-crime plans, with little effect. Their failure was hardly surprising given the fact that the plans seemed solely concerned with enforcement issues – guns, gear, risk allowance etc – for the police rather than development issues which addressed the causes of the still simmering unrest.
The deployment of the Guyana Defence Force marked a new phase in the crisis. Despite a series of operations with beautiful names, however, military action was largely ineffective because the Guyana Police Force had been discredited in the villagers’ eyes. The police should rely on information from the people to catch criminals and to make examples of those caught. But the conduct of policemen and soldiers towards villagers undermined public confidence.
Many villagers alleged that their homes have been repeatedly searched; that they were detained without warrant; that many persons were killed, kidnapped or tortured without investigations being held, and that their property was damaged without compensation. As a result, security operations receive no cooperation from the public.
By default, criminal elements were allowed to fill the void created by the absence of good governmental administration and effective law enforcement. Instead, an undeclared ‘dirty war’ was waged by murderous death squads and dubious shoot-to-kill tactics were employed against criminal suspects. But although many known criminals were executed in the extermination campaign, younger more ignorant recruits replaced them, resulting in continuation of the crimes that are still evident today.
The administration, unwisely, chose to ignore most of the formal measures proposed to address the unfolding national security crisis over the years. The voluminous recommendations of its own Steering Committee of the National Consultation on Crime, the Border and National Security Committee, the Disciplined Forces Commission and consultations by the National Commission on Law and Order, as well as the reports of various UK DfID-funded studies, have never been implemented. Without inquiries and inquests, decision-makers do not have a clue about the causes of crimes, much less how to solve the problem.
The latest phase of the terrible seven years’ war started last September with the still uninvestigated shooting of a woman, followed by the killing of two others and the torture of more men, all from Buxton-Friendship, allegedly by the police and defence forces. The shooting to death of a soldier last week, the shooting of sentries at the gate of the police Tactical Services Unit and shooting at Lusignan on 26 January are all part of a familiar pattern.
Experience shows that, if an administration is incompetent, it becomes a victim of its own errors.
