Dear Editor,
Stabroek News must be congratulated for bringing to the attention of Guyanese the possibility of obtaining United Nations assistance for the security forces to solve some of Guyana’s security and justice problems. It is to be hoped that Stabroek News will make its letter pages available to Guyanese who would flood the Government with requests to apply for the UN assistance which has helped Guatemala in circumstances similar to ours.
In Guatemala, according to the Miranda La Rose report captioned “PNCR, AFC and GAP would support UN help for security problems,” (SN, Feb 10th), “human rights groups in Guatemala and foreign diplomats argued that only outsiders could rescue the country’s police, prosecutors and judges, who are believed to be widely influenced by organised crime groups, cash-rich with the profits of drug trafficking.” Guyana is in exactly that same state. Narcotics has seeped into our society at all levels.
Dr Luncheon, in rejecting the proposal, says that “our legal and justice administration is competent enough. We can deal with this problem. We don’t need the UN to come and assist us in investigations and whatever.”
Dr Luncheon, in addition to being disingenuous, misses the point. He is disingenuous because a year or so ago, the Government hired Mr Bernard Kerik to provide assistance in dealing with crime.
Has the situation changed so dramatically that outside help is no longer necessary? The UN assistance, it should be noted, is not likely to raise integrity issues as Mr Kerik did.
Dr Luncheon misses the point because the issue is not only in dealing with the problem but in how to deal with it. Mr Raphael Trotman, Leader of the AFC., alludes to the wider problem of “how” when he refers, in the article, to “the crisis of governance which was allowing the state to collapse.” One has to ask, in other words, whether methods used in dealing with crime are not in themselves either criminal or destructive of social norms which underpin the state.
The critical structural problem is loyalty of the disciplined services to the state. But the state is superseded when loyalty of the disciplined services to individuals is insisted upon. Individuals change principled societal rules to the idiosyncrasy of partisan political goals. This damages social relations permanently. Recent examples are the murder of innocent people in Buxton to placate victims of crime; the wanton bulldozing of crops and fruit trees purportedly to reduce hiding places; the extra judicial killings to eliminate criminals and the trampling of private space and community rights without warning and without following legal guidelines.
It is not only the outcome of reduced crime that matters. It is the competence in reducing crime so that the society is not destroyed.
The UN assistance will combine military controls while strengthening informal social controls by providing credibility to support those controls. If there are no informal social controls, there will be no society. And it is the disintegration of society that is evident in the heavy hammer of repression to very selected areas of assertiveness.
Dr Luncheon is a straight A student who should not allow simplisms to over power the intellectual prowess he showed at university. Will he go to his grave obfuscating stupidities and permitting tyranny instead of peace?
The country is in a state of crisis and a majority of political parties is willing to seek assistance from the UN because the internal actors are too compromised to take the appropriate measures.
Yours faithfully,
Clarence F Ellis