President Jagdeo’s declaration on Tuesday at Bartica that the same gang of men was responsible for the Lusignan massacre on January 26 and the February 17 slaughter in the township raises a troubling dilemma which neatly crystallizes the law and order crisis facing the country.
As an aside, the President’s swift linking of the two events even in the absence of the final ballistic results is discomfiting. While the public wants results, the answers from the authorities must be credible and disabuse any notion that jigsaw pieces are being pressed into a predetermined pattern. Moreover, the police have provided a long list of ballistic information stretching back to the jail-break years which the public takes with generous measures of salt. It is about time that the ballistic information from the police force is subject to peer review. Interestingly, in a statement in Parliament on Friday, the Minister of Home Affairs made no linkage between Lusignan and Bartica based on the available ballistic information.
The more chilling residue of the President’s statement is that it exposed for all to see the incompetence, incapacity and helplessness of the security forces and the governmental authorities who have been entrusted with the task of protecting the citizens of this country.
The major implication of the President’s statement is that after January 26 and the slaughter of 11 including five children, the 20-25 gunmen withdrew in some order to a safe location where they immediately managed to elude any operation to detect and engage them. Though on January 26 their response had been sluggish, it should be remembered that the joint services were mobilized to respond and hared into Buxton and other suspect areas. In the following days a supposedly robust Operation Restore Order was launched by the Joint Services to capture the killers.
Though the Joint Services later trumpeted the demise of Fineman’s supposed deputy and another gunman the main force that struck Lusignan, or all of it, remained intact. For the next 22 days or roughly 528 exasperating hours the Joint Services were completely unable to detect the gang of gunmen at any point or to glean intelligence that they were planning an even larger operation and extravagant display of violence in a township several rivers and eighty miles away from the locus of their original strike.
This gang of men then presumably set about orchestrating the attack and regrouping at Bartica – not by a long march in military formation but by stealth and tightly ordered planning. They drifted in twos and threes out of the backlands without their weapons and attack garb and tapped into supply lines and safe houses along the way. Their heavy weaponry was likely transported by road and river – God forbid by air – and then they formed up again with a devilish plan.
Dressed in full battle gear down to the helmets and attacking from the tricky Essequibo River at night they crushed any likely opposition at the police station and clinically executed the plan of robbery and murder before escaping along the river – possibly in two groups. After abandoning their river craft they likely followed a trail that led towards Region 10 from where they returned to their hideouts in the backlands. In the seven days since this second massacre, there has been no sighting or engagement with the main party. Twenty-nine days have passed and yet the President’s security apparatus is still to make comprehensive inroads into these machines of terror.
Just in case it wasn’t the same group that attacked Lusignan and Bartica then it would be an even more frightening prospect; two heavily armed groups roaming at will and killing wantonly.
In the vortex of enormous public pressure and disaffection, one 19-year-old has since appeared in court for the Lusignan killings but as during the pathetic investigation into Minister Sawh’s murder the public was left wondering whether one bewildered-looking youth should be taking the rap for this incomprehensible iniquity. Where are the others? And by this staggering dereliction of duty aren’t the government and the security forces courting another disaster? This is the crux of the matter which the government must now speedily address having been oblivious to reasoned and sonorous appeals for real law and order reform over the years. The inability to gather intelligence, action it, plan operations, successfully conclude them and win prosecutions crystallizes the enormous failure of this government.
Disgraceful
In a recent dialogue on the state broadcaster NCN, Minister Rohee had the gumption to say that the crime plans that the government was working with encompassed the recommendations of the Symonds Report so he couldn’t understand the fuss being made by the opposition parties. Except for the fact that the Symonds Report followed quickly upon a strategic review of the police force commissioned by the UK in October 2000 – eight years ago encompassing some of the tenures of police commissioners Lewis, McDonald, Felix and Greene. Why this disgraceful neglect? Can President Jagdeo and Minister Rohee give a proper accounting for this delay in treating with the Symonds Report?
The Symonds Report would have lifted the hearts of many Guyanese when it said in its final paras of a 106-page report that it provided a template for a “modern police service which is better equipped to meet the challenges of the 21st century. The report recommends a radical overhaul of the services provided by the Guyana Police Force and provides specific advice on how to get there”. The intransigence of the government buried the report and its promise of substantial change. Eight years – all under the Jagdeo Presidency – have gone down the drain.
Criticism aside, it is now time for the government to deliver. It has done the sensible thing of convening meetings with the political parties and civil society so that the entire nation can be mobilized to thwart these diabolical killers.
However, the government has to be held rigidly accountable and made to fulfil its promises as it has shown alarming tendencies towards drift, subterfuge complete inaction. The political parties have elicited specific and important commitments which they can bring the government to book on in Parliament. It had been hoped that civil society would have been able to make its presence similarly felt at its confab over two days with the President. However, its participation – judged by the wispy statement it issued after the meeting – was an unmitigated disaster, perhaps reflective of the bevy of sycophants and opportunists that the President and his government have been able to mobilize from the ranks of the so-called civil society.
Does civil society really want Article 13 treatment or is that also a cruel constitutional joke? There was no reflection in any part of the unsigned, undated statement that any of the many persons at the meeting were able to stimulate serious discussion and succeed in pressing the government to do what it really needs to do. The statement was full of frippery and did a disservice to the people. The meeting could have effortlessly secured renewed commitments on implementing the findings of the Disciplined Forces Commission and Symonds reports, a mechanism for monitoring the security plan as has since been separately called for by the GHRA, establish a fund for the families of the massacre victims, hold the President to his breached commitment for a wider probe of the East Coast violence and a whole series of other worthy things. The signatories to this statement must now make themselves known so that the public will know who these uninspired commitments should be followed up with. We hope that their future meetings with the President will yield more substance.
The dozens of anti-crime editorials in this newspaper in the last six years or so have not succeeded in getting the government to significantly change course. We hope that the two massacres and the jeopardy presently facin
g the country will convince the government that it is now time to really deliver.
