As much as the two recent shocking mass murders at Lusignan and Bartica have cast a pall of gloom over Guyana, the responses of the country’s political leaders to these appalling crimes have added much insult to the injury inflicted by the killers.
In the weeks since the shocking killings political jousting over responsibility for the atrocities has secured far more prominence than efforts to calm the nation and catch the killers.
The slayings are said to have been carried out by a criminal gang led by Rondel ‘Fine Man’ Rawlins, Guyana’s most wanted man – who, shortly before the Lusignan killings had reportedly threatened to create mayhem if a missing Buxtonian woman reportedly carrying his child did not show up unharmed. However, both the government and the main opposition party, the People’s National Congress Reform, have lost little time in adding their own political twists to the drama.
While Guyanese have grown used to a political culture in which sterile displays of one-upmanship by the country’s two major political parties have become a wearisome way of life, they were at least entitled to hope that the sheer magnitude of the two crimes would bring some respite from the tedium of political confrontation.. That was not to be. Nothing, it appears, can deflect the two parties from their traditional political arm-wrestling each time that the country faces a crisis.
In the wake of the killings the PNCR waded into the government, accusing it of failure to implement several recommendations arising out of various reports and Commissions of Enquiry designed to arrest a crime situation that had spiralled out of control ever since the rash of robberies and killings that followed the 2001 Mash Day jailbreak had left sections of the population dangerously vulnerable. The PNCR also charged that the worsening crime situation was a function of the government’s chronic neglect of the need to strengthen the capacity of the security forces and deficiencies in the wider governance process including exclusionary policies that failed to provide for the social needs of sections of the population.
Not to be outdone the ruling party responded with charges of its own, including one by Home Affairs Minister Clement Rohee in the National Assembly that the Lusignan and Bartica killings were “politically motivated.” Rohee, whose tenure as Home Affairs Minister has come under public scrutiny in the wake of the killings also used the occasion of the parliamentary debate on the 2008 budget earlier this month to restate charges that a number of guns belonging to the Guyana Defence Force (GDF) and issued to the PNC during its tenure in office had not been returned. In the face of the alarming proliferation of gun-related crime there was no mistaking the implications of his observation.
Whatever the validity or otherwise of the respective charges, the two political parties have appeared oblivious to the collateral damage that their ceaseless political jousting has inflicted on a nation still struggling to come to terms with one of the most serious challenges to law and order in the country’s history.
Public bewilderment over the political war of words now sits atop what is already a profound sense of consternation over what many feel is the seriously diminished capacity of the state to effectively maintain law and order.
The political confrontation that has followed the Lusignan and Bartica killings may also have had the effect of drowning out government’s efforts to provide the nation with assurances that the security forces possess both the capacity and the will to “hunt down” the killers. Instead, what has caught public attention is evidence that the killers – assuming that the same gang struck at both Lusignan and Bartica – are well-organized and highly mobile and an open admission by the Home Affairs that government could offer no assurances that the killers may not strike again in some other part of the country. The security forces, he said, simply do not have the numbers to ‘go around’ effectively.
The growing lack of public confidence in the security situation was reflected in the vigorous post – Lusignan demonstrations in East Coast communities where traditional supporters of the government accosted and ‘roughed up’ cabinet ministers visiting bereaved families and demonstrated open hostility to members of the very security forces whom President Jagdeo told them had been assigned to catch the killers.
Behind closed doors the two political parties have fared no better. Stakeholder consultations to discuss the way forward have imploded amidst claims and counter-claims of deliberating in bad faith, driven by a long-standing and unshakeable mistrust among the two parties.
In the two months since the Lusignan and Bartica killings little has happened to change the minds of Guyanese about the propensity of their political leaders to subsume national emergencies beneath political rhetoric. Sections of the media, particularly the state media, have inundated the populace with harsh political rhetoric while public statements by both parties have been unable to resist their customary combative tendencies. The net effect of the rhetoric may well have been the further polarization of large sections of the population that have traditionally supported the two political parties.
Civil society – the church, the trade union movement, the business community and the various social organizations have sat in on the ‘multi-stakeholder’ deliberations that have followed the killings which, while creating a semblance of democratic consultation, do not appear, at least up to this time, to have accomplished much by way of remedial action. The role of these non-political organizations has been decidedly marginal, a function no doubt of their realization that their words have little weight in the focused confrontation between the two political parties.
Both the government and the PNCR have condemned the killings and advocated enhanced security measures. That is their customary way of ensuring that they engage each other from high enough moral ground lest they render themselves vulnerable to charges of partisan politics. Neither, however, has bothered to disguise the fact that their primary preoccupation is with constituency politics.
The government’s decision to order the military to clear dense vegetation on hundreds of acres of land aback of several East Coast villages is a response to pressure from its supporters in the wake of the Lusignan tragedy. Meanwhile, Opposition Leader Robert Corbin has not only steered clear of making a pronouncement sought by President Jagdeo on what the administration feels is Buxton’s role as ‘a haven’ for criminals, but has also publicly criticized what the PNCR says is the heavy-handedness of the security forces in policing the Buxton community, part of its own political constituency.
As much as the horrific events of Lusignan and Bartica have cast a pall of gloom over the country, the inability of the country’s political leaders to rise above their traditional behaviour pattern in the face of a national crisis is an equally disturbing reality. And while there has been no shortage of promises to further strengthen the capacity of the security forces to respond to the crime situation what the nation really seeks is an enhanced sense of statesmanship on the part of its political leaders without which nothing else is likely to work.
