Just over a decade after President Janet Jagan and opposition leader Desmond Hoyte signed the Herdmanston Accord at the northern end of New Garden Street in Georgetown on 17 January 1998, President Bharrat Jagdeo and forty social partners agreed to the Bourda Accord at the Office of the President at the southern end of the same street on 12 March 2008.
The Herdmanston Accord had come in the wake of a dangerous deterioration in public order after the general elections of December 1997. The Bourda Accord was reached in the aftermath of two of the most monstrous mass murders in the country’s criminal history when twenty-three persons were slaughtered at Lusignan and Bartica. No one so far seems able to determine what were the criminal motivation and organisation behind the two massacres and, hence, what law enforcement measures are necessary to prevent a recurrence.
The Bourda Accord, the outcome of a consultation convened between the administration and social partners, is an attempt to build a broad-based consensus against violent crime. But citizens familiar with the past decade of dialogue between the administration and opposition should not expect any spectacular success from this round of discussions. All previous talks ritually concluded with cordial agreements. The celebrated Joint Communiqué that emerged from the Jagdeo-Corbin ‘constructive engagement’ process in May 2003, in particular, was regarded as one of the most promising. In fact, the resemblance between the texts of the 2003 Joint Communiqué and the 2008 Bourda Accord is striking.
Back in 2003, for example, the president and the opposition leader made a “firm commitment” to a timetable to establish, among other things, the Constitutional Reform Committee and agreed that “immediate steps” would be taken to have all of the outstanding constitutional commissions appointed. These included the service commissions, the Public Procurement Commission, the Human Rights Commission, the Commissions for Women and Gender Equity, for the Indigenous Peoples, and for the Rights of the Child.
Five years on, the social partners still seem to be at square one. They agreed to convene and activate the same Constitutional Reform Committee and to expedite the appointments of the same six constitutional commissions among other things. They also agreed to establish a parliamentary Standing Sectoral Committee on National Security. Is this not the same committee that the Disciplined Forces Commission had recommended that the National Assembly should establish four years ago?
Social partners in the new Bourda Accord also pledged to “commit their full and unqualified support of the joint services in confronting crime in the country and in securing the safety of our citizens under the law.” They promised to work with the administration and all parliamentary political parties to jointly review the Guyana-Britain Security Sector Reform Action Plan. But the President himself admitted that a lot of the social partners “were not familiar with what we were doing, so many of the suggestions that were coming in were things that were already being pursued and part of the national plan.” How realistic was it to invite social partners to discuss a redacted extract of the Security Sector Reform Action Plan. How valuable would be their deliberations and their commitment to support a fragment of a plan with which they are hardly familiar?
It is difficult to imagine how any serious counter-crime strategy can succeed unless it is premised on securing this country’s airspace, seaspace and territorial borders against narco-trafficking, back-tracking, fuel-smuggling, gun-running and gold and diamond smuggling. After over fifteen continuous years in office, the administration is bound to be aware that these are the grand felonies that are triggering the scores of inexplicable executions and gun crimes which have made this country so dangerous. Yet, after a decade of denial and indifference, these heavy issues have not found a place on the Bourda Accord’s menu of measures.
An analysis of the text of the Bourda Accord does not suggest that its aim was to solve the present public safety problem at all. If the social partners’ objective was better governance, they could have aimed, instead, at establishing continuous civilian oversight to ensure that the recommendations of the British-funded consultancies and Guyanese commissions, crime consultations and drug strategy master plans are implemented and that the integrity of the police force’s disciplinary and operating procedures is guaranteed. Acceptance of even such modest measures could be a sea change from the cynical charades of the last decade.
