Come September, one year would have elapsed since the start of a spate of allegations of torture against the Guyana Defence Force, Guyana Police Force and Guyana Prison Service. The past eleven months have also experienced a cynical and sometimes comical charade on this issue by administration spokespersons.
When in September 2007 Patrick Sumner and Victor Jones appeared before the media displaying their injuries, it was evident that they had been victims of abnormal and cruel treatment. The men claimed to have been arrested by members of the police and defence forces in Buxton-Friendship and were taken to various police stations and military camps where they were badly beaten before being released without explanation or compensation.
Two weeks later, Minister of Home Affairs Mr Clement Rohee gave the assurance that the allegations were being investigated, adding, “I want to maintain that we have always denounced torture as a means of extracting information.” But, by the next month, October, Mr Rohee seemed less concerned about investigation and more about condemnation of the People’s National Congress Reform which had taken up the victims’ claims, suggesting that the party was exploiting the allegations for political purposes.
By December, Mr Rohee’s attitude had changed further. He declared that ordinary people were more concerned about receiving goodies from overseas and acquiring their own homes than the torture of two Buxtonians. As minister responsible for public safety, he dismissed the grave matter of torture as just another allegation saying injudiciously “When you finish with one allegation there will be another. I am not expected in my life-time at the ministry to dispense with all these allegations.” That pretty much explained why so little progress has been made on this issue.
Meanwhile in November back in Buxton-Friendship, another resident − David Leander called David Zammett − who was arrested by the police, had to be hoisted bodily into the Georgetown magistrate’s court to face certain charges. His counsel told the magistrate that the defendant had been beaten while in police custody.
Hardly had the furore over the various victims from Buxton-Friendship subsided that the defence force faced fresh accusations from three of its own members in January this year. Alvin Wilson, Michael Dunn, Sharth Robertson and others who were considered to be concerned in the disappearance of a weapon from Camp Ayanganna complained to the media that they had been badly beaten by officers of the defence force’s Military Criminal Investigation Department.
Asked for a comment on the issue, President Bharrat Jagdeo impatiently told a reporter not to waste his time as there were more positive things happening in the country. By mid-January, however, the President modified his posture saying that his administration was taking the torture claims against the GDF seriously. He promised that a board of inquiry would investigate the allegations.
Time passed. The Guyana Defence Board which the President chairs did receive the report on the inquiry into torture allegations which was submitted by the Chief of Staff. But, by mid-April, the President admitted that the board was yet to examine the report. “We did have a general discussion… the investigation was done and there is a report, but the report itself was not circulated. That is where we are,” the President said.
By March this year, as would have been expected, the stellar performances of the Guyana Defence Force and the Government of Guyana earned a paragraph in the US Bureau of Democracy, Human Rights, and Labor’s Country Reports on Human Rights Practices for 2007. According to that report, “the Guyana Defence Force (GDF) was accused of physically abusing two of its own soldiers during an interrogation related to the search for a missing weapon; the GDF promised a full investigation. Some senior officials in the government publicly dismissed all such abuse allegations, despite physical evidence that appeared to corroborate some of the claims.”
After eleven months of verbiage, the administration has evinced little enthusiasm for bringing the perpetrators of these crimes to justice. This policy is perilous. As former British Foreign Secretary Jack Straw said two years ago, “When torture begins to take root anywhere, it is one of the first indicators that the forces of ideological fanaticism and corruption are in the ascendant… that the boundary between order and chaos is dissolving.”
Are the administration’s inaction and verbalisation allowing torture to take root in the defence and police forces?