The government did not show itself to best advantage in the parliamentary debate a week last Monday, and Agriculture Minister Robert Persaud in particular did nothing to advance his political reputation. Why he should have been the lead speaker for the government benches on an opposition motion calling for the state to honour its obligations under the UN Convention against Torture and set up an independent inquiry into allegations of torture by the Joint Services, is something of a mystery, since the conduct of the police and the army doesn’t fall naturally within his portfolio; nevertheless, since lead he did, both he as well as the administration he serves are to be held accountable for what he had to say. And what he had to say was profoundly disturbing.
The motion, brought by the PNCR-1G and supported by the AFC, had arisen out of the cases of civilians Patrick Sumner, Victor Jones and David Leander, as well as military personnel Michael Dunn, Alvin Wilson and Sharth Robertson, all of whose allegations of torture received widespread coverage in the media and whose injuries were photographed and video-recorded. There was an army investigation into the cases involving the GDF, but the report which emerged has not yet been made public. And neither was it produced in Parliament on Monday, although government spokespersons including Mr Persaud made so bold as to tell members what it contained, viz, that there was no evidence of torture, although it did find instances of “roughing up.”
So the first question to ask is why wasn’t the report released prior to the debate? Members of Parliament are not primary school children who need a document reduced to simple terms by a minister so that they can comprehend it. They are adults elected to represent their constituents, and as such are paid to exercise their own judgement on those constituents’ behalf. President Jagdeo has since said the report would be made public, albeit with names edited out, but that would now be too late for the House.
Minister Persaud, in appearing to defend “roughing up,” told members of parliament that in the light of the “new face of criminality” the security forces would use “a certain amount of physical and mental pressure” in order to obtain information. He went on to say, “To try to include these acts [as torture] is to cheapen the definition of torture.” Unsurprisingly he has come under a good deal of criticism for his idiosyncratic definitions which debase the meaning of ‘torture,’ and for also appearing to defend “roughing up,” however that is defined. A week last Friday he attempted to mitigate the damage with a press release saying that “at no time during his presentation did he either advocate a policy or suggest any approved action of ‘roughing up’ of persons being questioned by the security forces.” It was, however, too little too late, and in any case did not affect the fundamental question of the distinction between ‘torture’ and ‘roughing up.’
Unfortunately for the Minister, language is a public form of communication, not a private one, and the PPP which he serves is simply not in a position to impose a new lexicon on the rest of the world − least of all on the international human rights agencies. In this instance, the Minister better believe, international definitions will apply, and the allegations in question meet international definitions of torture as contained in the UN Convention to which the government is a signatory. So when the government spokespersons say that the administration does not condone torture, what they mean is it does not condone some privately concocted definition of torture which no one else knows about. So what precisely does the government consider to be torture? The citizens of Guyana are still waiting for that to be explained to them.
But it got worse. Mr Persaud, who had earlier said that the report had found no evidence of torture and that the claims by some of the “alleged victims” were false, later worked himself up to demand of the opposition benches, “Give us the ocular proof. You cannot because there is none.” Well, Mr Raphael Trotman of the AFC was ready for him, and held up for the scrutiny of the House the bloodied trousers of the late Edwin Niles, who died during interrogation in the Camp Street jail. However, even without that bit of drama, one has to marvel at the capacity of the Minister of Agriculture and the governing party to believe that they can persuade rational citizens and the international community that the visual evidence which went into the public domain after the men had been held by the Joint Services is something altogether different from what they know they saw.
And thousands of pairs of eyes saw it. The injuries of the men were photographed and video-recorded and were shown in the newspapers and on television newscasts; in particular, the burns on the bodies of the Buxtonians were very visible. This newspaper’s reporters saw the men in person, inspected their injuries and listened to and evaluated their stories, which were eminently credible, it must be said. And nobody has forgotten – except the government, it seems − how Mr Leander had to be lifted into court owing to the extent of his injuries, in his case allegedly inflicted by the police. Is Minister Persaud really trying to suggest that the serious burns on some victims, but other injuries as well, were simply a figment of our collective imaginations? Or that those who saw the TV footage or the photos in the papers or who watched Mr Leander in court were suffering from a communal hallucination that the injuries were more serious than they really were?
And if the torture report really does deny that the major injuries to which the nation either directly or indirectly through the agency of the independent media could bear witness, did not prima facie amount to torture, then it will have little credibility. At the very least, it would have to provide believable evidence of how such serious wounds were come by – unless, of course, it accepts the extent of the injuries, but like the government has indulged in semantic games.
Last Saturday during a press conference at State House, President Jagdeo said that the country needed to understand the context of the torture allegations. Well, actually, Mr President, it doesn’t. There is no context which will justify agents of the state torturing anyone, let alone over a three-day period, as was alleged in the instance of Messrs Sumner and Jones. As for his statements about how the security forces had to operate in Buxton during the crime wave, that was simply going off at a tangent, and did not address the central issue of the allegations themselves.
Then of course during the parliamentary debate Mr Persaud and Ms Gail Teixeira dragged up that old canard relating to the PNC, saying the party had no “moral authority” to bring the motion because of its poor human rights record while in office. Well the poor human rights record of the PNC in government is not in dispute, but what does that have to do with specific torture allegations against members of the security forces under the PPP/C? Surely the two senior members of the governing party are not seeking to argue that what the PPP/C does can go unchallenged because the PNC did it too? Or that nothing which the PNC/R raises in Parliament should be discussed there because it lacks moral authority? If the government were to follow those positions to their logical conclusion it would lead us into absurdity – and an undemocratic absurdity at that.
The government would be well advised to release the long-awaited torture report soon, and if this document does not address public concerns in a credible way, to open its mind to the possibility of having an independent inquiry into the allegations. It appears to be seriously underestimating the damage it would sustain if the matter is taken up by international human rights agencies, in a context where it has failed to act.
