Minister of Home Affairs Mr Clement Rohee doesn’t speak much about the plague of piracy that continues to affect this country’s coastal and riverine waters. The tragedy is that neither his ministry nor the Guyana Police Force, the country’s principal law-enforcement agency, has either a plan or the resources to do anything to make those waters safer and to protect the lives and livelihood of the fishermen who must traverse them every day.
Soon after he was appointed minister, Mr Rohee would offer solace to several delegations of aggrieved fishermen from the Corentyne Coast and elsewhere. After a while, it became clear to them that nothing was being done to counter piracy. The law enforcement problem was then shunted to the Minister of Agriculture Mr Robert Persaud who, evidently, held lots of meetings but has had little success.
Last week on the Corentyne Coast, fishermen in four boats were robbed of their outboard engines, gasoline and other items by pirates armed with a handgun. Soon afterwards on the Essequibo Coast, two more boats were attacked by a gang of pirates armed with ‘long guns’ and their crews relieved of gasoline and rations. About an hour later, the pirates struck again some distance away.
The new commander of the Guyana Police Force Berbice-Corentyne division Mr George Vyfhuis told this newspaper candidly that the police simply “did not have the capability to fight such crime and would pass on the information to the army.” Clearly, the Guyana Defence Force has not been capable of acting on that information to suppress piracy either.
These continuing attacks show how dangerous coastal travel has become. Last month, the dead bodies of Romeo de Agrella and his son Clint de Agrella of the Pomeroon River were found with gunshot wounds at Shell Beach in the Barima-Waini Region. These were not the first murders at sea and the police seem to be at a loss to investigate crime in an environment in which they have little equipment and less experience.
Piracy has been a major public safety problem for decades, and there have been numerous reports of raids and the recovery of the cadavers of Guyanese seamen washed up on the Corentyne. The administration’s traditional cool attitude to contraband and its irresolute law enforcement along the entire coastland − especially on the Corentyne and Essequibo coasts which are notorious for smuggling and illegal migration − opened a new frontier for enterprising pirates. Many of them are rogue fishermen who know their way about the rivers and coastal waters.
The Ministries of Home Affairs and Agriculture seem unwilling to spend money to acquire the maritime, surveillance and aviation assets which they know are necessary to deal with this crime. Soon after he was appointed, Guyana Defence Force chief-of-staff Commodore Gary Best presented a maritime security plan to representatives of the Fisheries Department, the Fisheries Advisory Committee and various fishermen’s co-operative societies.
Minister of Agriculture Mr Robert Persaud once spoke of the proposed communication network which would include a global positioning system that would identify the location of vessels in distress. There is no indication that the system was extended to cover the entire coast. If anything, pirates seemed to have been encouraged by the absence of enforcement.
In the face of calls for effective action to tackle piracy, the administration last July introduced the Hijacking and Piracy Bill that prescribes the death penalty for murder committed during the act. Mr Rohee declared then that piracy was challenging the country’s security and the bill would send a “strong message” to the pirates. As the recent operations off the coast of Somalia have shown, it will take then a strong message to eradicate the scourge of piracy. What good is the law without law enforcement?
