That recommendation was the first of several failed attempts to convince this administration of the need to establish a parliamentary committee to oversee this country’s parlous security. It was ignored and the national security situation deteriorated.
President Jagdeo and Opposition Leader Robert Corbin then issued another joint statement two years later calling for the establishment of the Disciplined Forces Commission. The Commission presented its report to the Speaker of the National Assembly in May 2004 recommending, among other things, that “a commission on public safety to which the Minister of Home Affairs would be answerable” should be established in the National Assembly. That was nearly six years ago.
That commission was never established but, this time, that Report was sent to a ‘special select committee.’ While that committee was still examining the Report, the National Assembly was dissolved in May 2006 in preparation for the general elections. Its findings were never presented to the Assembly.
The next stage was reached when Head of the Presidential Secretariat Dr Luncheon and the British High Commissioner Fraser Wheeler signed an interim memorandum of agreement for the Security Sector Reform Action Plan in August 2007. Under this agreement, the Guyana Government was committed to establishing a new special select committee to re-examine the same Disciplined Forces Commission Report. That was done in 2008 but, by then, two of the worst massacres in this country’s history occurred in January and February 2008 at Lusignan and Bartica, respectively.
In the aftermath of these atrocities, the Administration hurriedly convened a series of consultations with civil society and political parties in an attempt to belatedly build a broad-based consensus against criminal violence. This National Stakeholders Forum, as it came to be known, repeated the call for the establishment of a Standing Sectoral Committee on National Security in the National Assembly.
Last week, nearly twenty four months after the Forum’s recommendation was made and fourteen months after a constitutional amendment to establish the oversight committee was approved, the Administration acted. The government side introduced a motion to establish the Standing Committee on Oversight of the Security Sector which will be tasked with examining certain areas of government policy and administration and assessing the performance of the disciplined forces.
The government side has seen it fit to preclude the work of the Customs Anti-Narcotics Unit, which is part of the Ministry of Home Affairs, from coming under the oversight of the committee. This is so despite the widely acknowledged fact that narco-trafficking is the main transnational crime that is at the root of gun-running, money-laundering and execution-type murders. These are the serious crimes which have fuelled violence over the past decade.
In addition, although it is evident that administration officials have dawdled for nine years over establishing and empowering a committee such as this to examine the security sector, chairmanship of the proposed committee will be handed to another government nominee.
The Administration has evinced little enthusiasm, despite several well-meaning attempts, to establish any form of security sector oversight committee in the National Assembly. There have been lots of proposals for committees on security over the past decade but little commitment to bringing any of them into existence to do the work they need to do. What, therefore, can the public expect from this latest much-delayed half measure?
