Editor’s note: As part of the newspaper’s contribution in the run-up to the November 28 general election, the presidential candidates of the political groupings represented in Parliament have been invited by Guyana Publications Inc to submit weekly columns which will be carried in the Sunday Stabroek. The series began four weeks ago and will end on November 27. The columns below were received from the People’s Progressive Party/Civic and A Partnership for National Unity.
The four Disciplined Forces of Guyana – the Guyana Police Force, the Guyana Defence Force, the Guyana Prison Service and the Guyana Fire Service – have been treated with a mixture of ambivalence, suspicion and aversion by the People’s Progressive Party/Civic administration from the time it entered office in October 1992. The result has been that, as transnational crimes spread and criminal violence plagued the country, especially during the past 12 years, the Disciplined Forces were found to be under-equipped, unprepared and unable to preserve public order and ensure public security.
The PPP/C administration was jolted into altering its attitude to the Forces only during the dreadful days of the ‘Troubles‘ on the East Coast which erupted in 2002. President Bharrat Jagdeo and opposition leader Robert Corbin agreed to establish the Disciplined Forces Commission with a mandate to inquire into the Guyana Police Force, Guyana Defence Force, Guyana Prison Service and Guyana Fire Service in order to identify their shortcomings and to recommend remedies to respond to the public security crisis.
The Commission was welcomed by professional members of the Forces. It had a broad mandate “to examine any matter relating to the Public Welfare, Public Safety, Public Order, Defence or Security including the structure and composition of the Disciplined Forces. The Commission started its work in July 2003 and presented its final Report to the Speaker of the National Assembly in May 2004. The Report was then laid before the National Assembly and was accepted unanimously. The Report, despite the gravity of the public security situation at that time and the urgency of the Commission’s recommendations, was deliberately delayed thereafter.
The PPP/C administration was unconcerned about the fact that its procrastination was costly. It was unwilling to acknowledge the connection between the high crime rate in the country during the ‘Troubles’ – when some of the most bloody mass killings were occurring – and the non-implementation of the Commission’s recommendations to reform the Forces to correct their shortcomings.
The Commission, in the final analysis, made 164 recommendations to reform the Disciplined Forces. It found that Guyana faced transnational dangers to national security and public security posed by narco-trafficking, weapons-smuggling, money-laundering, back-tracking (illegal migration) and terrorism. National and international developments clearly were making an impact on the operations of the Disciplined Forces but the PPP/C administration was not willing to make commensurate changes in Forces’ administration, legislation and organisation. The Forces, given their composition and capability, were unable to confront criminal violence. Public security suffered as a consequence.
The Commission recommended that a comprehensive National Security Sector Reform Programme – which methodically addressed the deficiencies of the Forces and which would enable them to cope with these evolutionary challenges – should be considered for implementation. This was never done.
Seventy-one recommendations concerned the Guyana Police Force alone. The Commission recommended, among other things that attention should be paid to strengthening the Force’s investigative capabilities and that a sound criminal intelligence system be established. The Police Complaints Authority’s independence should be maintained by providing adequate administrative and financial resources and it should be staffed with an investigative team consisting of trained investigators who would be responsible and accountable directly to the Authority. This was never done.
The Commission paid special attention to the capabilities of the Defence Force’s Air Corps and Coast Guard. It recommended that there should be an increase in manpower – that was seven years ago – and that the Defence Board should seriously review the support given to the Coast Guard. Better arrangements for the recruitment and retention of pilots and engineers should be made.
It was proposed, also, that there should be increased operational employment of aviation resources in coastal, maritime and border surveillance. To do so, the Air Corps should be assisted to conduct routine patrols in cooperation with the ground forces and Coast Guard in order to assist in the interdiction of contraband activities on the country’s border and the detection of illegal fishing and other violations of its maritime zone. Inshore patrol vessels, similarly, should be acquired to enable the suppression of illegal fishing, illegal migration, narcotics-trafficking, gun-running and contraband-smuggling. The Coast Guard should be present in the Corentyne, in particular, to suppress smuggling.
The Commission found that the issue of paramount importance to Fire Service’s fire-fighting efforts was the supply of water at the scenes of fires. It recommended that the Minister of Home Affairs use his office to ensure that fire hydrants are supplied with adequate water for fire-fighting purposes. The Commission also recommended that immediate efforts should be made by the Minister to acquire at least one fire boat for the Service to be based in the Demerara River in the short term. These were never done.
The Commission’s greatest concern, with regard to the Prison Service, was the growing size of the prison population. As numbers increase, there ought to have been a commensurate increase in the strength of the Service’s personnel. The risk of over-crowding the Georgetown Prison with too many high-security prisoners was great. Numbers had to be reduced by the transfer of convicts to the more commodious Mazaruni Prison after completion of its physical rehabilitation and structural expansion. It was recommended, therefore, that the Georgetown Prison should be rehabilitated and its facilities improved and modernised if found to be economically feasible; that the Mazaruni Prison should be expanded and provided with the resources for greater prison intake as a solution to the overcrowding problem in the Georgetown Prison and that there should be a female remand prison in the vicinity of Georgetown. These were never done.
The Report of the Disciplined Forces Commission essentially was, a ‘performance report’ on the People’s Progressive Party Civic administration in general and the Ministry of Home Affairs in particular.
Many of the recommended changes required decisive governmental action, particularly by the Ministry of Home Affairs.
It has always been evident, however, that the PPP/C administration had no intention either of implementing those recommendations or of improving the capability of the Forces to counter the crimes – especially narcotics-trafficking, money-laundering, commodity and fuel-smuggling and backtracking – from which well-known persons continue to profit.
The PPP/C, in addition, has demoralised law-enforcement officers and de-professionalised the Disciplined Forces by selective personnel practices such as arbitrary dismissals, promotions and extensions of service.
These are the reasons why public security problems persist. Daily gun crimes, a high murder rate, out-of-control banditry in the hinterland, piracy and various ‘disorderly’ crimes will continue as long as the PPP/C remains in office.
