Guyana is not one of those ‘hot spots’ – so to speak – among the territories in which matches of the 2024 Cricket World Cup (CWC) will be played where serious security-related occurrences are expected to mar the events themselves, or create a discomfiting atmosphere, particularly for visitors to the country who will arrive here to see the games. One of the very early games will see the West Indies clashing with Papua New Guinea on Sunday, and since it is unlikely that supporters of the PNG team will pour into the Republic, the passion that is customarily associated with cricket in the region is unlikely to create any flare-ups.
Terror attacks can bring considerations into play that are – as we say in Guyana – beyond the pay grades of the region’s Police Forces. Here one assumes that the Police Forces in the region would have availed themselves of briefings on aspects of terror that might present themselves and policing responses that might compromise such attacks and/or mitigate the effectiveness of such attacks.
In a matter of a few days, the readiness of the police/security forces must be prepared to go ‘up a gear,’ so to speak, in keeping the respective countries, players and officials and visitors safe. It is an assignment which, unquestionably, will be used by the rest of the international community as a yardstick to determine whether or not we have come of age, or at least, the pace at which we are getting there.
Still there are going to be, during the course of the tournament, what one might call the routine security-related undertakings associated with the movement of people between one country and another and the likelihood of customary domestic crime challenges, in one or another of those territories, seizing the moment associated with sudden influxes of outsiders to raise their game. Here the point should be made that CWC 2024 has come to the Caribbean at a time when some countries are experiencing varying degrees of social upheavals that frequently manifest themselves in various levels of serious crimes. In some instances, the level of proliferation is linked to gang-related criminal activity and there is no reason to believe that there may not be, at this time, the phenomenon of gangs in the affected countries licking their lips, so to speak, at the thought of temporary inflows of foreigners who, afflicted with ‘cricket fever’, become altogether unmindful of the threats that might exist.
To return to terror related upheavals these, of course, could occur in any of the countries in the region that have been assigned games in the tournament, with motivations deriving from terrorist targeting that have to do with perceptions of the countries’ foreign policy positions on one issue or another. In this circumstance of the likely randomness of such terror attacks, few if any of the territories hosting CWC games can be ruled out as targets for varying levels of disruption.
Indiscriminate terror is not one of those issues that frequently finds its way into the public space, the more reason why, in contemplating the likelihood of possible disruption of any of the games in the series, the policing authorities in the participating countries can take nothing for granted. It would, for example, be absurd for any country in the region to assume that it is too small, too inconsequential, to become a target for terrorist attacks. To do so is to completely misunderstand the mindset of the terrorist culture which is, among other things, to attract maximum public attention. The fact of the matter is that should an effective terrorist attack impact CWC, even in any ‘nook’ or ‘cranny’ in the Caribbean, the news will travel in the wings of popularity fashioned out of the near global popularity that the event enjoys. It is for the state to provide the rest of us with assurances that everything that can be done, is being done, to keep terrorism at bay.