Guyana’s staggering crime crisis
GUYANA is currently gripped in a crime crisis for which there seems no immediate or quick-fix resolution, and made worse by its endemic political/racial polarisation and a growing menace of well-armed and connected criminals.
For the people of Caribbean Community states like Jamaica and Trinidad and Tobago, especially those who may, regrettably, have become numb to murder, violence and armed robberies, they could be cynical, or disinterested about reports out of Georgetown about the crime upsurge and its damaging consequences for Guyana.
But for Guyanese, especially those in the capital city, and even moreso along villages on the East Coast Demerara with their parallel dominant communities of people of African or Indian descent, life has become a living hell.
Guyana has had its bitter, costly fratricidal warfare in the pre-independence years of the 1960s when some 176 persons fell victims to the guns, bombs and other weapons of the purveyors of race/political hatred.
At the best of times, Guyana is not a country whose 83,000 square miles can easily be policed, not even along its densely populated coastland with miles of farm/cattle lands stretching from the main highway that parallels the sea defences from the Atlantic Ocean.
When political and racial divisions are added to the mix of 35 per cent poverty and 15 per cent unemployment, as well as the crimes of narco-trafficking and gun-running, strident anti-government attacks from the main opposition People’s National Congress (PNC) and on the police that blend with that party’s rhetoric to make the country “ungovernable”, it all combines to convey the depth of the crisis.
And the people of the multi-ethnic, plural society find themselves struggling for survival in this most unpleasant atmosphere while continuing to nurture hope that the security forces will soon seize the upper hand from the criminals.
What may have originally started as a politically-linked terror campaign by armed criminals that coincided in February last year with the escape of five dangerous prisoners – two on murder charges – from the Georgetown Prison, was to degenerate into the most frightening and unprecedented scale of murder, kidnappings, vehicle hijackings, armed robberies and criminal violence Guyana has ever known in its post-colonial history, outside of the fratricidal war.
Although the victims have, in the majority of cases, been Guyanese of Indian descent, the criminal rampage has had its toll on all races when the bandits move to kill, steal and destroy, and finger lawmen among their special targets with 20 of them among the murdered.
In 2001, when the governing PPP secured its third consecutive electoral victory against the PNC that held uninterrupted power for 28 years from 1964 to 1992, the number of murders, including crimes of passion, stood at 79.
For all of 2002, it was 142, with at least 70 of those linked to a mixture of narco-trafficking, gun-running and politically-motivated hate and revenge crimes, and included the deaths of 14 lawmen and 25 business people.
The situation in Guyana seems worse than even the mind-boggling murder rates in Jamaica (1,040) or Trinidad and Tobago (171) for last year, when population data and other related factors are considered. Guyana has a population of 750,000 compared with Jamaica’s 2.7 million and Trinidad and Tobago’s 1.2 million
Already, for the first three weeks of this month, Guyana has recorded 27 murders and a number of wounded. Among the murder victims are five policemen.
The murders have reignited a war of words between Government and Opposition forces about contributing factors to the crime crisis.
While, for instance, the PNC – which is to elect on February 1 a successor to its late leader, Desmond Hoyte – points to poverty, unemployment and alleged discrimination in job opportunities and allocation of state funds for social/economic development, the Government responds with data of high levels of expenditures on projects in depressed villages and communities, in contrast to the PNC’s 28 years in government.
The Government also points to the “open, racist politics of destabilisation” being preached by PNC activists, some of whom distribute controversial pamphlets at funerals while others maintain a constant barrage of abuse on TV talk shows against the security forces and Government ministers and officials.
In addition to criticising the Government’s social and economic policies which it blames for contributing to the criminal lawlessness, the PNC maintains its verbal salvos against the PPP administration for being reluctant to deal with what it views as “executions” by the police whose tactics have often sparked hostility.
Villagers of predominantly Indian descent have become primary targets of criminals from the Buxton-Friendship area of predominantly African descent.
The spate of killings and robberies within the past two weeks have reinforced the view of the stressed-out security forces themselves that Buxton/Friendship, located 12 miles east of the capital Georgetown, has emerged over the past 10 months as a major sanctuary for criminals and from where marauding gangs launch attacks on nearby villages.
There is now the fear of organised retaliation by besieged villagers of the parallel Annandale area, a development that could spark racial conflict.
This is something that the governing PPP of President Bharrat Jagdeo feels may be part of what it views as “the sinister aim of the intellectual authors of the criminals”, including those on the pro-opposition television stations “with their race talk and excuses for violence”.
The threat of reprisal last Tuesday by villagers of Annandale to arrest the weekly, at times daily attacks by marauding gangs from the Buxton-Friendship area, followed the daring kidnapping in front of their home of two teenage brothers by armed men who had demanded a ransom of G$5 million (G$189 = US$1).
Recalling how a 62-year-old kidnapped farmer of their village was shot to death when a ransom demand was not met, the villagers made chilling threats against the alleged criminals from nearby Buxton village in an effort to free, at all cost, one of the brothers.
Such a conflict by villagers is, of course, the last thing that any side – including the post-Hoyte PNC or the ruling PPP – would wish to descend on the Guyanese people who are already severely traumatised by the offensive of the criminals.
As three leading figures of the small Working People’s Alliance parliamentary party noted in a letter to the media, illegal weapons are playing a large part in the “upsurge of brutal violence”, and warned that “in the end, crime and violence know no race”.
This sentiment fits the thinking of civil society representatives, as reflected, for example, in a draft anti-crime communiqué a three-member Social Partners Group has been endeavouring to get the parliamentary parties to sign for joint action. The PNC is yet to give the document its consent.
Representing the private sector, labour movement and the local bar association, the group’s draft joint anti-crime communiqué, as discussed with the parties, urged collective “recognition” that:
“The many victims of recent increases in criminal activities are innocent civilians and that continuation of their suffering through murder, violence and robberies will intensify the feelings of hopelessness felt by many members of society…”
After two months of meetings and negotiations, the PNC was still not ready to sign on to the draft up to the time of the death on December 22 of its leader, Hoyte.
One encouraging signal in the post-Hoyte phase is that the PNC under its interim leader, Robert Corbin, who is expected to be endorsed in the post next Saturday, has been more forthcoming in denouncing criminal attacks and urging co-operation with the security forces.
Whether the PNC will now sign the anti-crime communiqué offered by the civil society representatives and also end its now 11-month boycott of Parliament to encourage a more constructive climate for a consensual approach in battling the criminals, is left to be seen.
For its part, the Government is perceived to be weak in its measured responses to the crime crisis. And up to last week its principal media spokesman, Dr Roger Luncheon, head of the Presidential Secretariat and secretary of the Defence Board, was still expressing reservations about the imposition of a limited state of emergency with curfews, even in the troubled communities along the East Coast.
The Government, he said, was more focused on high profile initiatives such as the now operationalised, permanent round-the-clock joint patrols of the police and army in the crime-plagued villages and in other areas of the country.
It is, however, widely believed that unless there is a collective political response from the governing and opposition parties, in collaboration with civil society, it would remain very challenging for the security forces to seize the high ground from the widening band of drug-trafficking and other categories of criminals.
Among the criminals are deportees from North America, with their capacity to mobilise illegal guns and other weapons and operate a sophisticated networking system in their reign of criminal terror.
Last Thursday, President Jagdeo received a report from a broadly-based committee that was engaged in national consultations on the crime situation. The consultation was an initiative of the Government to obtain maximum possible “people’s inputs” on what needs to be done.
Chairman of the consultation committee, Bishop Juan Edghill, chairman of the Guyana Council of Churches, said that while the Government was elected to govern, the society as a whole had a “moral obligation” to help in finding solutions to the current crime crisis.
That may be soothing words for the Government. The question is how it will respond to the recommendations once they are placed, as they would be, in the public domain at a time of bleeding hearts over the unprecedented crime wave.