The United Nations should be asked to establish an international team of investigators here as was done in Guatemala

Dear Editor,

It is disappointing that none of the political parties has responded positively to the editorial on “Massacre of the 11,” published in SN, January 28. The proposal set out in the editorial was one that has been adopted by Guatemala to battle narco-induced crime and corruption.

As reported in the SN editorial, “Guatemala and the United Nations announced the establishment of an international team of investigators to aid the criminal justice system in its fight against organised crime. The International Commission Against Impu-nity in Guatemala will comprise 150 lawyers and forensic grandees who will prosecute cases in local courts, relying heavily on scientific evidence-something completely lacking in local jurisprudence.”

The comprehensiveness of the UN approach is appealing especially for Guyanese who are still largely colonial in outlook and who disparage our oft repeated calls for decentralisation and depoliticisation of our public administration. A large number of politicians and officials will most likely leave Guyana as evidence pointing to their involvement in narco crime becomes public.

The AFC should get the facts relating to this initiative and request the PNCR and the GAP / ROAR alliance to call for an emergency session of Parliament to debate the proposal for its urgent adoption in Guyana. Many Guyanese in the diaspora would welcome the opportunity to return to Guyana to work for salaries that should be pitched at levels within the reach of those paid to CARICOM officials working in Guyana. The expertise of these officials will facilitate the establishment of electronic data bases at Lethem (where we are not ready for the bridge across the Takatu), at Mahdia, at Bartica, at Anna Regina, at Charity, at Morawhanna, at Port Kaituma, at New Amsterdam, at Orealla, at Linden and at Ituni. These data bases should relate to the businesses and farms operating in the respective areas, providing details of their output, their employment and their profits. Barama has built an all weather road that stretches from Supenaam to the Venezuelan border. The Malaysians know more about the resources along that road than Messrs Sam Hinds and Robeson Benn.

We are thankful to Sta-broek News for information on the UN facility and urge the AFC to take the “change” in their name seriously, publish the details of the scheme in their newspaper, travel around the country and canvass for this change in the approach to managing the security crisis in Guyana.

Time is of the essence in getting this facility. The present leaders of both the PPP and the PNCR are too compromised to seek this UN assistance. What will proceed from here on is the murder of alleged criminals to placate supporters as if the lives extinguished in this cruel game of racial control are worth no more than the mosquitoes that are swatted away from one’s hands as nuisances.

I am convinced that the political solutions to reducing crime will never be taken by our leaders who are full of talk but refuse to act. When looking at the Sharma TV tape of the Lusignan community protesting against “the massacre of the eleven” (the protesters said “twelve”), one is struck by the viability of that community to function as a decision making unit for its advance into modernity. Such an advance is impossible, however, if economic activities remain stuck in the unchanged and undeveloped plantation production and social relations and in the top-down edicts of two worn-out political juggernauts, fighting the battles of the 1950s and the 1960s.

Lusignan is not the only community where there is an energy yearning for taking its place in the modern world. So is Buxton/Friendship; so is Enterprise, so is Victoria; so are tens of other communities and villages on the coast and in the hinterland. But these places are imprisoned by small minded politicians who distribute guns to selected cohorts and who sit in neighbourhood democratic councils making decisions in a zero-sum environment that is producing the same sugar, the same rice, the same cassava, the same plantains that we were producing for the last 300 years. There has been minuscule processing and little effort to get into the top end of delectability and of nutritional sophistication. We are technology users, not technology innovators. We are stuck in the mud, hence some justification for being called mud-heads.

The UN facility will make it possible to take guns away from civilians, whether those civilians are Africans or East Indians. This will be a first step to the restoration of law and order. The responsibility for the protection of the society rests with the police. The ridiculousness of the attack on Eve Leary and the scampering for safety by frightened policemen is amusing if it were not an indication of the extent to which the state has failed. A state has failed when it cannot maintain its physical, social and economic infrastructure and when its institutional structures have no capability for recapitulation, correction and continuous resuscitation. In those terms Guyana is a failed state. The UN facility provides us an opportunity for the institutional framework to be revived. The AFC should join with Stabroek News and campaign for its immediate adoption in Guyana. Time is not on our side.

Yours faithfully,

Clarence F Ellis