Guyana Defence Force Chief of Staff Commodore Gary Best has been busy sermonising cadets and recruits on training courses about military misbehaviour. Soon after he assumed command of the force in 2007, he told an officers’ training course that “discipline within the military is under question.” It still is.

At the Colonel John Clarke Military School at Tacama last week, Commodore Best warned soldiers on the Basic Recruits Course, “Do not get involved in illegal activities; do not steal from your fellow soldiers; do not steal while on patrols; do not conduct your own operations for private gain. That is not the purpose of [being] a soldier. Your duty is to keep Guyana safe.” Declaring open the Standard Officers’ Course at the Colonel Ulric Pilgrim Officer Cadet School at Timehri last month, he admonished the cadets to, “Uphold your own and the force’s integrity through display of proper conduct and superlative leadership.”

Best’s recent counsel might have been prompted by allegations that a young lieutenant and three soldiers robbed miners in the Barima-Waini Region, reopening unhealed wounds of a similar robbery in 2000. This newspaper quoted Secretary of the Guyana Gold and Diamond Miners Association Edward Shields as saying that “there had been several allegations of mostly Brazilian miners being robbed by the armed forces” in the past.

The force has had other problems apart from robbery. The chief of staff admitted to this newspaper that the rate of soldiers’ desertion from the force − an average of over one a week − is “too high.” In addition, the public has been alarmed at the rate of fatal road accidents. In April, a woman died after being struck down in McDoom Village and, in May, another woman died after being knocked off her motorcycle on the Soesdyke-Linden highway, both by defence force vehicles.

These reports are recent, but it is evident that military discipline has been deteriorating over a long period. It will be recalled that a soldier murdered another during peacekeeping operations in Haiti fourteen years ago. Latterly, the courts determined cases of a lieutenant who shot one of his soldiers to death at a hinterland camp; of a soldier who killed a fellow at a camp on the East Coast; of another who killed a fellow in the barracks at Timehri; and of another who severely burnt a fellow by setting fire to a building at a camp in the hinterland. Allegations have been made also that officers tortured their own soldiers in Camp Ayanganna.

The force’s involvement in law enforcement operations during the troubles on the East Coast made bad worse. In one case, President Bharrat Jagdeo, the Minister of Defence, announced publicly that the USA indictment on narco-trafficking charges of a former major − who was set to testify against another accused narco-trafficker Shaheed ‘Roger’ Khan − vindicated his decision in May 2003 not to promote him when he was still a member of the defence force.

The chief of staff cannot be blamed for the events of the past, the cumulative effects of which are evident today. But he cannot avoid responsibility for correcting the misbehaviour which has now become quite unacceptable.  Given the educational background of cadets and recruits, military enlistment standards must be radically rewritten to prevent degenerates from joining the force. Equally, the initial courses that new entrants must attend at the Colonel John Clarke Military School and at the Colonel Ulric Pilgrim Officer Cadet School must be fundamentally reconstructed to inculcate upon entrants the high standards of discipline which military service demands and the nation deserves.

Homilies, alas, change nothing.