Civil society must not allow the serious debate on crime to be diluted by anecdote or to degenerate into sterile political badinage. Judgement must be based on a rigorous assessment of the evidence.
Contribu-tions to accumulating evidence on crime will be welcome in order to ensure that public safety policy is driven by facts, not by fears.
It seems, however, that facts are already being supplanted by the factitious for no other purpose than fomenting fear. In the aftermath of the Lusignan massacre earlier this year, for example, Presidential Adviser on Governance Gail Teixeira felt compelled to contradict comments by Prime Minister Samuel Hinds who airily suggested that the killings were “clearly a racial problem.” Ms Teixeira said straight away that the ethnicity of the killers was unknown and “we can’t tell that as we weren’t there.”
She argued that, whether the gunmen who attacked Lusignan belonged to one ethnic group or not was not the issue. She then advanced her own theory by stating categorically that the gang of killers had a “terroristic agenda,” pointing out that terror is based on creating fear and trying to create tension between ethnic groups.
A similar line was taken by Minister of Home Affairs Clement Rohee during the budget debate in March this year. Echoing Ms Teixeira’s theory, he insisted that criminal gangs that had carried out killings and robberies were “politically-motivated.” He said that the men are “para-military operatives who have their dubious political-ideological masters to guide them in their killer operations.”
Although neither Ms Teixeira nor Mr Rohee provided proof of their sweeping assertions, PPP General Secretary Donald Ramotar iterated the same theory. Delivering the Central Committee Report of the People’s Progressive Party at its 29th Congress earlier this month, Mr Ramotar tried to establish a nexus between politics and crime saying that it was “widely believed” that criminals are executing a political programme.
But he took the argument further, repeating Mr Hinds’s dubious notion of racial motivation.
He suggested that the criminals’ intention had been “to create fear and to terrorise the population in general but, more particularly, the Indo-Guyanese population,” insinuating that the idea could have been to bait the Indo-Guyanese into some form of tit-for-tat conflict and unleash full-scale “racial reactions reminiscent of the 1960s.” Still on the racial theme, he accused the People’s National Congress Reform of targeting the police force by speaking out about extra-judicial killings and the murder of young African-Guyanese men “whenever bandits or criminals were confronted by the police and were killed.”
It was untruthful, uncalled for and unfortunate to suggest that all the persons shot by the police were “bandits or criminals.” Mr Ramotar ought to know that complaints of killings by the police were not invented by the People’s National Congress Reform. Reports of unlawful killings have been made to, and investigated by, the Police Complaints Authority over the years. They have been documented by the Guyana Human Rights Association and published by the United States Bureau of Democracy, Human Rights, and Labor in its annual Country Reports on Human Rights Practices. This is fact, not fiction.
Mr Ramotar did admit that narco-trafficking and gang-related violence were impeding this country’s progress and argued that “Much of the criminal activities in this part of the world revolve around illicit drugs.” The United States Department of State’s International Narcotics Control Strategy Report has been publishing this fact for a decade.
It is a deliberate distraction to acknowledge the connection of narco-trafficking to criminal violence on one hand and to avoid taking responsibility for the failure of the counter-narcotics strategy on the other hand.
Mr Ramotar refrained from referring to the resolute non-implementation of the National Drug Strategy Master Plan, the discovery of airstrips in the near hinterland, the seizure of narcotics sourced from this country in foreign destinations, the linkage of narco-trafficking to gang warfare, gun-running and money-laundering and the strange inability of the criminal justice system to convict a single, major narco-trafficker or money-launderer in the past 16 years. Could opposition political parties be blamed for this?
Political party commentaries and congress reports are what they are – stories by a minority for a minority.
But facts are sacred and factitious anecdotes should not be dressed up as truth and served to the public.
The Teixeira-Rohee-Ramotar theories do not add up to a useful anti-crime analysis, much less strategy.
When their ulterior motive is to instigate ethnic insecurity in order to rally support for the next election by implying that one ethnic group is the victim and another is the villain, they could damage community relations for decades to come.
