Recently, The Guyana Review conducted an extended interview with AFC Executive Member Gerhard Ramsaroop during which he spoke at length on issues relating both to his personal outlook and to the politics of the political party which he feels is much more than the ‘third force’ that it has been labeled. In this issue we publish the first part of our interview with Mr. Ramsaroop Part One
Guyana Review: First of all, why are you with the AFC, why did you leave the PPP?
GRSP: I would say it was because of Dr. Jagan
Guyana Review: Can you explain that?
GRSP: I grew up in a very political family, and the political values instilled in me by my parents were based on their understanding of the principles and vision for a united Guyana that were articulated by Dr. Jagan. Since Dr. Jagan’s death in 1997, I became increasingly uncomfortable with what I saw as the PPP’s drift from his principles. I have found the space and comfort to be true to myself in the AFC. If it were not for the clear moral teaching of Dr. Jagan, I might not have had the fortitude to do what I am doing today.
Guyana Review: What is the AFC’s vision for Guyana?
GRSP: Our vision is very simple. We wish to make Guyana the one country on earth that every Guyanese would choose to live in over and above any other. What we are saying to you is; if you were given the chance to settle in any country in the world, you would choose to be here in Guyana, rather than in Great Britain, Canada, the United States, Barbados, Trinidad, Australia……….. you name it.
Although this statement of vision is simple, its implications are far-reaching. It means that we must make Guyana a country where no law-abiding citizen has to fear for his or her life, safety and security from any quarter, whether bandit, police, soldier. It also means that we must make Guyana a country where citizens can enjoy economic prosperity for themselves and their families, and it means that our social systems must adequately provide those fundamental public goods such as health care, education, safe water and sanitation, and once again, safety and security.
Guyana Review: Many say the AFC has been given a reprieve with the recent re-election of Robert Corbin to the leadership of the PNCR, do you agree that this has been advantageous to the AFC?
GRSP: No we don’t agree with this at all. Persons have similarly said that the continued marginalization of Moses Nagamootoo in the PPP is advantageous to the AFC but we don’t agree with either of these propositions. These sentiments subscribe to the view that the AFC is nothing more than a collection of ex-PNC, ex-PPP and ex-WPA people and this is simply not true at all. We don’t see ourselves as being “anti-PPP” or “anti-PNC”. We have our own principles that we subscribe to and which those parties demonstrably don’t. The AFC is a political party in its own right and there is a particular political space that we occupy that is not served by any of the other parties. Many of our members have never been in politics before joining the AFC.
Guyana Review: By political space I take it you mean ideology. If so what is the AFC’s ideology?
GRSP: First and foremost we subscribe to the concept of liberal democracy which is tightly tied to protection of individual rights, rule of law, and limitation of the power of the executive. Secondly we are genuinely multi-ethnic. Thirdly, we are unreservedly pro-private enterprise.
Guyana Review: We’ve heard a lot about this Liberal Democracy concept of late, what is your take on it. Don’t we have democracy in Guyana?
GRSP: Many serious political scientists now subscribe to the view that when we say “democracy” in reference to countries like the US, the UK, Canada – and I use these only because these are the preferred places of refuge for Guyanese – what is really meant is liberal democracy. That is to say countries where in addition to having regular, periodic free and fair elections – that’s the democracy part – there is also an explicit limitation on the power of government over the life of the individual, binding it to respect for property rights, respect for human rights and subjecting the government to the rule of law. There is a school of thought that says that countries like the US and Great Britain for example had centuries of “constitutional liberalism” i.e. they had this respect for individual rights and liberties before becoming true democracies in the sense of extending suffrage – or even these rights in and of themselves – to women, non-property owners and certain ethnic groups such as African descendants in the United States.
Guyana Review: We have heard this theory expounded before but isn’t there a paradox here? I mean how can these societies have had respect for individual liberties while perpetrating oppression on all of these groups?
GRSP: This is a good question and the short answer is yes there was a paradoxical situation. But I think that the best answer I’ve come across is given by Marc Plattner, once co-editor of the Journal of Democracy, and co-director of the International Forum for Democratic Studies who argued that the inequality that unquestionably existed in those societies was always in tension and conflict with the values of constitutional liberalism, and it was the very commitment to those values that ensured that over time, rights, suffrage, and full participation was extended to the previously excluded groups. If you will, progressive and clear-minded liberals always saw that exclusion of these groups from enjoyment of these rights as inconsistent with the values of liberalism, and they fought for all to benefit from them.
Guyana Review: Very well but what does this mean for the ordinary man in the street?
GRSP: Well under constitutional liberalism, Mr. Joseph O’Lall could not have been dismissed in the manner that he was, advertisements could not have been withdrawn from Stabroek News in the way that they were, and it would have been unthinkable for the Coast-Guard to even stop the boat in which Dweive Kant Ramdass was travelling, because no probable cause would have been established to search him, much less to take him away in full view of a number of citizens. Because of the absolute commitment to the sanctity of life fatal police shootings would have been subjected to scrutiny to ensure that the taking of life was justified in each particular situation.
Guyana Review: This concept of individual rights, is it not counter to security of the state? I mean we have seen the government repeatedly contend that they have to fight fire with fire so to speak.
GRSP: Respect for individual rights is absolutely critical to the security of the state and in a very real sense, nothing can truly be isolated from everything else and we feel very strongly that it is impossible to guarantee collective security by abusing human rights. We have to, over time, build institutions where we can effectively contain criminality.
Guyana Review: But the criminals are here today and we have to deal with them today, so what are your plans?
GRSP: It is absolutely true that the criminals are here today. It is also true that the criminals were here yesterday, the day before that and the day before the day before! Criminality has been a clear and present danger to the post 1992 order from the day someone was bold enough to fling a dead body out of a very visible prominent vehicle more than 15 years ago. The question is, what did you do about it.
Guyana Review: No, the question is what are you going to do about it sir?
GRSP: First and foremost we are going to set the example. That is to say, no member of an AFC cabinet who is plausibly implicated in criminality will be allowed to enjoy the protection of the executive. Some may argue that this is merely cosmetic, but we think no improvement in the law and order situation is possible without the example set at the top, because what this does is remove the psychological confusion and stress from the police. The police will know then that they have the carte-blanche to apply the law against any lawbreaker.
Can you imagine the pain that a police officer at say Albertown police station has to go through when he is expected to throw an ordinary citizen in a stinking lockup for a given transgression, when just ten minutes before that he is instructed by his superiors to let a “big one” or one connected to a “big one” go for the very same or an even worse offence. This is unfair to the police, and after a while, these youngsters get jaded and cynical, and they will let people go of their own accord for a “raise” because they figure “if the big ones are getting away with it, why not”. So if you have been robbed, burgled, assaulted or in any other way violated by someone, and that person is connected or is able to pay, there is no recourse to the law for you. That’s the rule of man, not the rule of law.
Secondly, we are absolutely convinced of the need for external help in the form of actual personnel to build the capacity of the police force. So within one year of assuming office, we will have in place, in the police force, officers from the Scotland Yard, Scottish Police Force, or some other credible jurisdiction in key positions in the force. Within that same year or certainly no later than the end of two years, we will also identify a cadre of officers who will take over from the overseas officers when they leave. These officers will be exposed to the best training available. It’s also important for the morale of our local police officers to know that this is not an open-ended thing. An explicit plan with dates for full return to local control will be public to all concerned.
Thirdly and concurrently with this, we will invest heavily in forensic capacity. There will be no ambivalence about our commitment to forensic capability. At the end of the day, successful prevention of crime lies in convincing potential criminals firstly that their commission of crime will be detected, secondly that they will be apprehended, and thirdly they will be successfully prosecuted and thus pay the price for their crimes. We cannot give this assurance without developing forensic capacity. This capacity involves training the police how to secure a crime scene and collect evidence. It is investing in labs for ballistics, DNA, entomological science, physical and chemical analysis, and materials databases among others. You can’t wave a magic wand and create this capacity. It’s a long painstaking process but there is no other way. And every day that we don’t do it is another day lost to criminals. If we don’t do these things we will always be in a position where we are trying to shortcut things. Fourthly, we need to address the issue of enhancing the legitimacy of the forces in the eyes of the public.
Guyana Review: You mean addressing the issue of professionalism?
GRSP: No not at all, I’m talking about ensuring ethnic balance in the forces. This is quite different from professionalising the forces.
Guyana Review: Are you saying that you don’t think balancing the force will result in it becoming more professional?
GRSP: If I put that question another way I think it will become clear. Would Indians and Amerindians bring some professionalism that Africans innately lack? You can switch this question around any which way you want. With respect to having the force ethnically representative, the real issue is that of legitimacy in the eyes of the public at large. From an objective standpoint the force can be absolutely professional, but from a subjective standpoint the citizens may not accept it as legitimate if it is dominated by any one race which would lead to tensions in the society. We think actually that professionalising the force may in some ways be a pre-requisite to rebalancing it, as more people are likely to become attracted to it as a career option as its image and reputation improves.
Although this is not a position of the party per se, I personally would like to see police officers – as well as teachers and nurses for that matter – exempted from payment of income taxes as part of a set of measures to improve their conditions of service and secure them a decent standard of living. Some people might say that this is discriminatory, but I think we must take special care of those who provide these services that are at the very foundation of civilization, education, security and health. Having done so however, we should relentlessly pursue public officers who violate the trust reposed in them by the public and negate the sacrifice that we all make in compensating them, but as I said, this not a party position, at least not yet.
Guyana Review: What about the GDF?
GRSP: We would like to see the GDF dedicated solely to its role of protecting us from external threat. The place of the soldier is in the barracks, on the borders, or in his or her base. Whenever the soldier ventures on to the road, he or she should become a civilian just like any other and be subject to the civil law and jurisdiction of the police just like any other citizen. We must realise that police are trained to preserve the peace while soldiers are trained to kill the enemy. These are two entire different orientations, and the particular orientation of a soldier makes him unsuited to policing duties.
Guyana Review: Let’s return to this issue of police killings for a moment, you do open yourself to the argument that you are soft on crime so how do you address this?
GRSP: Well, anyone who says that I as an individual or the AFC as a party is soft on crime is far off the mark. A dishonest argument that is sometimes levelled against us is that we argue for the rights of criminals as opposed to the rights of victims. This is extremely dishonest. As civil libertarians we argue for the rights of human beings period. And this does not mean that we advocate the rights of criminals against the rights of victims. It means that we realise that upholding the rights even of criminals is the inescapable and unavoidable price we pay for upholding the rights of the innocent. Democracy and civil liberties are not easy. There are going to be times when outcomes will be perverse and we realise that this is unpalatable to many people, but we think that those people are being misled by the enticingly simple but ultimately specious argument that there is an easy way out of our present troubles by executing on sight those fingered (or even caught red-handed) in criminal activities. It was I think H L Mencken who said that there is usually an easy solution to any given human problem – neat, plausible and wrong.
The Force needs to be professionalized not criminalized. At the end of the day we find it absurd to argue that our collective security in general, and Indian Security in particular, can be assured by creating a situation where a predominantly African force of several thousand men under arms is encouraged to violate the law with impunity and conditioned to execute citizens. Do we not see that we are creating 0a loaded gun and aiming it at our own head?
I know that we have to move on, but you would agree with me that security is perhaps the most pressing subject facing Guyanese today. I’d just like to go back to the Yohance Douglas case for a moment which is a classic example of why due process is important. In that case, they got it wrong. They got it all wrong. Being encouraged by the government and police high-command to kill without establishing guilt beyond reasonable doubt, resulted in the death of an innocent. But it goes much farther than that. Not many people remember that nothing less than an official police press release was issued in the immediate aftermath of that incident, alleging that Rasta wigs and other items consistent with the modus operandi of the criminals of the day were found in the vehicle. In fact if my memory serves me correctly, there happened to have been video footage of a police officer planting evidence in the car. You might recall that it took the eyewitness accounts of no less than the former Chief Magistrate Fung-A-Fat and the then Chancellor of the Judiciary Madame Justice Bernard to get a very ashamed-looking Police Commissioner to publicly retract the blatant untruths officially issued by the police force. Why are people so willing to believe when the government tells us that so and so is a criminal – and in many cases they say that so and so was a criminal after he is already killed.
It is for very good reason that the judicial system imposes a very high bar on the case that must be made before a person can be convicted of an offence for which his life can be taken. If you do not believe me, ask Mr Doodnauth Singh, Mr Ramson, and Mr De Santos who have all been Attorneys-General under the PPP. Ask them if it is not a basic tenet of our legal system, that it is better that one hundred guilty go free rather than one innocent be hanged. That is what it means when we say that sometimes the escape of the guilty is the price we pay for the innocent to enjoy liberty and life. So the issue is, when we insist on protection of civil liberties, the police know that their every action will be scrutinised to a judicial standard and the result of this is protection of the innocent. The occasional escape of the guilty is but an unfortunate by-product of this philosophy.
Guyana Review: But the guilty escape more than occasionally here to the extent that the continuing the status quo is simply not an option. What’s the solution for that?
GRSP: I do agree that far too many guilty people are going free in open and shut cases because of the failure of the police to build proper cases. But again, the government’s response to this is misguided. Instead of trying to improve and professionalize the force, their response is to try to lower the bar through the passage of repressive legislation allowing all kinds of infringement of civil liberties, so that the police can secure convictions despite their inability to do elementary police work. They introduced legislation allowing them to allow appeal acquittals given by jury. Imagine in a case where a jury in the high court determines that the government has failed to make a case, they want to re-try people. We have also seen repeatedly, cabinet officials castigating magistrates for granting bail in specific cases. They know that the police and prosecutions cases are weak, so they want the magistrates to remand indefinitely because they know they can’t get these people convicted at trial. To use a cricketing analogy, this is like setting a field for bad bowling.
The answer is again to professionalize the police force so that they can carry out proper investigations, thus arm the prosecutors with good cases. Because they can’t do this, they ask us to accept that police should “fight fire with fire” which is basically a euphemism for going out and murdering people they can’t prove cases against. We have no other choice than to put our shoulders to the wheel and commence with the long hard slog of overhauling the security forces to bring them to the point where they discharge their obligation to protect every single one of us. There is no magic formula, so I have no quick fix to offer.
