On this most recent occasion, however, a child was the victim, and the nature and extent of his suffering at the hands of those appointed to protect and serve the public beggars the imagination, even in this jaded, battered and world-weary society of ours.
With ordinary citizens expressing their outrage, and groups whose voices are not often heard coming forward on the issue, the government could hardly ignore it. Even so, the condemnations emanating from most administration spokespersons are circumscribed with qualifications. We are being asked to accept that those who perpetrated this crime against a minor were just some “rotten eggs” (Commissioner Greene); or that there are some “unsuitable policemen” who have to be rooted out (Minister Rohee); or that we are talking about “a few” who are acting in a “rogue fashion” (President Jagdeo).
There have, of course, been the usual asseverations from official sources that neither the ruling party nor the government authorizes or condones the use of torture, but given the well-documented cases of recent years these asseverations convince no one. In the end, it doesn’t matter what you say; all that counts is how you respond to credible claims of torture committed by law enforcement, and in that regard the administration simply does not pass the test, no matter how many times it repeats it does not subscribe to torture.
In support of the notion that all we are talking about here is the actions of a small number of ‘rogue policemen,’ the President, among others, insisted that citizens “can’t allow the actions of a few to cause them to forget the hundreds out there who work professionally and with decency.” He waxed lyrical on the “many, many good policemen and soldiers… who day after day go out to protect our country, our border and the society against criminals… the remuneration is not great, sometimes the conditions of the service are not great – but they go out there and put their lives, in many cases, on the line for all of us…”
This was echoed in less elegant fashion by Mr Hydar Ally in this weekend’s Mirror, presumably representing the PPP position. “The bad publicity received on the matter [the torture of the teen] should not overshadow the good work done by the police over the years to bring down the murder rate in the country which has dropped some 30 percent over the comparative period last year.” Are we to conclude from this that if the murder rate dropped 70 per cent, say, in a context where there had been a very large number of allegations of torture by law enforcement, we should ignore the latter because the police were dramatically reducing the incidence of homicide in the society?
Behind this attitude of playing down (or perhaps suppressing?) unpleasant information about law enforcement excesses lies an implicit assumption that the ends justify the means – an assumption which has been apparent before in the pronouncements emerging from Freedom House. It might be recalled that in Mao Zedong’s China, which had the distinction of being one of the most repressive countries on the planet, where millions of citizens were imprisoned and many were tortured, there was a very low incidence indeed of common or garden crime. One can only hope that this is not the kind of world Mr Ally hankers after.
As it is, it doesn’t matter how many arrests according to the book the police make, if there are credible allegations of torture against them (or the army), these will contaminate the record and defile the force. This would be so even if we were indeed only talking about a few rogue policemen. As it is, however, what the administration is refusing to acknowledge is that this is not a problem of a few “rotten eggs,” but a systemic problem. This is not the same thing as to say that there are not “many, many good policemen and soldiers,” as the President says, who do their duty every day in difficult circumstances. What it does mean is that if you create a framework where the boundaries are unclear, human rights abuses will occur, and possibly otherwise normal people in uniform will do unthinkable things. Under former President Bush, ends certainly came to justify means in the ‘war against terror,’ an approach that informed the interrogation procedures in Guantánamo Bay, among other places. It made possible Abu Ghraib too, a subject on which the PPP has never been reticent about offering its comments.
The ruling party has a long history in office of refusing to condemn gross transgressions on the part of the police – the notorious ‘Black Clothes’ unit being one of the more egregious examples of this. Then there were the government associations with a drug dealer in confronting the crime wave a few years ago; this was a man associated with numerous murders, we are told. In other words, the administration has attempted to deal with its crime problem in a way that lacked moral context and defied the rule of law.
The reluctance to relinquish the ‘ends justify means’ approach was exemplified by Mr Ally in his current Mirror piece, when he wrote:
“One must, however, strike a balance between the rights of individuals and the methods and procedures used in the extraction of statements from persons accused of committing crimes… The Standing Orders dictate that the Police, by virtue of office, have been given certain powers… [they] must not abuse prisoners, although for good and sufficient reasons, they can use some measure of force which must be reported and documented. Criminals are not likely to give information to the police freely and voluntarily… Hence, the provision in the Standing Orders authorizing the Police to use some force in the extraction of confession statements.”
Certainly there was no suggestion by the Commissioner of Police that force could be used in the “extraction” of confession statements when he read excerpts from the Standing Orders to the media last week, so what is Mr Ally talking about? Is this just what he thinks the Standing Orders should be, rather than what they are? If there is some ambiguity in the orders, then that needs to be clarified, and if not, Mr Ally’s misperception should be immediately corrected, although it must be conceded that the general climate in which the security services carry out their operations is created not by the Standing Orders, but by the political masters in the land.
President Jagdeo attempted to suggest in an insidious fashion that the manual on human rights drawn up by the Guyana Human Rights Association and used by police recruits was inadequate for the purpose, and that foreign assistance in this area should be sought. This is testimony to a refusal to confront the real nature of the problem. It does not matter how good a manual is; as said above, if the framework within which the police are operating is flawed or ambiguous or not underpinned by ethical considerations, then there will be abuses. In short, until the heavy hand of politics is removed from the police; until they are allowed to function as a professional body rather than responding to the priorities as perceived by the political masters; until they can build up some esprit de corps again and take pride in the Force and their ability to solve crime; and until they really do operate with the Standing Orders as their “bible,” as Commissioner Greene put it, it will be difficult to stamp out the habit of beating confessions out of suspects, and in the case of some members of the services, torturing them in other ways as well.
