Such is the case of the now retired Major David Clarke. Where else in any well-ordered and transparent society can such an individual be indicted on drug charges in a foreign jurisdiction without the army in which he held significant positions or the government headed by the Commander-in-Chief of the Armed Forces saying anything immediately about it?
The defensiveness is further evidence of the labyrinthine machinations that engulfed government officials, the drug gangs, law enforcement officers and the underworld in the hair-raising crime carnival of March 2002 and onwards. That there would be synchronicity in silence by those who should have had something to say about Mr Clarke’s plight points convincingly at the many interconnections and intersections between those who were meant to uphold the law and those who were engaged in criminals acts and infamy.
The retired Major Clarke was not charged with minor infractions. He was indicted in the US in 2006 on charges of conspiracy to distribute cocaine and conspiracy to possess cocaine. He will be sentenced shortly on these charges but the details of the pathway to sentencing – whether he pleaded guilty and under what circumstances – are sealed as Mr Clarke was to have been a key witness in the case against Mr Roger Khan.
What made the ensnaring of Mr Clarke in the web of US drug charges even more disconcerting for the local audience was the fact that he had been entrusted with an important command at the height of the crime scourge – that of Operation Tourniquet which had been established to contain the criminals who had forged a beachhead in Buxton. The charges laid by the US against him pertain to the period October, 2003 to April, 2005. It would mean that around the same period that Mr Clarke had been assigned perhaps the most crucial operation in his lengthy career in the army he had also been implicated in drug dealing for which he will be sentenced in the US shortly.
That is an extremely shocking and disturbing confluence of events and one that the public should have been advised of immediately. Apart from the fact that it was in this jurisdiction that Mr Clarke should have been confronted about drug allegations, the prospect that he could have engaged in behaviour in contravention of his most solemn duties as commander of an operation at the height of the crime scourge should have attracted immediate attention from the Commander-in-Chief, the Guyana Defence Force and the Defence Board. Instead, there was absolute silence at the time and moreover, though it was known that he was indicted, Mr Clarke was able to take early retirement from the army and proceed to the US to hand himself over to the authorities here.
Only convincing reasons of national security could possibly be excused for the silence that followed his departure but that could hardly be the case. Mr Clarke apparently cut a deal with the US and ad interim his then Commander-in-Chief, Presi-dent Jagdeo has not spoken glowingly about him at all.
It was only after the publication of news items on Mr Clarke’s charges in this newspaper based on US court transcripts, and after he was pressed on this matter that President Jagdeo unconvincingly argued that he had confidential information from sources in Buxton which influenced him in denying a promotion to Mr Clarke. The President went as far as saying that Mr Clarke had collaborated with criminals in the village. Stunning charges yet Mr Jagdeo was unable to employ his not inconsiderable powers as president and head of the armed forces to institute proceedings against Mr Clarke. Moreover, Mr Clarke ended up with preferment and most damningly without any type of rebuke or action issued against him by the army. One can only conclude that both the army and the commander-in-chief – for various reasons – were happy to see the back of Mr Clarke rather than risk embarrassing disclosures even though it was clearly in the public interest that these things be exposed.
The army has bluntly said it is not commenting on Mr Clarke at all. For the army, his alleged misdeeds would be another in a growing list of grotesque acts by members of the armed forces – crystallized recently by the murder of Dweive Kant Ramdass and gnawingly ambient in the cases of Lindo Creek and that of the missing boy, Ricky Jainarine.
It is also of significance that Mr Clarke was accused at private meetings and later in court documents by the drug convict Mr Roger Khan of working with the criminals in Buxton. This allegation of course did not save Mr Khan from the clutches of US law enforcement but it is this allegation which the Guyanese man and woman in the street would want investigated as there had been repeated, credible allegations that the army had been ineffective in curbing the crime rampage during Operation Tourniquet and if it were the case that the now retired Major Clarke had not properly discharged his duties, or worse, had engaged in activities inimical to the state he should by all right have faced a Board of Inquiry here. As it stands, yet another strand of the arcane and bloody tangle of post-2002 has been surrendered to the American justice system because law enforcement authorities here were incapable of or unwilling to bring Mr Clarke to book. Surely Mr Clarke would have been able to clarify some of the allegations that had been levelled against him and the army during that period. Instead, he agreed to testify for the US against Mr Khan and will probably never deign to clarify what had played out here under his command in Buxton. What a travesty.
