Dear Editor,
I am reading with disgust about the crime situation in Guyana and how the police are incapable of finding a solution to this problem. I am calling on President and Commander-in-Chief of the armed forces Donald Ramotar to make crime-fighting his number one priority. The police have failed us miserably and crime is tearing the country apart; many murders are unsolved. My idea is to set up an office of Homeland Security to stem the crime wave in Guyana. Some naysayers to whom I showed this idea are accusing me of setting up a parallel police force, and these are the people who haven’t spent any time in the military. Well if I am trying to set up a parallel police force that’s all well and good, because the one we have in Guyana is not working and for argument’s sake, if this is a parallel police force then what is the Customs Anti Narcotics Unit (CANU) and the Berbice Anti-Smuggling Squad (BASS)? Both these units were created by the PPP after they won the elections in 1992.
What I am proposing is that the office of Homeland Security must be a special unit, just like CANU and BASS, but would comprise mostly ex-presidential guard members and others and would be answerable only to the president as commander-in-chief of the armed forces. This unit would co-ordinate community policing groups in Guyana because these groups under the Police Commissioner are not working. Instead of engaging those of us here in the diaspora with security skills on how to arrest the crime situation in Guyana, Minister Rohee went ahead and set up a Citizens Security Programme which is barely functioning and is incapable of stopping crime in the country. The PPP doesn’t want to reform the police force. One myth is that Indians are not interested in military training, but what about the Gurkhas? My son is now a corporal in the US Navy and I spent six years in the Presidential Guard as bodyguard for three presidents of Guyana. I was lately sent for a two weeks’ course in Aviation Security for American Airlines in Texas, and I am still in the security business.
This propaganda about Indian disinterest in the military has being peddled for a very long time, and I am surprised to see how many people buy into this nonsense. When the PPP won the elections in 1992 busloads of young Indian boys came from as far away as Berbice and Essequibo to join the Presidential Guard and the Guyana Police Force but most were sent back to their respective communities by the then Minister of Home Affairs Feroze Mohamed.
We don’t need Scotland Yard or the FBI to tell us who is doing what in Guyana. The Guyanese people know; the information is out there. I can walk into any village and ask for Jim Jones and a little child would show me where Jim Jones lives and tell me what he does, but the police can’t do this because the Guyanese people have lost confidence in them. They see the police as corrupt, bribe-takers and torturers, and that’s why they are afraid to come forward with the relevant information necessary to solve crimes.
Homeland Security would win the hearts and minds of the Guyanese people and thus win the war on crime, and if they see something they will say something. I call on all Guyanese to make their voices heard and tell the President that we are tired of crime. Let’s put this plan into action, and support my call for an office of Homeland Security now.
Yours faithfully,
Surujnarine Harald
