Dear Editor,
We ought to have the honesty and courage to sweep a certain kind of imbecile discourse off the table.
“Balancing the armed forces” is part of the discourse of provocations rooted in the conflicted past of this nation. It, increasingly, merely appears backward and dated when it is raised. I say this in reference to a letter by Sultan Mohamed on the subject, in which he manages to-
-regurgitate the PPP “force balancing” slogan which was afterwards placarded by ROAR
-pretend that the problem has not been regarded nor effort made by the PPP
-insinuate that there remains an urgency to the matter
-ignore the historical and cultural reasons behind the imbalance and apparently persuade himself that we are still living the sixties sub-civil strife conditions.
I have written before here that armed forces manpower, in Guyana as in many nations, had been and is determined by the attraction of one ethnic group to the administration jobs at all levels and that it was neither “jobs for those with party cards” nor filling the ranks with Afro-Guyanese to suppress Indians. It is disheartening that we are still repeating that Maj. Sattaur was let go by Burnham in the sixties because he was Indian.
Similarly, I have noted that the job specifications, at one point, insisted on height requirements, on a level of literacy, and on recruits being unmarried, as being among the reasons that Indians, locked onto the sugar estates, were either uninterested in the Police work, or, initially, not qualified. It was the PNC and PPP that changed requirements. By that time a certain racial and cultural profile had come to be associated with the armed forces.
Besides, I have heard that dietary and lifestyle habits were a disincentive. The PPP tried, as former Pres Jagdeo has said, to encourage Indians into the forces. The response was not enthusiastic. Besides, many saw being hired by the black PNC government at senior level as a sort of betrayal of the race. But even so, there have been reviews of the composition and efficiency of the Police and armed forces, for example, that recommended, in the sixties, racial balance.
Also, can the government, with its downsizing of the public service and apparent reduction of the armed forces, explain why it is that twenty years after, even with the constant retirement, resignations, and migration of blacks that we have experienced in the forces, there has not been enough of the expected Indian flood to replace blacks? Is positive discrimination an option? Did the creation of a para military People’s Militia mean a chance for change. How did the PPP instruct its followers? Join, or boycott? Is an all military Indian corps an option? Sultan’s letter is like many I have read in the past. It does not really give us a solution that will give more votes to ROAR or the PPP. Perhaps the solution is a sort of National Service for Indians only. Two years at best in the forces. My feeling is that such an idea would be as unattractive as was National Service.
Is the idea relevant now? Balancing the armed forces was not even relevant in the sixties. And as far as the Hoyte years (“kith and kin” talk) the illusion was alive that the Afro-Guyanese in the army and police force represented a group whose loyalties were unquestioned. The fact is that they have meant a voter block. Nothing more. If anything at all, the armed and police forces, correctly and professionally, are loyal to the chain of command of the day. And, we now know, sometimes to those who offer the highest bribes. While it is possible that at Buxton the inefficient policing led to the impression of collusion between sitting forces and the bandits, the case could also have been made that the Police were deliberately badly utilised and managed to permit Roger Khan to clean up. We do not know for sure.
Finally, we need to be by now sufficiently educated, in our generation, to recognise that occupational specialisation, observed almost everywhere in multi-racial societies, will mean that when it is not ethnicity, it is perhaps class or geographic origin or the inescapable pull of family tradition that will create the pull factors that attract people to one or other occupational niche.
Yours faithfully,
Abu Bakr
