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‘Special’ arms and a phony war

The headlines changed and changed again. But the Guyana story, which stayed in the headlines, was leading the news budget because, once again, it was about people bleeding.

Like a flashback to somewhere in Liberia or Rwanda, a war party had emerged without warning, or identification, killed and looted multiple victims, then returned, again without trace, into the bush.

The Guyana story was not being told in such as way as to recall African precedent or inspiration. In the reporting, a certain delicacy was preserved, likely in observance of political correctness in a divided country where “African” could explosively become a fighting word.

We thus don’t know if, as had occurred in west, central and southern African conflicts, child soldiers took part, or if the killers and looters in Lusignan and in Bartica were acting under the influence of any chemical ingested or inhaled.

At Bartica, the river town where they killed 12 people on Sunday, the shooters held large guns, wore helmets and boots and, survivors said, knew their way around the town and, even by night, in the river.

Police counted, later, 165 spent shells of high-powered rifles, consistent with reports that the attackers had shown no interest in conserving ammunition.

The mystery war party still took away whatever guns and ammunition they found.

In a state of undeclared war, the only certainty was that potential casualties include anyone anywhere.

However deprived in other areas, Guyana affords notable resources of commentary and analysis, including the instant analysis by newspaper columnists writing daily.

“What we have in Guyana today is a state that hates itself,” wrote Freddie Kissoon, in a Kaieteur News column.

Kissoon, also a University of Guyana social scientist, has called for the resignation or removal of President Bharrat Jagdeo.

He blames the Jagdeo regime for a “monumental manifestation of alienation among certain sections of the population, of which the sarcoma of violence may be an offshoot.”

Guyana-based observers, then, don’t hesitate to put a pointedly political construction on what Prime Minister Patrick Manning, with distant diplomatic detachment, last week called a “deterioration” in the Guyana “security situation.”

He offered use of a T&T helicopter and the supply of “arms of a special type,” presumably those somehow capable of giving Guyanese forces more of a fighting chance against their better-armed adversaries.

The Port-of-Spain view is inevitably distant. T&T lacks a diplomatic listening post in Georgetown, and is hardly better informed than the T&T media.

It also lacks a listening post in Bridgetown.

As he ostentatiously embraced new Barbados Prime Minister David Thompson last week, however, Mr Manning said fresh T&T investment was being made in the project of a sub-regional political union.

In furtherance of that project, surely, diplomats should be set to work “on the ground” in both the T&T and the Barbadian capitals.

But the otherwise free-spending Manning regime looks to be doing this integration on the cheap.

As seen from inside Guyana, moreover, it’s not as if something has slipped, or that the State’s security capacity needs some timely topping-up.

If political conditions predetermine it, and a continental-scale geography permits it, then guerrilla warfare is what we may usefully conclude is being waged against the Guyanese State.

Twenty-three dead in three weeks; no prisoners taken on either side; and no political demands made: this is still a relatively low-intensity conflict, with nowhere to go but up the scale of intensity.

In the event, the guerrillas prosecuting armed propaganda in Lusignan, Bartica and elsewhere can count upon at least a fifth column of moral support.

Such supporters belong to those anti-Jagdeo “sections of the population” who, as Kissoon suggests, are defined by their “alienation.”

This is, of course, a political interpretation of the killings which, both inside and outside Guyana, some interests will not, or cannot afford to, share.

Caricom Prime Ministers Manning, Thompson and others will choose to see the killings as “crime,” parallelling that in Morvant, Maloney, Laventille and in Tivoli Gardens, West Kingston.

Disarming noises recognisable from Commissioner Trevor Paul in Port-of-Spain are echoed by Guyana’s acting Police Commissioner Henry Greene.

“We want to assure the public that they need not be scared,” Mr Greene said. “We are checking out all the reports...It is just a matter of gathering enough evidence in order to make arrests.”

Guyanese are hardly more reassured by such suggestions that normal police work is proceeding through normal channels, toward predictable, law-enforcement ends.

The Guyana experience, anyway, is that the bodies of guerrillas shot dead in the bush are more likely to be produced than suspects handcuffed and shackled on their way to court.

In T&T, where two police officers were shot at, Newsday reported: “Police...said they know who are responsible, but no one is willing to come forward and give the information which could lead to arrests.”

We have become used to the projection of a police self-image of helplessness or irrelevance, often linked to a pretence of knowing what’s going on.

So, far from seeking a leading role in the crime drama, the police often sound like commentators or reviewers.

“We expect an upsurge in gang-related murders, on a nightly basis,” a police source told a reporter. Such a “source” typically also claims possession of information about the numbers and locations of gangs, and even their names.

But this is rarely actionable intelligence. It does not permit the making of arrests or the interdiction of serious criminal activities.

Indeed, just as the Manning government was committing aid to Guyana’s war effort, the T&T police were demonstrating their usual zeal against agreeably soft targets with no capacity for escaping capture or resisting arrest.

In an untimely phony war against allegedly illegal immigrants, the police were, last week, flushing out even Guyanese women and children and packing them into charge rooms for deportation.