As Guyanese continue to daily bemoan the escalation in violent crime, beating their brains to come up with solutions, the Guyana Defence Force (GDF) has announced a sensible, proactive approach to the situation, conducting its first ever internal security training programme for recruits. And the recruits have this week ably showed off, before the media and their peers, their new skills in crowd control and dispersal, mounting road blocks and responding to ambushes - all of which are necessary if the lawlessness gripping Guyana is to be stamped out. And while we can but pray that the occasion never arises, we hope that if it does the army will provide a successful demonstration for long suffering citizens.
The army had recently joined the Guyana Police Force in its battle against the wave of criminal activity and has seen some amount of success in apprehending suspects at road blocks. But clearly, this is a new role for the army and its hierarchy has acted correctly in seeking to prepare its ranks as much as it possibly could.
In many countries, when the police require assistance with internal security situations, this falls to a National Guard or militia, which is mostly a reserve component of the Armed Forces of that country.
In the United States, the National Guard dates back some 365 years to the days of English colonisation and was a key force in fighting native American Indians as well as foreign invaders. It was from this group of then largely untrained male citizens that the US drew the bulk of its troops for the Mexican and Spanish-American wars, as well as both World War I and World War II, as by 1903 legislation had been passed making the National Guard a reserve force of the US army.
More recently, as the US increased its efforts at peace-keeping around the world, its National Guardsmen have responded to crises in Haiti, Bosnia and Kosovo. But the National Guard's mission remains the protection of life and property and it would have played a key role in the events which followed the September 11 terrorist attacks on the US.
The now-defunct Guyana People's Militia would have been the force to deal with threats to internal security here. However, when it was disbanded, some of its officers who had been on secondment to the army would have assumed roles in the GDF or become reserve officers. Therefore their skills would not have gone to waste entirely.
The army has so far exposed 223 of its recruits to its internal security training and hopefully will expand this to eventually cover the entire defence force. This will provide a much-needed boost to the police's crime-fighting activities.
Perhaps in the long term, the feasibility of providing generalised training in internal security to all members of the joint services can be examined. Developing a specialised training programme in this area could also prove useful, especially if efforts were made to secure knowledge of the latest methods available and used internationally