Responding to an editorial in this newspaper of September 27, suggesting that the Government should invite the PNC/R for discussions on the practical measures to confront the crime situation, Mrs Jagan wrote in the Mirror of 28-29 September: “What can the PNC/R do? The same question came up in the terrorism of the 60s. Should the PNC be asked to ‘Call off the dogs’?” Answering her own question with a paraphrase of Mr Burnham’s infamous reply to a Royal Commission investigating the disturbances of the 1960s, she said: “The answer then and now, I suspect, is ‘if we call off the dogs, then we own the dogs.’ Will they [the PNC] admit ownership?”
Leaving aside, for the moment, the former President’s misrepresentation of this newspaper’s position implied in her response, it should be noted that Mrs Jagan makes a little logical leap and fails to ask the question which precedes the one she asked. That question is whether the PNC/R is really controlling the bandits at the present time. She just assumes that it is so on the basis of history going back forty years, and then moves to her conclusion. However, a responsible administration in a situation as critical as this one must pose itself the intervening question, and use all the information at its current disposal to inform its judgement.
Mrs Jagan said in her analysis that the issue was not just one of basic crime, pure and simple, that there was a distinct political element. She would appear to be correct about that, at least where some of the activity is concerned. However, that does not mean to say that some crimes are not pure crimes, so to speak, or that those which appear to have a political patina are not also sometimes inspired by ‘pure crime’ ends as well. In a situation of lawlessness such as the one we are now experiencing and the existence of what one assumes to be a flourishing narcotics and gun-running trade, there will be drug-related killings, and there will be the temptation for some anti-social elements to copy the techniques of the hardened gunmen and engage in common or garden armed robbery and the like.
The political element seems to enter the story most unambiguously on the lower East Coast, with the epicentre at Buxton. There can be no doubt that the attacks on Annandale and Non Pariel were ethnically motivated. It also cannot be denied that the African villages of this zone represent a segment of the political heartland of the PNC. Many of the disturbances which followed the 2001 election were associated with this very area, and eventually, subsequent to the inauguration of the dialogue process, those disturbances ceased. It is not as if, therefore, the party can claim that it has exerted no influence there in the past.
In fact, as we all know some of the supporters of the main opposition party in general have rattled the palisading of the PPP fortress on various occasions, particularly before and after elections, and who can doubt that the responsibility for creating the climate, at least, which has allowed the society to be held hostage by gunmen is to be laid at the PNC’s door.
Furthermore, the wild talk on the PNC/R platform just before the invasion of the Office of the President in July, would have done nothing to assuage the perennial fears of Freedom House that the main opposition sought its removal by any means possible. In addition, the march that ended in disaster on July 3, it must be remembered, had a PNC/R input, with senior members of the executive engaged in mobilization for it. Thereafter, however, the demonstrations stopped.
Creating a climate, however, is a different thing from directly controlling the current gunmen. Perhaps the first thing that should be said is that the PNC has never, since 1992, gone the whole hog. If its leadership had as a policy the removal of the administration by any means, that theoretically could have been effected by more direct methods than have ever actually been invoked. The destabilization of the protests, however unsavoury, was limited; those protests did not escalate to the point of threatening the state, and they had a finite term. While there can be no doubt that the PNC would love to see the PPP/C out of office, the objective evidence so far would seem to suggest that while they have played an ambivalent and hypocritical game, and they have been prepared to undermine and chip away, since 1992 they have shrunk from “rule at all costs,” to use Mrs Jagan’s phrase.
And so we come to the gunmen. The flyers that have been distributed from time to time, the ethnic killings and the armed robberies do not suggest official PNC direction; the last Congress held by the party espoused a quite different message. Why would the party choose methods, which while making Indians particularly vulnerable, also put Africans in the firing line? After a time, crime expands and terrorises everyone at some level or another, and if the PNC wanted to get into power illegally again, it would not need to expose some of its own constituents to this extent in the process. Furthermore, it would be political suicide for the PNC to even think of coming to power behind a bandit’s AK47; it would not survive in its present form as a party, and its tactics from 1997 until now seem to indicate that it knows that.
So where is the political direction coming from? Certainly the PNC’s lower East Coast constituency has been radicalized, and when one takes that together with Mr Oscar Clarke’s report to the last Congress indicating that the party had been lackadaisical in maintaining its grass roots’ structures, one must assume that it may well have lost influence in, if not control of some of its constituencies. This is revealed in the fact that many of the supporters of the PNC have espoused positions far more radical than the one enunciated by the party in August, something whose ramifications hardly need explication.
It seems that extremists are at work among the PNC’s supporters, and that it is they who supply the political rationale for the criminal activities in the Buxton area. In a letter to this newspaper on September 6, two senior members of the PNC/R, Messrs McAllister and Lowe, wrote that most likely “fringe elements” had attached themselves to the crime wave, and “through the use of propaganda... have sought to shroud the criminal acts in a political cloud for their own aims.” There was no mainstream political endorsement of crime, they said, and young people “must never be given the impression that robbery and other forms of violence serve some high political function.”
It could be that these “fringe elements” to use Messrs McAllister and Lowe’s term, have been associated with the PNC at one time or another, but that is not the same thing as saying that the leaders of the PNC are directing them. The picture will be further confused by the fact that radicalized supporters of the main opposition are likely still to maintain links with people in the party at some level. Whether within the party there are those who sympathize with the extremists is difficult to judge from outside, but it has to be conceded that that is quite possible. However, once again that is a different thing from saying that the executive of the PNC/R has adopted a policy of arming bandits with a view to overthrowing the government.
Last week, Dr Luncheon, in one of his more opaque presentations, linked the leader of the PNC/R to “crime and the criminals in the siege village of Buxton,” on the grounds that he was continuing his “foray” into that community and had made “representations on behalf of those arrested during the most recent cordon and search operation.” The Cabinet, he continued, thought that this could only be interpreted as offering support to criminal elements, etc, etc. If that is indeed what Cabinet thought, then it must have been one of its off days. A more credible interpretation might have been that Mr Hoyte went into the village with a view to trying to restore party influence there, which if he could, might even conceivably be helpful. Whether or not his approach is the right one, is not the point; the point is that his motivation was almost certainly not to lend support to bandits.
The Government ignores the fact that the PNC/R has indicated publicly on several occasions its preparedness to join in talks about crime, but it has been either rebuffed or ignored by the PPP/C which has gone instead for amorphous, meaningless national crime consultations. In fact, the governing party has nothing to lose by talking with the main opposition about possible security strategies in a general sense, and how to restore public confidence and morale in the police force, whatever it may consider the motivation of the opposition to be. (It might be observed in passing that if the PPP/C seriously believes that the PNC/R is behind the bandits, then its behaviour to date has been absolutely inexplicable; why did it not take decisive action months ago, instead of allowing the situation to drift?)
And why won’t the PPP/C talk to the PNC/R to create a national position on crime, as this newspaper has advocated - not to have the opposition “call off the dogs” which as indicated above it cannot do - but to mobilise all groups in defence of the state, as opposed to the government? It surely doesn’t have to be spelt out how much easier it would be for the administration if it had PNC/R backing for some general security strategy. And if no agreement was forthcoming, the Government should then press ahead on its own.
The possible reason for its failure to make this move comes not from Mrs Jagan, but from statements made elsewhere - mostly in letters to the press from those sympathetic to or perhaps even associated with the governing party. The latter possibly believes that the whole crime situation has been engineered in order to force the administration to talks on shared governance so the PNC/R can enter office with the PPP/C via “the back door.” In other words, the PNC is going to all this trouble to get half a loaf, when by a direct method it could surely get the whole thing far more quickly. It doesn’t make much sense as an analysis.
The debate on shared governance will be coming, whatever the Government does or does not do, or whoever it does, or does not talk to. But those talks are not going to produce anything in the short term since no one, including the PNC/R, has come up with any idea of what the term means. And deciding how to make it meaningful and under what time frame is not something which is going to be agreed upon in a hurry. In the meantime, there are more pressing concerns, namely crime, and the political ambitions of those who would have no intention of putting the PNC/R hierarchy back into office if they actually did manage to seize the reins of power by violent means.
Will the Government please close the pages of the history book, and look at the new dimensions of an old problem with a dispassionate eye.