Civil-military relations
Editorial
Stabroek News
May 31, 2003
Pronouncements by President Bharrat Jagdeo on the one hand, and Guyana Defence Force (GDF) Chief of Staff Brigadier Michael Atherly on the other, indicate contradictory interpretations of civil-military relations in this country. In light of the continuing national security situation, such a controversy would be unnecessary, if not unhelpful, in bringing the campaign to quell the unrest and disorder on the East Coast to an early and successful conclusion.
President Bharrat Jagdeo has stated publicly that he was unhappy with the work of the security forces in dealing with the current crime scourge and called on them to “rethink their strategies.” He felt that this administration made sufficient efforts to counter crime by providing all it could in terms of policies, resources and moral support to the law enforcement agencies but the results of the forces’ efforts were unsatisfying.
In particular, the President said that he made his orders clear to the Chief of Staff of the GDF and the Commissioner of Police and it was either that those orders were not passed down to the servicemen on the ground or that they were doing things they should not be doing. Colourfully, the President insisted that he wanted “...to clean out the situation in Buxton.”
Brigadier Atherly, in a delayed rejoinder, complained that the GDF’s support for the police in the fight against crime created the conditions for the Force to become ‘too politicised’ as an institution at the centre of domestic strife and that the operations on the East Coast had harmed the Force. While members of the GDF were working hard within the limits of the law to support the police in the fight against crime, he felt that “others seems to be working equally hard through a centrally-coordinated propaganda campaign to tarnish our good image for whatever sinister reason.”
In Atherly’s opinion, promotion of the national interest must be seen as a top priority over the internal interests of any other sector of society and harmonious civil-military relations must be the bedrock of democracy. Darkly, he warned that only roles that seek to satisfy ‘legitimate national security objectives’ should be assigned to the GDF, stressing that “honourable and credible roles can help to draw the Force out of functions that would otherwise lead it into politics and so harm civil-military relationships.”
The point at issue in the Jagdeo-Atherly dialogue is not the structure, but the nature, of the relationship between the Government of Guyana and the Guyana Defence Force. Civil-military relations embody two policies: the ‘institutional’, which deals with the manner in which the civilian administration formulates security policy, and the ‘operational’, which deals with the military means employed to meet the security threat. The objective of harmonious civil-military relations should be to develop a system which provides the best military security at the least social cost.
In Guyana, the Defence Force has always been obedient to civilian authority and, as the President says, the Government has provided the material resources necessary to fight crime. so, what’s the problem?
On the institutional side, the President himself is Minister of Defence and Chairman of the Guyana Defence Board, the supreme authority over the GDF. But the President is very busy with affairs of state and is more likely to be photographed attending to housing problems at Cummings Lodge, sea defence problems at Foulis, electricity problems at Linden, and other pressing political and parliamentary matters than visiting troops at Buxton or on the borders at Eteringbang or Lethem.
This year, so far, presidential duties have also taken Mr Jagdeo to the USA to hold discussions with the World Bank, to Trinidad to attend Caricom meetings, and to Russia and China on state business. All this is understandable but the fact is that, in this busy schedule, he just may not have enough time to devote to defence and national security problems.
There may be other institutional weaknesses which have consequences for operational effectiveness on the ground. For example, there is no single national intelligence organisation and it is the President’s hard-pressed Head of the Presidential Secretariat, Dr. Roger Luncheon, one of the busiest officials in the Administration, who is the head of the Central Intelligence Committee. When soldiers and policemen find it difficult to locate kidnap victims in as small an area as Buxton and are shot at by bandits for their trouble, it could point equally to their own bungling as to poor intelligence.
Further, as the Chief of Staff seemed to suggest, the application of force “is always only temporary; it may subdue for a moment but it does not remove the necessity of subduing again.....political, economic, social and humanitarian levers are useful for finding long lasting solutions.” This implies that the central government and regional administration have an obligation to implement non-military measures to complement the operations of the security forces in the affected areas.
The GDF cannot avoid criticism for its performance on the East Coast over the past year. It has made many mistakes and it must seriously re-examine its operational conduct.
At the same time, the Administration, equally, must re-examine the entire national security institutional architecture, including the President’s duties, so that improved civil-military relations could provide this country with the best protection against the current crime surge.
This cannot be achieved by each side’s hurling long-distance rhetorical missiles at the other.
