APNU denies links to crime

Nov 01, 2011 News

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..says PPP bears full responsibility

The opposition coalition that is seeking to deny the incumbent People’s Progressive Party (PPP) its fifth consecutive victory at the polls, has refuted accusations that its major faction had ever been involved in criminality.
Instead, the coalition – A Partnership for National Unity (APNU) – insists that the incumbent government should bear responsibility for crime in this country, and especially so, the rise in murders, illegal arms possession and drug trafficking during the 12-year term of the outgoing President, Bharrat Jagdeo.
The People’s National Congress Reform (PNCR) is the main group in APNU, which consists of other small political groupings.
The Partnership yesterday quoted President Bharrat Jagdeo, who was speaking at a rally at Bartica last weekend, as falsely accusing the PNCR of having “had its hands in the Buxton… and the Bartica killings” during the crime wave that was sparked by the escape of five dangerous men from the Camp Street Prison in February 2002.

APNU Presidential Candidate, David Granger, a retired Brigadier, said that the President repeated “the wild slander” with intent to scare voters in the run-up to the 2006 elections. Granger also quoted the President as saying that if the PNCR “were to get into power, guns would be given to the criminals.”
“APNU is aware that President Bharrat Jagdeo is attempting to evade his own culpability for 12 years of mismanagement of the country’s security by engaging in his wild diversionary statements.
“APNU insists that the People’s Progressive Party/Civic Administration must bear full responsibility for the high rate of armed robberies, banditry, murder and piracy plaguing the country today,” Granger said at the Partnerships Secretariat on Regent Street in Georgetown.
APNU declared that almost every year since Mr. Jagdeo became President, in 1999, the US Department of State, through its annual reports – International Narcotics Control Strategy; Human Rights Practices; and Trafficking in Persons – criticised the  PPP/C Administration for the failure to ensure human safety and public security.
The Partnership stated that it is “a well-known fact” that the current administration deliberately derailed its own National Drug Strategy Master Plan and the ₤4.9M Security Sector Reform Action Plan that the British aid agency was dedicated to funding.
APNU charged that the recommendations of the Steering Committee of the National Consultation on Crime, the Border and National Security Committee and the Disciplined Forces Commission have been routinely ignored.
Following the 2002 jailbreak, the Partnership said that the need for comprehensive security sector reform became evident, but the response of the current administration was calculated to permit the emergence of several “phantom gangs” as an alternative form of policing.
“It was those gangs which were responsible for an untold number of murders and massacres,” Granger stated.
“It is also a well-known fact that since 2000, uniformed members of the Guyana Police Force Target Special Squad had been implicated in several shootings of so-called suspects,” he noted, adding that they also acted as enforcers for criminals involved in narcotics-trafficking and a US Embassy visa scandal.
“The PPP/C has never investigated these reports,” he stated.
“As a result of the deception of the Administration, the lethal use of illegal firearms, gang-related assaults and organised narcotics-trafficking pushed up the rate for serious crimes,” Granger added.
He said there are now about two armed robberies on average every day and an average of about three murders per week.
Other grave threats to human security were reported in the allegations of torture against the Guyana Defence Force, Guyana Police Force and Guyana Prison Service which are still to be investigated by an impartial commission, Granger stated. He also said that the PPP/C has refused to investigate the massacres in Lusignan, Bartica and Lindo Creek.
In mid-July, 2010, the United States called for Guyana to investigate reports that members of the security forces, sometimes employing criminals, murdered hundreds of people during the 17 years after 1992.
In November, 2009, opposition political parties released a file listing 449 suspected extrajudicial killings between 1993 and 2009, many blamed an elite police unit called the “Black Clothes” squad.
The report also accused the government of equipping and employing a criminal gang of killers, known as the Phantom Squad, in an attempt to control the cocaine trade-fueled crime wave in 2002.
President Jagdeo had said that the report was politically motivated and included some people who died in car crashes and others who are listed as missing persons in the country of 760,000 people which won independence from Britain in 1966.
At a May 2010 meeting of the U.N. Human Rights Council in Geneva, Britain and Canada called for an independent inquiry into the accusations of death squad killings and other rights abuses.
The Phantom Squad was believed to work largely at the behest of convicted drug kingpin Roger Khan and was said to include members of the Guyana Police Force, according to compilers of the report.
The Black Clothes Squad was set up to deal with violent crime, but was disbanded following the allegations that it carried out extrajudicial killings.

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