October 16, 2009, Guyana Observer, Clive Thomas on the Criminalization of the Guyana State,

October 16, 2009, Guyana Observer, Clive Thomas on the Criminalization of the Guyana State,

One of the activities of the joint Opposition was a public forum at the Georgetown Town Hall in August. This was part of its ongoing campaign aimed at energizing its call for an independent probe into alleged links between the Guyana Government and confessed Guyanese drug lord, Roger Khan who is in a US jail awaiting sentence. The allegations surfaced in sworn testimony during a New York Federal witness tampering trial of former Khan's former lawyer, Robert Simels- a prominent New York lawyer. Among speakers at that function were leaders of the Peoples National Congress Reform (PNCR), Alliance For
Change, Working Peoples Alliance and National Front Alliance along with members of civil society. Chris Ram chaired the proceedings. Dayclean Global, in this issue carries a transcript of the talk given by Clive Thomas the forum on the criminalization of the Guyana state.

Dr Thomas:

…These are the leading elites who determine the distribution of power, distribution of resources, even as we shall come to see come to see, who lives and who dies…that is the ruling cabal that is presiding over the operations of the state, the economy the state and life in society and nearly every other dimension of life in Guyana today.

The second important development is that this group by its very nature had to operate above the law and one might say outside the purview or the regulation of any state agency. So they were not just a clandestine group – they were a group above being put under any surveillance or oversight or any regulatory framework. They were independent of the state, supreme in relation to the state and operated and acted in that way. So when they made a decision to eliminate somebody it was felt that their judgement as to who should be eliminated was good enough. They did not have to go through any other legal process because they saw themselves above the law, beyond the purview of the law and beyond the purview of any operation of any state agency.

The third factor that eventuated from this was having campaigned law and order in that framework law and order degenerated into a struggle between one set of criminals and another set of criminals. One set was closely aligned with the state and the other set was not aligned with the state. So we have a situation in which law and order was in effect two sets of criminal enterprises struggling with each other for hegemony in the framework of what had already been created. All of this was done in the name and on the part of organized crime, law and order, protection from whose on the part of those who were not privileged by having political support of that type, of some insurrectionist notion or some suffering or whatever you may want to call it.

The fourth important factor as the result of this was based on this situation – the means and modalities of state terror, state intimidation and state violence began to be elaborated within the society. So all the modalities that we come to see now exhibited by what is taking place in the course of (words unclear) … began to be elaborated by that particular framework. There were some dire consequences from all of this. One of these was of course that the state had by this time become pathologically degenerated. The state was both overtly and covertly involved in systemic violence and there can be no doubt about that. There are hundreds of people that have died in the period of time between time 2003 and 2005, unaccounted for, killed in the most brutal of manners on both sides of the equation is testimony to the amount of terror and violence that prevailed in the society. The state instead of leading the drive to promote social and economic development, to preserve the rule of law in the most honourable sense of that term and to protect the national sovereignty of the state, became progressively, more and more transformed into a criminal endeavour.

And that is why I said this marked the beginning of the criminalization of the state. Some results were very important. First of all, there were heightened privileges for the drug bosses during this period, in the wider society they became well established, well connected business persons. So there was a consolidation of economic power on the part of organized crime, a consolidation of political power on the part of organized crime, a consolidation of social standing among the organized criminals with the consolidation of economic power as well among some of the political bosses as they began to look for the private spoils that may come their way, not only the state‘s spoils, the protection and so on from this symbiotic relationship they had with the drug lords. Such a situation I have argued and still maintain is inherently unstable. No society can function in this present modern day globalised world with such a legacy. And Guyana can be no exception to the rule.

Therefore, we are faced within the society with a fundamental set of contradictions which flow from this. Ultimately, it is going to be self defeating leading to the erosion of the whole body politic in the wider sense and in the narrow sense the collapse of the state and its transformation let‘s hope into something more progressive but potentially it can also collapse into something worse. Because the traditions of the criminalization that has been set in this particular period are the traditions which have developed out of the past authoritarianism that we had experienced in the period before the PPP/C gained power. We have therefore what most political scientists would call a state for itself, a state which has no other vocation but doing and seeing what they can grab for itself; it becomes a self fulfilling entity, its purpose is not to drive any national vision and national development – its an entity that is now concerned with bringing benefits to those who control it, benefits to those who occupy it. It is not a simple kleptocracy, it is not a failed state, its worse than that - it‘s a state that is a state for itself because it had no higher altruistic purpose. And that's what presents the particular danger for persons who are ordinary citizens in this land. It means that the state pursues no advocation, no vision, no attempt to transform the society into something better or of a higher order. As a result of this I try to link it to some of the economic features of the state. One of these which I think is particularly important is that the state tends because of this to be very little concerned, except in paying lip service to it, with the issues of productivity, production goals and so on. They would like to be able to have the economy grow but if it has to grow to the expense of this relationship it can‘t grow. And that is the fundamental reason why it is that between the period 1998 and 2008 our average rate of growth over all those years have been less than two per cent per annum. The economy is stagnated despite what they say. I can absolutely assure you that the average rate of growth between 1998 and 2008 has been less than two per cent in real terms per annum.

The second point is that entrepreneurship has disappeared, hustling and forms of bandit capital have tended to take prominence. People try to make money out of rent seeking opportunities…they hustle positions, opportunities with the state in terms of contracts whatever it might be. The primary way to make money in any business activity is to be able to exploit the rents of having scarce value and access to scarce resources. That is what makes them drive the system – not production, technology and issues of productivity and

growth. I have called this a form of backward capitalism, for the consequence of this criminalization of the state is not only the deformation of the state – a deformation of the body politic but a deformation of the overall trajectory of growth and development within Guyana. So it comes to serve a backward capitalist enterprise in an age of globalization where the world is expecting all countries to behave in a way that can sustain its own growth and expansion. And we are forever caught in that vortex. The challenge which I think we have is to be able to transform ourselves out of that historical inheritance and that is going to be a very difficult challenge for the society to achieve in any limited space of time. I am sure we will spend time discussing that but I just want you to know that at this point in time my own judgement is that we may not have that capacity within ourselves to solve such a fundamental contradiction which besets us.

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