Mike McCormack, co-president of the Guyana Human Rights Association at the time of this interview, discusses many challenges to protecting human rights in Guyana. With more than 30 years' experience working on human rights issues in the country, he is able to chart progress and setbacks with a deep knowledge base. McCormack reflects on the extra-judicial killings of the past and present, the drug-related incidents that have become more common, and tensions between the human rights community and the police. McCormack also touches upon the ethnic representation of the police and perceptions among the Afro-Guyanese and Indo-Guyanese communities as well as the disparities between the rural and urban police units. He draws a distinct line between the prison system and the police as an organization.
At the time of this interview, Mike McCormack was the co-president of the Guyana Human Rights Association. Born in the U.K., he lived and worked in the Caribbean, Central America and South America since the late 1960s, serving as Oxfam's Andean regional director and working on human rights issues in Chile and Argentina. He returned to Guyana and was involved with the GHRA since its founding in 1979. Through the GHRA, he championed political, economic and social rights.
Gail Teixeira shares her experiences with policing reform and domestic security issues during her tenure as minister of home affairs in Guyana, first as acting minister in 2004 and then officially in the post from 2005 to 2006. She describes in detail the process of establishing a functioning civilian police force, including the utilization of community-based rural constables and volunteer neighborhood police as well as the more macro-level issues of donor relations and compliance with international norms as identified by the United Nations. She provides a compelling account of the challenge of adhering to the cultural and historical expectations of the people at the same time that outside financial assistance and training is going on. The decentralization of the reforms and the policing system are of particular interest, especially in the face of drug-related gang activities.
At the time of this interview, Gail Teixeira was serving as a member of Guyana's Parliament as well as an adviser to President Bharrat Jagdeo on governance. Her comments center on her experiences as minister of home affairs from 2004 to 2006.
Raphael Trotman gives a detailed account of the role of the Alliance for Change party in the 2006 Guyanan elections, which were hailed by the Carter Center as the most peaceful that Guyana ever had. In addition to the mediating force of the AFC in the elections, Trotman credits the United Nations Development Programme, the heavy presence of election observers and the actions of civil society institutions with helping assure peaceful elections. He recognizes the strides the Guyana Elections Commission made in the area of election results, but he tempers that praise with criticism of the organization's partiality in matters concerning funding for the payment of scrutineers (political party-based poll workers), recruitment of poll workers, and ensuing legal battles with the Alliance for Change. Trotman offers a sobering account of results from the 2006 election that were still being contested at the time of the interview.
At the time of this interview, Raphael Trotman was a member of the Guyanese Parliament and leader of the Alliance for Change political party. A lawyer by training, Trotman describes himself as "in the middle" racially, with roots in both the East Indian and African ethnic groups that stratify much of the political and social thinking in Guyana. His background in conflict studies and resolution led him to help form the AFC as a third-party alternative to the dominant People's Progressive Party and the People's National Congress.
Calvin Benn of the Guyana Elections Commission recounts the depth and breadth of his experience in the administration and management of Guyana's national elections, particularly focusing on the successes of the 2006 election process. In his capacity with the commission, Benn oversaw the registration of voters and administration of polling places, including the distribution of polling supplies, recruitment and training of poll workers, and vote counting and verification. Benn shares some relatively straightforward approaches to resolving voting day challenges, including simulation exercises, acquainting poll workers and security forces with polling places, the training of political party polling "scrutineers," the shipment of polling supplies, and the procedure for vote counting. The interview can be broken into two related but distinct parts: Benn's role as the administrator of the polling process and his related but separate responsibility overseeing a continuous registration process for national identification cards for purposes that include but are not limited to voting registration.
At the time of this interview, Calvin Benn was the deputy commissioner of national registration and deputy chief election officer of operations at the Guyana Elections Commission. He became a full-time employee of the commission secretariat in 2000, having served the organization since 1975 in various part-time positions. He previously taught and worked for the the Ministry of Education. His experience with administration of elections in Guyana includes local, district, and national elections. He oversaw the continuous registration process as well as a house-to-house registration verification exercise.
Gocool Boodoo discusses his personal path to his position as chief elections officer of the Guyana Elections Commission, as well as his reflections on the institutionalization of practices, policies, and procedures that account for the relative success of the 2006 electoral process in Guyana. Boodoo notes the benefits of institutional memory with the implementation of a permanent staff for the commission and secretariat, and he highlights the importance of transparency at every level of the organization and every stage of the electoral process, from registration to voting day to declaration of results. The emphasis he places on technology for organizing and sharing information, including registration forms and polling results, reflects his feeling that electronic voting will be a reality in Guyana at some point in the near future. The roles of technology, particularly for the sharing of information internally and with regional organizations, are the central focus of the interview. He also stresses the importance of a valid electoral roll. The interview concludes with a brief discussion of constituency delimitation in the late 2009 local elections, including a proposal before Parliament of a mixed proportional representation and "first-past-the-post" system.
At the time of this interview, Gocool Boodoo was chief elections officer at the Guyana Elections Commission. He previously served in various public relations and administrative capacities at the commission. Prior to his work at the Commission, he was the head of the Department of Foundations and Administration of the School of Education of the University of Guyana. His initial work with the commission was in the preparation of training and policy manuals for electoral workers. After serving as deputy commissioner for administration, he became chief elections officer in 2001, and he supervised both the March 2001 and 2006 national elections.
Remington Eastman of the Guyana Elections Commission describes his role in heading a group that monitors the media prior to, during, and after elections to ensure that coverage is fair and does not favor one party or engage in inflammatory rhetoric. His operation, which is funded by international donors through the commission, had no legal powers to enforce its actions and relied upon persuasion, or “name and shame,” to influence media behavior. He says that these efforts generally were effective during election time, but that the media often return to their partisan or inflammatory behavior after the election period. He states that the Media Monitoring Unit was especially effective during the Lusignan and Bartica massacres, in which Guyana citizens of African descent attacked communities of East Indian descent. The unit worked to calm inflammatory media behavior by showing them the consequences that flowed from similar media behavior in Rwanda and the former Yugoslavia. Another media monitoring unit in Guyana, the Advisory Committee on Broadcasting, created by the Parliament, has the power, unlike the MMU, to enforce its actions through legal action by the president, who is also Minister of Communications. Two television channels were closed down for a period of time because of violations. However, ACB has power only over television, not print media. A 2006 Media Code of Conduct was adopted to guide media behavior during elections that year. It drew upon the Media Code of Ethics of the Society of Professional Journalists, as well as codes of ethics at the British Broadcasting Corp., the Associated Press and other groups. Eastman also discusses the steps and costs involved to upgrade his agency from analog to digital technology.
At the time of this interview, Remington Eastman was serving as project manager of the Media Monitoring Unit of the Guyana Elections Commission. He started working at the unit in 2006 as a supervisor, and then served briefly in community mobilization and public relations with the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. He returned to the unit in 2007, when he was appointed manager. He holds a diploma in public communication and a degree in mass communications from the University of Guyana.
Rupert Roopnaraine discusses his role in the Constitutional Reform Commission in Guyana. He details the challenge of recommending reforms to better balance power in a government that was constitutionally highly centralized on the Office of the President and the difficulty of dealing with a government reflexively resistant to electoral reform. He touches on the question of proportional representation, discussing the advantages and disadvantages of the system, why he believes removing the proportional representation system is a necessary first step in reforming the quality of parliamentary conduct and productivity, and why he believes a first-past-the-post system is better for local government. Roopnaraine discusses the commission’s strategies to address high ethnic tensions exacerbated by racialization of political parties and outlines the commission’s success in putting together an Elections Commission that was acceptable to both incumbent and opposition parties. He lays out the events around Guyana’s failed 1997 elections that led to the formation of the Constitutional Reform Commission and political difficulties in Guyana at the time of the interview. He also discusses progress made on the rights of indigenous people, the reasons why many reforms were never fully implemented, and the challenges of putting together new voter registration lists.
Rupert Roopnaraine was a co-leader of the Working People's Alliance in Guyana, a group he joined in 1979. He served as a member of Parliament from 1995 to 2000 and on the Constitutional Reform Commission in 1998. He also was a member of the Standing Committee on Foreign Affairs, special select committees on the Integrity Bill and on the Trade Union Bill, and the Public Accounts Committee. He also was a member of the Commonwealth Observer Missions for elections in Uganda, Zimbabwe and Zanzibar. At the time of this interview, he was program director of the Guyana Citizens’ Initiative. He received his doctorate in comparative literature from Cornell University, and he taught at the University of Guyana, Cornell, and Columbia University in various capacities.
Steve Surujbally discusses the 2006 election in Guyana. From the broad to the very specific, he touches on a wide variety of issues of logistical operations surrounding the 2006 election. Surujbally brings up voter registration and the issues surrounding preserving the anonymity of voters in rural districts while reporting voting trends of individual districts in an effort to maintain transparency. He also discusses campaign conduct and tensions leading up to the election.
At the time of the interview, Steve Surujbally was the chairman of the Election Commission in Guyana. He earned bachelor's and master's degrees in veterinary science, and was a practicing veterinarian. He was appointed chairman of the Election Commission after stints with other government agencies, including the Ministry of Agriculture. Surujbally also was a columnist, writing both satirical political articles and response articles in veterinary science.
Janice Jackson recounts her dealings with the Guyana National Police in implementing a standardized domestic-violence training program. Her grassroots approach to identifying the scourge of domestic violence, initiating contact with the police commissioner, and beginning with a "training for trainers" session is instructive in its simplicity. Jackson discusses her personal encounters with police officers who attended the training sessions and explains the standardization of the training that took place over years. She emphasizes that the success of any police training program relies on the ownership of the program by the police and offers suggestions as to the financial resource commitment and training rotation for training both new and experienced officers. She shares thoughts on a reporting system whereby participants can evaluate the training and revisit lessons learned.
At the time of this interview, Janice Jackson was an educational psychologist who spent her career working on issues of domestic violence, particularly in establishing and implementing domestic-violence training programs with the Guyana National Police. As the national representative for the Caribbean Association for Feminist Research and Action and a founding member of the Guyana Volunteer Consultancy, she wrote and presented on domestic violence and child abuse, and formed a standardized course of training for the Guyana National Police on awareness of, sensitivity to, and processes for dealing with cases of domestic violence.
