Dear Editor,
Minister of Home Affairs the Hon. Clement Rohee has now discharged a loaded revelation in public. His name, Clement, please note, means “kind”.
His revelation raises many issues.
He has revealed that in a secret poll of interest to his ministry’s reputation, and personally carried out by him, and now presented as valid, he found something. He found that Guyanese were more interested in the arrival of their barrels with goodies, with getting a house lot and other material matters than with the “alleged” torture of two young men of Buxton.
His process, he believes, is without bias although he, the pollster, is a most interested party. He does not explain the weighting of his poll. It would be important if he polled a balanced number of persons, with and without house lots, anxious and not anxious over barrels of goodies. Since the young men would be best known in their home village, how many responses did he get from there?
If the minister really wants to employ a credible method of public opinion polling, he would be well advised, if it must be done by a minister, of all people, to engage at least a minister as far from Home Affairs as possible. I know he would consider me an upstart if I were to recommend an independent pollster, or a poll by any media except the unswerving Chronicle, so at least, let us try another minister. It is strange that he did not think of asking GINA to carry out the poll.
Hon. Mr Rohee as a minister took the Oath of Office binding him to “bear true faith and allegiance, to the people” and to “honour, uphold and preserve the Constitution”, a Constitution that outlaws torture absolutely. It provides, “No person shall be subjected to torture, or to inhuman or degrading treatment.” He does not honour it when he seeks, by a self conducted poll to brush aside one of its fundamental provisions. The only acceptable defence in the Courts to a motion supported by evidence is, not “national security” or “law and order” or crime prevention. The only defence is that a Court of Law ordered such treatment. Such a court will not be found.
People should not see this as a race matter. All Guyanese should demand and deserve justice. When Arnold Rampersaud was being harrowed and prosecuted with a porous indictment in the 1970s a lot of Africans, especially in the WPA, did not play the game and treat it as a race matter. The multi-racial WPA raised a hue and cry, drawing a very mixed assortment of people into the fight for justice. While Walter Rodney moved Georgetown from an anti-Indian response to the case to one of reason, others like Moses Bhagwan worked at close range with lawyers revealing inconsistencies in the evidence as the trials went on. Tacuma Ogunseye and Sase Omo challenged the mindset of PNC supporters squarely. The National Council of Black lawyers of the USA and lawyers from the Caribbean including Maurice Bishop and Guyanese lawyers of all races did not stand idly by. The PPP claimed that the collapse of the case was due to international solidarity. But the accused wrote letters to several Guyanese expressing his understanding of the part they played.
What or where is the real source of the new arrogance we are all witnessing?
Yet in this torture case, with no allegation that Sumner and Jones had assaulted PPP supporters, the PPP has been silent to the point of dumbness. Is this how the ruling party hopes to set an example and play a part in national reconciliation?
The general secretary of the PPP recently told the public that the party had reprimanded a minister. The government is silent on that member who is accountable to the Cabinet and the people. In the Sumner-Jones case of reported torture, a matter of the highest public interest, the PPP has given no leadership. Is it indifferent to the reported torture of citizens it may see as supporting an opposition party?
The minister himself has a strange way of letting it be known what is important and what is not. As a result, some security personnel may take the cue from him and not realise that torture is an extreme violation of a human being, offensive to the Constitution and the free conscience.
I notice from the press that the security personnel who hosted the two young men, Victor Jones and Patrick Sumner, had been asking them to identify gunmen in Buxton. Has there been any use of similar outlawed methods to identify members of the Phantom, or are those too well known to the police?
I recall that an older Buxton villager on TV, when questioned by Chris Ram, recommended that an official figure open a public conversation with the gunmen. Other steps would follow. A government must have imagination and creativity, anticipation. They laughed at my recommendation. Probably they thought I was already in my dotage. We learned later that persons suspected of running drugs had a better idea, and the Phantom was born. The President in his deliberate misjudgment refused to allow the Gajraj Commission to include the East Coast disturbances, along with the link between Gajraj and the Phantom, even though the two issues were joined at the navel. And look where we are now. The state faces a strong allegation that the security forces are torturing young men to find out about gunmen in Buxton.
I do not know the two young men personally. I know families of those names. The young men faced the press on release, at Eve Leary Police Headquarters, not at their homes. The press people saw them, questioned them and heard them. The army chief admitted that they entered without bodily marks and emerged with bodily marks. He, like the police, denied his personnel’s involvement in torture. But the denial is not a denial that took note of the allegations. Such denials will not stand up to a cross -examination.
The place for the sounding out and probing of these detailed torture reports is the High Court of Guyana. The allegations are so grave that they ought to be placed in court pleadings before the High Court and the authorities in charge of the forces accused ought to place their own pleadings before the court as well. The DPP will have no discretion in such a case to remove the cases from the court whether pressured to do so or not.
A real human rights-minded Cabinet would request its Attorney General to bring a suit to the High Court on behalf of the men so convincingly alleging torture.
The PNC dictatorship has been off the scene for a full 15 years now. It has left its own heritage of civil and criminal excesses. These excesses are in danger of being outdone and, regardless of the partitioning of history, it is what they experience that will stay with the young generation. We must thank Minister Rohee for being so candid.
Yours faithfully,
Eusi Kwayana