Dear Editor,
I think Mr Frederick Kissoon is wrong. He said (02/19) that it was “not Father Rodrigues who first advocated the establishment of contact with the gunmen. Oliver Hinckson was the originator of that proposal.”
Mr Hinckson was the first to offer to act as a mediator. The first person, I believe, who may have suggested dialogue between the government and the Lords of the flies who sent out their gunmen to commit treason against the people, was Mr Tacuma Ogunseye.
After the assassination of Minister Sawh, Mr Ogunseye made his suggestion. Sadly, like much of this history of treason, no one paid any attention until it became unavoidable.
I recalled writing about this proposal, after Mr Clement Rohee, current Minister of Home Affairs, addressed other aspects of Mr Ogunseye’s letter but failed to touch on this issue.
Secondly, in an earlier article (02/03), Mr Kissoon seemingly suggested that he was the first to identify the “political” face attached to this violence. He said, “It was clear from the data I collected, the people I had spoken to in the GDF, GPF, the Government, the phantom squads, and in Buxton itself, that the agenda was a political one. ”
As much as I enjoyed the details of his remarkable series, “Buxton Conspiracy,” for which he risked his life, Mr Kissoon’s assessment of a “political” agenda attached to the criminal attacks was late news to many of us who had been monitoring and complaining about crime.
True, Mr Kissoon added vital details that most of us could not provide because we lack his contacts and so forth, but surely we knew politics was being acted out in criminal terms. And while I agree with Mr Hinckson’s assertion that a “war of flea” is in progress, what really is new?
Indeed, it seems to me that it is the same old dog-fight we are witnessing, only that the dogs have moved to another yard.
The point is: the flies were already on the wall. The Buxton blueprint did not emerge out of thin air. It rested on a foundation of political violence beginning since 1992, long before “oppression” and “marginalization” became battle cries of treason, and emphasized best in violent post-election street demonstrations.
Each election saw an erosion of the value of a vote and `the political system at large as crime was being rewarded “politically”; an example of such evidence is the illegal Hermandston Accord, a rare example of electoral rigging after an election is done.
We are reminded that just under one year before the Mash day jailbreak, the first strong indication that the violence of street demonstrations was being replaced by the violence of the gun as a mean to political ends, was the triple executions aback Enterprise after the 2001 elections.
Further, an examination of the criminal violence which occurred between the elections and the Mash day jail break showed that people (eg, Rahamat Ali, Brickery, EBD) were being gunned down even where they posed absolutely no threat to the gunmen.
In June 2001 or thereabout, the police issued a statement that crimes were indeed being committed to destabilize the country, and that supporters of the government were targeted.
If I recalled well, individuals like Mr Frederick Kissoon and other noted political analysts (Mr Dev being the exception) did not address crime, but instead were writing more about power sharing.
The “escapees” changed this with a few bullets and accomplished what a host of small-timers in the letter columns could not do; that is, put the real focus on crime and politics. (At least for a while.)
And even then, we were already in old territory just as the local writers in Guyana are today, given what is being written (or not written) in comparison to the activities of the Lords of the flies.
Without a doubt, the writers are not up to speed given the information they have, being inside Guyana, and the enormity of the threat facing Guyana.
Yours faithfully,
Rakesh Rampertab
