The Working People’s Alliance (WPA) says that simple decency demands that Prime Minister Sam Hinds withdraws his “unfounded pronouncements” from the floor of the House, when he suggested that Walter Rodney’s family didn’t want to go ahead with the Inquiry into the death.
“The WPA shares the astonishment of Mrs Patricia Rodney and her children at the pronouncement by the Prime Minister in the National Assembly that there was some hesitation on the part of the Rodney family about whether they wanted the resolution to go forward,” the WPA said in a press release.
Dr Patricia Rodney, widow of Dr Walter Rodney, said in a letter to the press: “I would like to state categorically that no member of the Rodney family based in the US or Barbados has ever communicated to anyone that we did not want a probe into the death of Walter Rodney.
I see this as a blatant and unfortunate misrepresentation of the truth by Prime Minister Sam Hinds and would like this statement to be retracted.
The Rodney family has always maintained that it requires and supports an impartial enquiry conducted by an international team and not one that is solely selected and managed by the Guyanese government.”
Efforts by this newspaper to reach the Prime Minister for a comment on the WPA’s and the Rodney family’s statements proved futile.
“At no time have the family, friends and comrades of Dr Rodney wavered in their demand for the impartial international inquiry called for in the Parliamentary Motion. If, as the Prime Minister claims, he was advised by the Office of the President through Dr Roger Luncheon, that some consultations between Dr (Rupert) Roopnaraine and the family, according to one media report, ‘sparked the contention of hesitation’, then he was poorly advised, if not misled,” the WPA said.
“The Prime Minister should have been advised that feelers were put out by the Office of the President in an attempt to mount an Inquiry in the run up to the 2006 elections. At that time, the WPA and the Rodney family expressed their distaste for the Inquiry being turned into an elections campaign issue, with all the ugliness that would have entailed,” the WPA said.
It said that it certainly wasn’t the season for the kind of inquiry Mrs Rodney had called for, one that would have provided the basis for healing and reconciliation.
“The Prime Minister was present on the Government benches when the PPP/C MPs abstained on their own motion for the Inquiry, thereby setting a new parliamentary precedent. The Prime Minister’s latest pronouncements are entirely in keeping with that equivocation the PPP/C has from the beginning shown towards the Rodney Inquiry,” the WPA said.
