– campaign to intensify this week
In the wake of Roger Khan’s sentencing in the a US court on Friday, opposition leaders are lobbying again for the administration to mount an international inquiry into his activities here, particularly his alleged involvement in a string of brutal, unsolved murders and will step up activities to realize this during this week.
PNCR and Opposition Leader Robert Corbin said the US court sentence, which “is for offences committed there”, is not the real issue and insisted that Khan remains accountable here. The administration, he said, owes it to the Guyanese public to inquire into Khan’s local operations and “ensure that he is also brought to justice for his crimes here”. The US justice system has prosecuted Khan and convicted him for offences committed in its jurisdiction, Corbin said yesterday, observing too that the system here is yet to investigate the atrocities Khan reportedly committed.
But Roger Khan’s operations and serious probes into trade of illicit drugs are not high on government’s agenda, according to Alliance For Change (AFC) Chairman Khemraj Ramjattan. The prosecution of “small fishes” in the narco-trade can hardly be identified with any aggressive strategy to curb it, Ramjattan told Stabroek News, noting that the “big sharks” like Khan usually escape the security net because of government connections and “complicity”.
Khan was sentenced to two 15-year and one ten-year prison terms, all of which would run concurrently, meaning he would serve a 15-year federal prison term for convictions of drug smuggling, witness tampering and gun possession. Khan was a principal player in the drug trade, US prosecutors said, and the key supplier of a Guyanese drug trafficking organisation based in Queens, New York. The Queens organisation was said to have distributed hundreds of kilos of cocaine in a two-month period during the spring of 2003.
WPA co-leader Dr Rupert Roopnaraine, while saying that Khan’s sentencing did not fully reflect the gravity of the crimes he committed, believes that it is imperative that a Commission of Inquiry be conducted by an international body into Khan’s local activities and his alleged connections with the administration. He says that during this week his party along with the members of the joint opposition — AFC, Guyana Action Party (GAP), National Front Alliance (NFA), PNCR and the Unity Party — will intensify this call.
General Secretary of the PPP/C Donald Ramotar was not inclined to address questions on Khan’s sentencing in the US court saying yesterday that it is outside of his portfolio, and that he was “yet to read the papers on Khan’s sentencing”. However, he briefly commented on the ability of the administration to fight the drug trade asserting that no single country can effectively tackle narco-trafficking. He said the issue of a local response must be viewed in the context of a wider initiative, and he cited the example of demand in the US, which he said is stimulating production. Ramotar said essentially that strategies should not be confined to “Guyana alone”, but rather an international effort which targets the industry.
The administration had ambitiously launched the National Drug Strategy Master Plan for 2005-2009 four years ago, but recent assessments have pointed to few of the original goals in the plan being achieved. Stabroek News attempted to contact Home Affairs Minister Clement Rohee yesterday to no avail and was later advised that he was out of town.
Smoking gun
The call by a relative of Khan on Friday for government to pay him and give him a pension upon his return here is a “smoking gun”, according to Corbin. He said the call points to government’s involvement in “the execution and torture of hundreds”. Corbin said too that the administration’s silence and diversionary tactics on Khan’s operations here will not erase the atrocities committed against hundreds of Guyanese. He said Khan’s involvement as well as that of the state must be investigated and reiterated his call for the inquiry.
The evidence led before the court in Khan’s trial and that of his former attorney, Robert Simels had been well publicized Corbin said, recalling statements by the PNCR on the issue last week. He said the administration had attempted to avoid the damaging implication of its involvement with Khan, but stressed that hundreds of families are in need of closure and justice. The joint opposition is committed to an international inquiry and in finding “that closure” for Guyanese who have been directly affected, Corbin added.
Time to put it to rest
Ramjattan said Khan’s 15-year sentence reflects justice being done as it relates to the charges brought against him in the US court. He said Khan obviously cooperated with the US authorities to the extent where “valid information must have been provided” on persons involved here, and he is certain other indictments will follow at the appropriate time. He said the Khan clearly made a deal with the US government that implicates other cocaine dealers.
But the sentence aside, he said, the time has come for the families of persons brutally murdered during the infamous crime surge between 2002-2006 to receive closure. Ramjattan said an international inquiry must be done “so that we can put this thing to rest”. The inquiry will not only probe what happened during that period, he explained, but also offer recommendations as to “how not to behave.
“Any inquiry is likely to find among the recommendations that here in Guyana we must not employ criminals to fight criminals but instead look to our enforcement agencies. If we doubt their ability to do it then we change whoever needs to be changed, and or if we find that they alone cannot get the job done then we must ask for outside help.” There are some valid lessons which can be extracted from an international inquiry, Ramjattan added.
On the issue of whether government is equipped to fight the drug trade, Ramjattan asserted that clearly there is non-cooperation by the state to prosecute persons the likes of Khan because “there is much complicity” and what he referred to as the fear of being exposed. He said that some government officials had even admitted in the past that narco-trade contributes heavily to the strength of the local economy.
Roopnaraine disclosed that he had only returned to the country late on Friday evening and while he had heard of the sentence he was yet to read the newspaper articles concerning the decision.
He opined that given the “viciousness and severity” of the crimes committed, Khan “got off rather lightly”. The light sentence given would clearly have been as a result of him being able to trade important information to the prosecution in the case, he added.
Roopnaraine, whose party is a part of the opposition front calling for an international inquiry into alleged links between government and the drug trafficker, said that during this week there will be an intensification of this campaign. He said an inquiry by an international body needed to be conducted since “we cannot believe that we are dealing with a normal situation.”
Following the explosive testimony by US government informant Selwyn Vaughn in the witness tampering trial of Khan’s former attorney Robert Simels, which linked the PPP/C administration to a death squad orchestrated by Khan, there were calls for the government to launch a Commission of Inquiry. When President Bharrat Jagdeo was asked at a press conference on July 29, if his administration would initiate such an inquiry, he said no. However, he said it was likely that a criminal investigation into the matter would be done at some point in time.
“You don’t need a Commission of Inquiry to go after criminal acts, the police should do that, not a special commission and they should get to the perpetrators and prosecute them. What you need more is investigation and prosecution… because what was alleged [here] are criminal acts,” he said.
When this was raised with Roopnaraine yesterday, he said the President’s reasoning “would make sense if we had criminal investigations that led anywhere”. He stated that the country seems to lack the capacity or the will to carry out proper criminal investigations. He further opined that there probably are elements within the justice system and in the Police Force who have “been tainted by what is going on”.
Meanwhile, when asked if street protests were an option being considered, Roopnaraine said that this should not be ruled out but admitted that there were some reservations from some members of the joint alliance. Roopnaraine had said previously that the government had worked overtime at criminalizing street marches which limited their impact. He told this newspaper yesterday that there are very few countries in the world where people cannot walk in the streets in protests. He said “any legitimate protest within the law should not be ruled out.”