David Granger, the PNCR presidential candidate has summed up President Bharrat Jagdeo’s character attack on him as the PPP/C engaging in diversionary tactics to conceal its 18-year record in office, and he is preparing for sustained attacks as the elections approach.
Granger, who had earlier refrained from responding to Jagdeo’s severe criticism of him, spoke publicly for the first time yesterday, saying that President Jagdeo descended into the attack at Babu John, Port Mourant because he had no real answers to give the people as it relates to the problems plaguing the Corentyne area.
Granger said the issues at Corentyne include the sugar industry and contraband smuggling, in addition to unemployment. “What Jagdeo needed to tell the people of the Corentyne where he was speaking was what he is going to do about giving them jobs and he needs to say how he will protect the fishermen along the Corentyne coast from piracy,” Granger said, while noting the people there need to know what kind of future they will have.
“The need to conceal the record is paramount in their minds,” Granger asserted, and he questioned why the President would ask Buxtonians to forget the past as articulated in a recent speech in the village, but has called on Berbicians to remember the past in the Babu John address.
And the PNCR condemned the President’s attack on Granger in a strongly-worded statement yesterday, which was read by party leader Robert Corbin.
Corbin accused Jagdeo of lying about events which occurred during the general elections of 1973 in Berbice, and stressed that he made an unwarranted and provocative attack on the party’s presidential candidate. Corbin said the facts of the 1973 incident on the Corentyne have not only been distorted, but that Jagdeo’s statements have serious implications for peace, race relations and national security.
He made reference to the “blood on his hands” comment, calling it a dangerous development in an election year with Guyana’s known political history. “President Jagdeo may have been fed a diet of distortions by PPP supporters at Mahaica about the facts surrounding the death of two persons in July 1973, since he was a little boy of nine years in short pants at that time. He is, however, not only an adult now, but the President of Guyana and cannot claim to be misinformed,” Corbin charged.
Corbin continued saying the President hopes the distortions would be spread by PPP “faithful” to “younger generations” in the hope that racial animosity would prevail to guarantee the PPP the votes of the East Indian community of Guyana. He said the President’s language was deliberately tailored to create public mischief.
According to Corbin, Granger was not an army officer assigned to any responsibility in Berbice in 1973 as he was then stationed at Atkinson Field, now Timehri Airport. He said Granger was not at that time in the management and control of the Guyana Defence Force, and that he was also not a member of the directorate of the PNC or the government. “President Jagdeo, therefore, deliberately lied to his supporters when he tried to link Mr Granger to events in Berbice in 1973. More significantly, however, Jagdeo also lied to his supporters about the events in Berbice when he failed to tell them that the incident at Number 64 Village on the 16th July 1973 was directly organised by the PPP as part of their plan to create disturbances after the 1973 Elections,” Corbin said.
Corbin read quotes from the Report of the Commission of Inquiry, appointed on September 15, 1973 to inquire into the incidents and conducted by Justice Dhanessar Jhappan, a judge of the High Court; the party also made copies of the report available to the press. He stressed that the judge was very specific on this matter.
Reading from page 19 of the report, he quoted Justice Jhappan, saying, “The events at No. 64, on the 16th July 1973, that led up to the shot Lieutenant Henry fired at the crowd, have some direct bearing to the speeches made at political meetings held by the People’s Progressive Party in the Corentyne, in June 1973 when Dr Jagan in particular told his supporters what they were to do after the close of the polls on polling day … The behaviour of the crowd that assembled at the beach road and in the school compound, followed the same pattern advocated by Dr Jagan, I have already dealt with this…”
Corbin read a few quotes from the report and charged that the PPP has attempted over the years to distort the events of 1973, “as they have done in distorting their role in the stimulation of racial strife in 1964 prior to the elections, as part of their campaign entitled, ‘NO PR OR DEATH.’”
Following in the same pattern of his late leader, President Jagdeo has consistently used the Babu John event to create racial discord, Corbin said. He recalled that last year, at the same site, Jagdeo told those gathered that if the PNCR won an election the party would distribute guns to bandits to rob and kill them.
Corbin concluded that Jagdeo’s attack on Granger would have been appropriate for the attention of a duly constituted and constitutional Ethnic Relations Commission (ERC) under the law, but “regrettably that too is a toothless poodle under the control of President Jagdeo.”
