The continuing controversy over whether or not the late Mr Burnham should receive the Order of the Companions of O R Tambo has once again drawn public attention to a spectre which has long haunted the PNC and the country at large, namely, the assassination of Dr Walter Rodney. It would appear that both the Rodney family and the group of Caribbean Pan-African intellectuals who wrote President Jacob Zuma of South Africa requesting the withholding of the award cited the murder of Dr Rodney as their primary reason.
While the accusations against both Mr Burnham and the PNC government date back in the first instance to the immediate aftermath of Dr Rodney’s killing, in the nearly thirty-three years since then few details surrounding exactly what happened have been exposed to the sunlight. This is not because the family – in particular Mrs Patricia Rodney and her son Mr Shaka Rodney – have not gone to some lengths to try and get the authorities to constitute a commission of inquiry into the late historian’s death; it is simply because the PNC administration didn’t want anything of that kind set up, and for reasons best known to itself, its PPP counterpart doesn’t seem to want it either – or at the very least, given its customary habit of substituting words for action, doesn’t feel it needs to do anything more.
During President Hoyte’s administration Mr Eusi Kwayana failed to get a charge instituted against Gregory Smith ‒ the man who had given Dr Rodney the device which killed him ‒ in addition to which there was a coroner’s inquest, but it was something of a farce. The Magistrate refused to allow time for Donald Rodney ‒ who was in the car when his brother was killed ‒ to return to the country so he could give testimony; he declined to inquire into the matter of where Gregory Smith could be found; and he did not entertain any suggestion that GDF records be produced to establish whether Smith was in the army at the time of the killing. The perverse finding in the teeth of what little evidence was presented was death by misadventure.
Greater hope was entertained that an inquiry would be forthcoming after the PPP/C came into office in 1992, but it was not to be. In December 1993, Mr Shaka Rodney, Dr Walter Rodney’s son, held a thirteen-day vigil and fast in Carmichael Street, outside the Attorney-General’s Chambers to try and pressure the government to set up an inquiry. It was clearly an embarrassment to the administration, and in their first cabinet meeting the following year, President Jagan and his ministers decided to establish a “special committee” to review the files on the case and make recommendations about how next to proceed. It was the classic delaying tactic, because to all intents and purposes nothing happened thereafter.
Hope was raised again when then Chief Magistrate K Juman-Yassin in 1996 issued an arrest warrant for Gregory Smith on the basis of a charge against him brought by Special Prosecutor Doodnauth Singh. However, since Smith was known to be living in French Guiana there was the not inconsiderable matter of extraditing him to be overcome in circumstances where no extradition treaty between Guyana and France existed. Apart from other impediments, the main sticking point with the French in the end appeared to be the fact that they would not extradite anyone to another jurisdiction where the death penalty was in operation, and would have required a written guarantee that Smith would not be subject to it. Ultimately, Gregory Smith’s death from natural causes in Cayenne brought an end to any possible further moves in this direction.
The above is but a very truncated version of the story of the attempt to get some kind of inquiry mounted into Dr Rodney’s death by one route or another – the International Commission of Jurists came here twice in connection with the issue, for example – a full account of which was supplied by Dr Rupert Roopnaraine to this newspaper in 2000. There is, however, a twenty-first century codicil to the story. In 2005 a motion calling for an inquiry was passed in the National Assembly that received the backing of the PNCR. Bizarrely, the PPP/C objected to the WPA request to amend the wording of the resolution describing Dr Rodney’s death as an “assassination.” The WPA argued, eminently sensibly, that when setting up a commission of inquiry one could not include in its mandate a foregone conclusion, when it was supposed to be finding out what happened. The language was in the end amended, but a substantial number of PPP/C MPs to their discredit abstained on the vote.
This newspaper’s letters column has been carrying correspondence from one side or the other ‒ generally on the basis of rather less knowledge of the subject than more ‒ claiming Mr Burnham’s guilt or innocence, and by extension that of the PNC. It has to be understood that this issue will not go away unless it is confronted. And now seems the appropriate time to confront it. While Dr Roopnaraine in more recent times has acknowledged that the WPA had been acquiring weaponry at the time of Dr Rodney’s killing, and could be read as being disposed to tell his party’s side of the story now, elders such as Mr Eusi Kwayana have repeated the traditional position that the WPA would only be prepared to reveal everything about its activities in the context of an inquiry.
Dr Rodney died almost 33 years ago, and the number of people who would have any direct knowledge of one or another aspect of what happened is inevitably diminishing with the passage of time. Most important of all, Gregory Smith is dead, and despite the fact that he left a memoir ghost-written, so to speak, by his sister Ms Anne Wagner, it contains more nonsense than sense. While it might conceivably be indirectly helpful in some sections it is no substitute for the cross-examination of its now deceased author.
There are all kinds of ghosts from the past shadowing Guyana’s present, but this is one which we can take some immediate moves to try and lay to rest. The Rodney family and the WPA apart, it is more in the PNC’s interest to hold an inquiry than anyone else’s. It is none other than President Burnham’s daughter Ms Ulele Burnham who wrote in a letter to this newspaper published on Thursday: “The conversation about Rodney’s death requires an arbiter to halt the cleavage; it requires a full, frank and formal public inquiry by as independent an international tribunal as can be convened. Then those dead, and alive, can properly be made to bear the true burden of responsibility they have been adjudged to owe.” It was a remarkable letter which should not be ignored.
It is now for the government to act. The time for political games in relation to this subject is over. Let the President set up an independent international tribunal and let us make the first meaningful move to “halt the cleavage.”
