Dear Editor,
The Guyana Chronicle has confirmed what the Stabroek News and the Kaieteur News have reported: The PPP has called on the PNCR and the WPA, both part of APNU to cooperate with the Rodney Inquiry. The call did more. On the eve of the Inquiry it proclaimed guilt and asked persons to exonerate’ themselves.
The tone signals what now controls the PPP.
Those who dismiss ethics as an element of politics and call themselves pragmatist will say that the PPP and any other party has every right to turn anything into an election campaign in order to ‘win.’
The political parties of Guyana have very capable people in their leaderships and their clusters at home and abroad. They also have others. Taking into account all that can be said about politics, I find the PPP’s political culture wanting in quality. It has got away with a lot. The President’s post-modern performance on Old Year’s Night brought no comment from the Trinidadian and Guyanese watchmen who have openly abused supporters of the opposition for “winding-up.” As Sir Eustace Woolford, once reminded the Supreme Court, “What is petty larceny in the kitchen becomes kleptomania in the drawing room.” (He meant that the same act is a crime when done by poor people becomes an illness when done by members of the upper classes.)
And I am on record as sending a message to a colonial governor that I would not stand his “confounded nonsense” when he presumed to exercise a responsibility he himself had charged on a minister. I then announced my message at a public meeting. So I am no model of middle class manners. I have been called a “country boor.” I have never denied the message, but corrected some of the forms of the narrative. I expect even more of the new rulers whom Kwame Apata called in a poem our “Creole Guvna.” As I have said before, I do have sacred cows.
Among them are martyrs, widows and abused women and children. What I find strange about the PPP’s statement is that a supposed letter from Walter Rodney’s widow, which she did not release to the press, was passed by the government to the party at Freedom House for political propaganda. And this is supposed to be all in the name of honouring the memory of Walter Rodney.
His widow it appears was dismayed when she found that her family’s determination to have an Inquiry had been misrepresented without discussion or even notice to her. She then acted, it may be presumed, without notice to third parties.
The PPP felt bound to respond to the charge from the parliamentary opposition that they had not been consulted in the arrangements for the commission. Forced to admit this charge, the cowards at Freedom House fell back on a supposed letter from the widowed petitioner. “The woman gave us the apple to eat,” as in the story of the Garden of Eden, one of whose five rivers “circled the whole land of Ethiopia.”
In the same breath, proving that the letter was cited for propaganda purposes and mischief, the PPP said that the Commission of Inquiries Act gave the President exclusive power to authorise a commission and determine the terms or reference.
Please note that the government’s Guyana Chronicle reported soon after the swearing in that the commission had been authorised by a resolution of the National Assembly.
Those who abstained on that resolution, that is, a considerable number from the PPP and the PPP only, now claim “exclusive authority” to design all aspects of the commission, a claim supported by Act 19: 03. The PPP in its vanguard mood abstained because the word “assassination” had been amended to read “death.”
Where is the PPP’s justification for abstaining? The Terms of Reference crafted exclusively by the President regardless of other features in dispute, require Inquiry into a “death” a term not allowing any charge of pre -judgment. It might not have been possible to assemble a self-respecting commission with the PPP’s formulation.
As an intending witness I make no comment on the composition and the Terms of Reference of the commission. That is for “stakeholders.” I say only that in relation to the appointment of the commission the record will show that all parties had their negative moments. There is wisdom in not entrusting defence of Human Rights only to political parties.
Yours faithfully,
Eusi Kwayana
