Dear Editor,
Freddie Kissoon says that, in his estimation, in a small closely watched country such as ours, it would have been impossible for the plot and execution that ended Dr Rodney’s life to have taken place without the knowledge of the paramount leader/president of the time, Forbes Burnham.
I do not know about what I will call the ‘panopticon’ theory that we were all being observed. The WPA seemed able to infiltrate and suborn members of the armed forces, ordinary civil servants, QC old boys, ex PYO militants, and not get much of a reaction from the government, or a mass round-up of its sympathisers. For a long time and for many the reaction by the party/government seemed limited to the violence of public beating by House of Israel thugs. No midnight knock on your door. No rounding up of this cell or that. But for us inhabitants of the country, it was all sufficiently terrifying. Perhaps because of the recent history of civil disturbance that had ended.
In general the PNC and government were relatively restrained in their response. Let us not forget that this was begun a mere decade and a half after Sibley Hall and the riots of the sixties. The political parties wanted peace. Both the PPP, it is to be stressed, and the PNC were generally against open insurrection. Memories were still fresh. It is to be conceded that the PNC could have proceeded otherwise than resorting to the public spectacle of beating people in the streets and killings. It tried the military intelligence/monitoring containment of the WPA. We do not know what it learnt in its spying that caused it to conclude that Rodney represented a real and present danger.
We have testimony given the Commission of Inquiry, in which former military leaders claim not to know everything that was happening in the army. We have admissions that army weapons were being diverted to the WPA. We have reports of WPA training camps on the West Coast with recruits from the feared PYO.
I appreciate Freddie’s point, but take it in the light of a conversation I had with Eusi Kwayana at the WPA offices on what must have been North Road in the years 1986 or 1987.
I seem to recall that he told me that the relations with the PNC and government had entered a period of calm in the years following the tragic event (Rodney’s murder) and that it was Hoyte’s accession to power that had been characterised by a rapid freeze, apparently due to Hoyte’s hostility or indifference.
I may agree that Burnham would have panicked as stated in the letter. I remember hearing that he’d had an aircraft standing by to flee the country. But it could have been the usual exaggeration. What we all realise is that the killings of WPA members like Ohene Koama, all ended with Rodney’s departure. I do not know that, according to the scenario Freddie has proposed, he would have ordered the neutralisation of Rodney and then fallen into a mood of regret when it happened. He writes “Rodney’s death psychologically destroyed Burnham.”
The PNC however took to itself the legal fig leaf of an inquest into certain deaths. Burnham brought in forensic experts. Hoyte had an enquiry done. Not the actions of an adversary happy at one’s passing or responsible for it. A commentator blogging to my letter says that few outside of the PNC would understand that, in those days, the party was neither monolithic nor free of dissent. It is possible that there would be organised activities without the knowledge or approval of the central committee.
It is as if we are to ask whether Dr Jagan himself personally knew of all the acts of theft or corruption under his watch? The PPP, it is to be noted, seemed more closely connected in the Phantom Squad episode than the PNC as party would have been in the counter-insurgency campaign against the WPA.
None of which would have happened in the totalitarian states that the PPP was feigning to admire and that Dr Jagan depended upon for ideological and material solidarity. In those countries Rodney and the boys would simply have disappeared.
In short the WPA type ‘revolutionary’ is only possible in specific political conditions. The state must be bad. But not too bad. Brutal but not fatally so. And susceptible to appeals to good conscience based on values with which we are familiar. The WPA was not possible in Cuba or Chile or Argentina or China and USSR.
Painting Burnham as the worst thing that happened to the race (whatever it is)…“dictator, racist..rigger, fourth-richest blackman, Indian girls in National Service,” may be flattering to the egos of some. After all we big ourselves up in boasting that we were in war with Goliath himself.
But the fact is that Burnham did not, after Rodney died, pursue the remaining members of the WPA. Or have their sympathisers arrested. Or “rendered harmless” – the Rabbi Washington, leaves question marks about the entire history. Somehow, it seemed to have been felt that a pacification had been accomplished.With Rodney gone, and with the tremors of the worldwide reaction to his death, the ruling party perhaps woke up. The PNC entered a phase where no amount of damage control was ever enough. It would live forever with the stain of turning thugs and guns on its own people. The fact that it permitted the penitents like Joe Hamilton to discover politics and power, and pushed some of its people into the criminality of represssing violently what was legitimate dissent, is alarming enough. In fact it made Rodney and WPA not only necessary, possible and credible, but also built the cross that it bears to this day. We mortals can only suppose, based on the facts at our disposal. And we cannot judge Burnham for the Rodney murder unless a plausible even prima facie case is made out. But what is sure is that he knew about the beatings and the earlier deaths. He should have called an end to all of that. The fact that he did not is what, post mortem, he is paying for now.
Yours faithfully,
Abu Bakr
