Dear Editor,
Last Saturday, while on a brief trip to New York, I appeared on a televised town hall style debate moderated by Mr. Sase Singh, and also featuring Vice President and Minister of Public Security Khemraj Ramjattan. The focus of the programme was the No Confidence Motion which saw the defeat of the APNU+AFC Government and its implications. Unfortunately, at several points during the programme I had to play the role of fact checker in response to Mr. Ramjattan’s cavalier disregard for the facts, his misquoting of the Constitution particularly in relation to Article 106 (7) [the holding of elections], Article 162 (8) dealing with the extremely limited powers of GECOM regarding the postponing of elections; his repetition of the visibly discredited notion that the lowest majority of 65 is 34; his misciting of the Vanuatu case despite the dismissal of that case’s relevance to Guyana; and his glib reference to the doctrine of necessity to justify the refusal and failure of the Granger Administration to comply with the No Confidence Motion.
The only accurate comment by Mr. Ramjattan on the doctrine was its association with Mr. J.O.F Haynes. In fact, I would make bold to say that Haynes’ brilliant, erudite and exhaustive analysis of the doctrine and its application to not one but two revolutionary changes in Grenada – a coup in 1979, and the removal of the 1979 revolutionary government in 1983, all of which came to an end with the American invasion on 25 October 1983.
Two things emerged from Ramjattan’s reference of the doctrine and to Justice Haynes. The first was that Mr. Ramjattan was not too interested in the detailed findings of the Grenada Court and the ruling by the Privy Council on a related matter of a stay. Second is the intended reliance by the Granger Administration on their misunderstanding of the analysis and findings by a three-man bench of the Court of Appeal presided over by Haynes and including Justices of Appeal Liverpool and Peterkin all of whom delivered written judgments on the matter.
I propose writing an academic article on the doctrine as it applies to the Guyana situation and the school yard bully action by the Granger Administration, led by people like Ramjattan. But let me say for now that the Grenada Court set out as one of the four requirements for the de jure recognition of a revolution – defined as a forced change of the constitutional order – the “conformity and obedience of the population [and not] mere tacit submission due to coercion or fear of force”.
And let me point out that except for Southern Rhodesia where the white racist Prime Minister Ian Smith announced a unilateral Declaration of Independence in 1965, the world knows of no other instance whereby an incumbent Government sought to upend the constitution thereby creating its own revolution, whether by force or otherwise.
Maybe Ramjattan and the Granger Administration do not know this, or if they do, they do not care. Suffice it to say that Burnham, a contemporary of Smith, would have found it extremely unacceptable to be mentioned in the same sentence as Ian Smith. Not so Ramjattan and Granger who obviously do not share Ian Smith’s racism but who surely come close to him with their brazenly unconstitutional conduct.
Yours faithfully,
Christopher Ram
