Dear Editor,
This is in response to the SN letter of June 24 last, written by Desmond Trotman, government-nominated GECOM Commissioner and WPA member, in which he stresses, amongst other things, that he is not party to a course of rigging the March 2020 elections especially as he was appointed by President Granger, also leader of APNU, shortly after the WPA (which allied itself to the PNC to form APNU) publicly stated it would not condone election rigging; this timing somehow transposes the WPA position to that of the President. The writer also highpoints his actions since appointment as such that Rodney, WPA co-leader assassinated in 1980, would have supported. Indeed Mr Trotman ended his letter with the call that ‘Walter Rodney lives!’.
Nothing could be more incongruous about these contents of Mr Trotman’s letter. First of all, it is public knowledge that since his appointment Mr Trotman has aligned himself unambiguously with the other two government-nominated Commissioners who have supported the various mutually exclusive versions of how the to-date still-incumbent coalition, headed by the said President Granger, claims to have won the March 2020 elections. But even before that, back in 2015 during the Commission of Inquiry into Rodney’s death, as APNU leader and leader of the People’s National Congress (PNC) David Granger opined that his party, the PNC, in government at the time of the assassination, had nothing to do with Rodney’s death. See SN March 2, 2015. However when David Granger came to office as President in May 2015 he swiftly closed down the Inquiry. Nevertheless the Inquiry heard enough evidence to find Rodney’s killing as murder and an act of state sponsored terrorism, and to identify the then leader of the PNC (and then Prime Minister) Forbes Burnham, as having fore-knowledge of these events. More recently in June 2020, independent diplomatic evidence emerged that the Forbes Burnham government was involved in planning Rodney’s death. President Granger has remained mum all the while.
It is in these circumstances that Mr Trotman has remained blindly oblivious to President Granger’s true stance on the March 2020 elections, and even on how Rodney, the leader whose legacy he now invokes, continues to be treated with injustice by the President and his government.
Yours faithfully,
Donald Rodney
