Dear Editor,
Ruel Johnson said a lot of things in his letter of 12 December. Some I choose to ignore, some I refuse to get muddied and dirty to respond. While he proceeds on the basis of suggestion, supposition and inference, his letter stands in stark contrast to another written by my friend Donald Sinclair, a tourism professional who, albeit holding a different point of view to mine, acknowledges that the ‘sharply conflicting views [on the issue] …should not be regarded as an anomaly and the debate in the media is healthy’.
Johnson is recognised in the Guyanese society as a wordsmith and literary figure, among other things. It should therefore be easy-peasy for him to discern that in the public offerings that I have made on this topic – two letters in SN and an interview with NBC Top Story – the thrust of my submissions has been on my concern for preserving the positive international image that Guyana currently enjoys as a developing oil rich country, rather than returning to the macabre imagery of Jonestown. Nowhere have I sought – unlike him, and after considerable research I might add – to locate this issue in the domain of local politics. On this aspect, I shall say nothing other than to bring to Johnson’s attention two names – Robert F. Kennedy Jr. and Cheddi Jagan Jr.
Given his literary credentials, I have to take strong objection to Johnson’s statement that ‘I agree with Bissember that the government of the day was critical to the facilitation of the tragedy…’. How can he agree with a position that I never stated!? What I did say, was that ‘Were we [the Guyanese people] resilient, the People’s Temple would never have set up shop in Guyana and the Jonestown massacre would never have occurred’. To take my statement and to extrapolate by hop step and jump to the position that I opined that ‘the government of the day was critical to the facilitation of the tragedy’ is a literary feat of no mean order, coming from a credentialed person such as Johnson.
Let me invite Johnson, and the Editor of the SN, who “facilitated” him, to reflect upon the defamatory implications of what was represented by Johnson, both as regards the government of the day, as well as what I said in my letter of 11 December. I turn your collective attention to the law relating to causation, and the need to establish a causal link, a chain of causation, between an action or omission on the one hand, and an outcome on the other. Also, to understand the distinction between the causa causans of an occurrence and the causa sine qua non.
Pursuing the thrust of Johnson’s extreme position, is it then the case that the pilots who flew Congressman Ryan and his team into Port Kaituma were ‘critical to the facilitation’ of their death? Did the pilots have the requisite state of mind or knowledge of the fate that was to befall them when they undertook to fly those now deceased into the interior? It is my understanding that up until the Saturday morning of the departure of Congressman Ryan and his team from Jonestown, very few people – if not Jones alone – had any prior knowledge of the massacre that would occur hours after their departure from Jonestown, or the fate that would befall the departing group at the airport. All that had happened previously were mock rehearsals, with no clear indication of when D day would be.
Ergo, could the government of the day reasonably foresee that when the People’s Temple was given permission to set up shop in Guyana three years before in1975, it was, by so doing, committing an act ‘critical to the facilitation of the tragedy’, that Johnson would want the readers to believe I represented in my letter?
I urge Johnson and the Editor of the SN to busy themselves with all convenient speed in this matter and to take the necessary corrective steps to remedy this misrepresentation and smearing of my character and withdraw the statement falsely attributed to me.
Regards,
Neville Bissember