Dear Editor,
The Walter Rodney CoI report cannot truly be made “public” if it is unavailable in the library, university, the press, and bookstores. Parliament is no longer a place for protected speech. More than a summary of a plot to kill an esteemed citizen, this report is a symbol of free speech, and ought to be an election issue.
For all intents and purposes, the report has been suppressed in Parliament because the PNCR, and especially its leader Mr David Granger, still object in principle and practice to the renowned historian. Mr Granger, who has proactively resisted legitimate criticism against the PNCR, sees grave danger in the report.
The report threatens to puncture the halo Mr Granger has woven for Forbes Burnham. It will destroy the façade of the PNCR as a law-abiding, democratic party (eg, see “Declaration of Vreed-en-Hoop”, 2012), that Mr Granger painstakingly nurtured during years of pseudo-political writings while attacking the PPP.
In his version of the GDF’s history from 1966 to 1976 (see “The New Road”, 1976), he enjoyed describing the PPP and its supporters in derogatory terms such as “gangsters”.
Here is an extract about the rigged 1973 elections, which the “gangsters” lost: “Realising that their hold on the electorate was slipping further, and in an abortive attempt to forestall an obvious and overwhelming PNC victory, a campaign of violence and resistance was planned by the PPP. The GDF was called in to aid the civil power and prevent a breakdown of law and order that was planned by the gangsters”.
Mr Granger never sought to revise his overt prejudicial views, because misrepresentation under the guise of army literature has its PNC virtues. The public experienced this on June 13, 1980. It also did so between 2002 and 2006, and of course since September of this year, in defiance of the CCJ.
It must be noted that Dr Rodney was not the only Guyanese who died or sustained serious injuries due to the use of State-owned gadgets or arsenals. Both before and after his demise, occupants of sugarcane villages have recorded by way of funerals, abortions, stolen property, and broken homes the use of state equipment to kill and keep villagers in line. No one protested then, to avoid doing so now.
To return to Mr Granger: with time, the more he wrote, the less history survived. He became more of a magician and less of a historian. His handiwork is to make entire occurrences disappear to protect Congress Place. It is not a coincidence, therefore, that this CoI report disappeared under his tenure.
In 2003, he presented a 28-page paper titled, “Civil Violence, Domestic Terrorism and Internal Security in Guyana, 1953-2003” at a foreign conference. He wilfully omitted any mention of violence that occurred from May 23 to May 27, 1964, at Wismar and Christiansburg. Like the CoI report, Wismar disappeared. The Demerara River straddled by the steamer RH Carr, filled with thousands who fled the area on May 26, 1964, disappeared.
Regarding violence in the eighties, Mr Granger never mentioned “kick-down-the-door” banditry. Guns, bullets, rapes, murders, whole corpses vanished as crime statistics plummeted with Mr Granger. He told the foreign audience that there were a few “occasional outbreaks of criminal violence, especially against isolated households in rural area”.
Far from being an authority on crime in Guyana, Mr Granger still became President, in great fanfare and without inquiry of his distortions. But such corruption of history comes with its problems. Dr Patricia Rodney, the widow of Dr Walter Rodney, said it better recently: “It is sad that on the continent [Africa], every person has read ‘How Europe Underdeveloped Africa’, but it is not available in Guyana”.
And the PNCR, unable to win elections, intends to keep it this way. They prefer a falsified, violent version of history, whether about a politically planned explosion near a jail in June of 1980, or the politically planned escape of gunmen from a jail in February of 2002, instead of a second coming for D. Rodney.
A second coming will aid Freedom House and obstruct the PNCR’s intent to impose a wider Burnham renaissance upon Guyanese. Thus, while the political legacy of Mr Hamilton Green is resurrected by way of an Order of Roraima, the name of Dr Rodney is quietly being stripped away.
This call for the Rodney CoI report is therefore an attempt to unravel all of this.
Sincerely,
Rakesh Rampertab
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