Murders and leaders: The Rodney assassination

Jun 30, 2011 Features / Columnists, Freddie Kissoon

I believe that the CIA was involved in several assassinations that many reigning American Presidents at the time didn’t know about. Two reasons explain this. First, the operatives may fear that the Commander-in-Chief may reject the action.
Secondly, powerful security personnel tend to act on their own based on the massive authority that is invested in them. It is possible that Nixon did not know about the overthrow of Salvador Allende? No details have ever emerged to tie him to the Chilean coup. Maybe Henry Kissinger acted on his own in setting up the destabilization campaign.
In the sixties in Guyana the internecine tit for tat between the PNC and PPP saw the commission of several violent attacks and murders but did Cheddi Jagan, Forbes Burnham and Peter D’Aguair and their close advisors had direct knowledge of the acts? I doubt it.
In those days, all three parties – PPP, PNC and UF – had their own lunatic fringe that went on their own marauding missions. Take the case of Peter Taylor, the crusading editor who relentlessly pursued Premier Jagan and his Government. What if a group of crazy PYO youths at the time decided, on their own, to take out Taylor (there was an attempt on his life one evening)?
I certainly believe Mrs. Jagan did not inform her husband of many of the missions she authorized against the PNC and UF in the sixties. I doubt very much that Burnham gave the orders for East Indians to be killed in Mackenzie.
In the case of the Rodney homicide, it remains a debatable situation as to how much the PNC leadership knew about it.
My opinion is that Burnham plotted Rodney’s death out of the fear that Rodney would have overthrown and publicly humiliate him by jailing him. But I am not convinced and have never been mentally satisfied that the PNC leadership knew about the murder plot. Presidents and Prime Ministers do not kill their internationally known and universally respected opponents by informing vast numbers in their party hierarchy. This goes against commonsense.
The then head of the Pakistani armed forces that subsequently toppled the Prime Minister, Zulfikar Ali Bhutto and hanged him, was convinced that Bhutto plotted the death of one of Bhutto’s opponents. To date no details have come out on that except in one book that is very convincing.
Even if Bhutto did that, there has not been any evidence to point to any conspiratorial discussions he had with the other leaders in his party.
My take on the Rodney killing is that Burnham was too thinking a politician to have trusted PNC big wigs with that knowledge. I don’t think they knew anything at all about it. Killing a high profile politician is not something you plan with, and broadcast to your Cabinet colleagues.
Detractors of the PNC will use the WPA election coalition with the PNC to point to the alliance as a manifestation of nasty morality on the part of the WPA. But the point cannot hold.
None of the presidential contenders of the PNC were involved or had anything to do with the murder of Rodney. They can also claim they don’t know if the PNC as an organization was involved at all. And they may be right. I think they are right.
It is a different matter all together if you ask them if they believe President Burnham was the centre of the plot. Logical deduction points to Burnham. Logical deduction points to the hand of the PPP’s high command in the shooting death in 1974 of the police constable James Henry who was guarding the toll gates on the Corentyne highway and became the object of PPP’s scorn.
In an election campaign, no PNC high command member will give an opinion on Burnham’s role in Rodney’s death. Likewise, no PPP prince at this moment will dare tell you that the PPP did plan the shooting of Mr. Henry.
Former Head of the Presidential Secretariat (deceased) under President Hoyte, Tyrone Ferguson, in his book, “To Survive Sensibly or Court Heroic Death: Management of Guyana’s Political Economy, 1965-1985,” argues that a inner group of trusted lieutenants who loved Burnham feared that Rodney would have removed their leader so they carried out the murder without the knowledge of Burnham.
How about that for a theory on the assassination of the great Guyanese hero? I guess we may not know in the foreseeable future or may ever know. But this I know and believe – the people in the PNC and the PNC-led Government would not have been told.

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Murders and leaders: The Rodney assassination

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