I advanced no argument that Dr Misir should abort due process or the rule of law

Oct 08, 2009 Letters

Dear Editor,
This is my last communique on this issue, and it is intended once and for all to demonstrate Marrisa Lowden’s blind flight along the border of my comments, rather than following the comprehensive route mapped out by the point I was addressing.
Lowden continue to explain that the Pro-Chancellor was addressing a departmental issue, and reminding the media that due process was important in issues such as these.
My rhetorical question is which statement or phrase in my initial letter questioned the legitimacy of due process as it related to the matter under discussion.
As I recall, I emphatically stated in my initial letter that the lecturer was entitled to due process and the presumption of innocence, and that he should not be dismissed summarily, or words to that effect.
Lowden’s effort is to change the direction of my comments from a critique of the hypocrisy inherent in the position of public personas who ignore legally binding presumptions unless and until they are convenient, to a question of whether the university lecturer is entitled to due process.
I wrote a letter arguing for due process for, in my personal opinion, one of the most despicable characters in Guyana’s history, to wit, Roger Khan.
What Lowden continues to do is to engage in a Christopher Columbus kind of discovery of something that had been known, recognised, and had been informing the views and opinions of many like me, prior to her “getting there”.
I made or advanced no argument that Dr Misir should abort due process or the rule of law in the matter before him.
The direction of my critique, as anyone who took the time to read it would quite easily have grasped, pointed to the convenience with which so many in the punditry circle of the ruling party express consciousness on the importance of certain binding legal principles and presumptions.
What due process or rule of law made Ronald Waddell a criminal, and thus excused or justified his assassination?
What sense of due process or rule of law allow so many in the camp of the PPP to justify the rounding up of kids from certain neighbourhoods and throwing them in the Brickdam lockups because, “they are the kinds of kids who will grow up to be terrorist or criminals?”
There is a world in Guyana outside of that inhabited by the Marrisa Lowden’s et al, in which the question of equal justice has to be examined from every reference emanating from enablers and apologists of a regime that offers bounties for kills, rather than for intelligent investigative efforts that enhance transparency in the appearance that justice is being done.
And in that world, the irony that was manifest in Dr Misir’s chiding public comments about the importance of the rule of law could not be ignored.
That it took the occupational situation of political colleague to get this recognition from him, after literally hundreds of letters opining on anything and sundry, should make any objective observer go Hmmmm!!
Robin Williams

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