The Dossier

Nov 22, 2009 Editorial

The Joint Parliamentary Opposition Parties (JoPOP) have issued the “dossier” they had promised when revelations in the Simels trial in a Brooklyn court back in August suggested that there might be a nexus between Roger Khan, elements of the security forces and a government official.
Promised by the end of September, the late delivery of the report correlates with the expansion of the span of its subject matter. An inquiry, with the obligatory “international presence”, is again demanded.
Evidently reacting to widespread criticism of its initial decision to begin its catalogue of unexplained killings from 2002, the final dossier casts its gaze back to 1993, the first full year of the present PPP administration.
Accepting that the extraordinary wave of killings in the middle of this decade did not have its origins in 2002 – the time of the infamous prison breakout and the intervention of Roger Khan – the question might be asked as to what is so definitive about 1993? Mightn’t there be connections to the wave of kick-down-the door banditry that swept across the country through the 80’s in a violent convulsion of robbery, mayhem and murder?
In its search for nexuses and origins, the joint opposition parties might take a hint from archaeology – it is crucial to keep on digging. Or there may be increased suspicions of being unwilling to unearth skeletons from a previous era.
And that is the key phrase, “increased suspicions”. Guyanese have become very cynical about their political elites whenever they jump on the bandwagon of politically correct issues such as “rule of law”, “justice”, “torture” etc. History has shown our citizens that their politicians use these concepts very expediently – especially based on whether they are in or out of office. There will always be the question of motives when politicians take the “high road”.
One hears once again that there is no “moral equivalence” between the excesses of the party in government and those in the opposition – even as the need for “justice” for the victims is piously invoked. The cynical citizen wonders whether to the victim it mattered who did the killing. Death is final – and murder is always most foul.
It could have surprised no one that the government reacted immediately to the Joint opposition parties’ dossier, with its long litany of 449 killings, not only to question its substantive contents but to declare: “It is obvious that the PNCR and their acolytes in their parliamentary opposition parties have used the publication of the dossier to advance their grand design which is to sensationalise, to confuse, and to score partisan political points using the circumstances of the dead as their primary tool.” So where do we go from here?
Recently, Mr Eusi Kwayana posed a couple of questions on the subject: “When we go to the point of a formal inquiry, however, is it just for exposure of a government already exposed? Or is it for the wider work of reconciliation, or healing?” One assumes that the “exposure” Mr Kwayana alludes to is the nexus between some government operative and Roger Khan, when as the latter declared in full-page ads in the Guyanese newspapers, he assisted the security forces in taking on the resistance fighters –and in the process saved the government from being overthrown.
This assertion is accepted by almost all Guyanese – but it is their reaction to it that is interesting: the country is split down the middle – coinciding, not surprisingly with its ethnic/political cleavage as to whether the intervention was positive or negative. No agonising over “moral equivalences.”
So we return to Mr Kwayana’s second question on the demanded inquiry: “Is it for the wider work of reconciliation, or healing?” Because of the divisions in our populace on the essential subject matter of the inquiry, we cannot see how the latter will lead to healing – in fact it can only exacerbate the fissures.
Over the last couple of years, the leading politicians from all sides of the political divides have conceded that we need a Truth and Reconciliation Commission to inquire into our violent past – all the way back to the sixties, when it all began. Only the restorative justice premises of such a body can lead to reconciliation and healing.

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