WHICH NARRATIVE NEXT?

Sep 26, 2010 Features / Columnists, Peeping Tom

---

The Working People’s Alliance has become very efficient in responding to matters of public interest concerning governance. It was quick for example to condemn what it perceived or believed to be the actions of a government minister following an accident. It was on the button when it came to other matters in which it felt the government deserved to be criticised.
But for some reason it has been very slow when it comes to the revelations of one of its members indicating that just prior to the assassination of Dr. Walter Rodney, the party was accumulating weapons.
Perhaps, the silence so far is part of the party’s selective stance when it comes to its own history. In the case of the political history of Guyana, it has been alert enough to respond to questions about the approach being taken by one of its leaders in relation to the President’s visit to Buxton. When Ravi Dev pointed to the dangers of this approach and in support of his arguments pointed to the actions in the sixties of a revered person within the party, the person concerned tried to deflect his own political mistake by asking Dev to produce his source. Dev promptly did. So far there has been no response from the leader concerned.
A response came from another leader, but he skirted the issue and instead of dealing with the consequences of a certain approach to the victim mode approach, argued that Dev was being selective since it was not Buxton which initiated the problems in the sixties.
The Working People’s Alliance, of course, can escape involvement in these debates by claiming that the views expressed are those of the individual leaders and do not reflect the official position of its leaders. In the case of the claims being made by Dr. Roopnaraine that the party was accumulating weapons, two groups, both based overseas, have issued disclaimers over related statements made in a documentary about the life of Walter Rodney.
There are obviously dangers in the WPA not responding officially to what Dr. Roopnaraine has said. For one, it will lead to two or more narratives about the party and its past. There will be the narrative of admission and the narrative of denial. But the greater danger is the loss of credibility by the party, in which there will be a selective embrace of its history. On the one hand by those who believe that the party was fermenting revolution or at the least an armed insurrection against the State, and secondly by those who defend the party and claim that the party was merely defending itself against the terror of the times.
The lessons of the past cannot inform the actions of the present if they are not based on the truth about what happened. We cannot on the one hand lash out about the implications that the defence of Buxton involved and yet at the same time not want to address what the implications of the alleged arming of the WPA in the seventies meant. The two are interrelated, in that they can indicate possible dangers and mistakes in the struggles of the working class.
It is common knowledge that the PPP and the WPA held common positions as regards the domestic political situation in Guyana and also in terms of their general, not specific, ideological orientation. But it is also known that Dr. Jagan, in particular, felt that Rodney was trying to do too much over too short a period of time when the conditions perhaps were not yet conducive to such a strategy, despite the gains of what the WPA called the civil rebellion.
There are lessons to be derived from both the defence of Buxton in the sixties and Rodney’s alleged adventurism. But these lessons are going to be elusive, unless there is a willingness to be open to whatever discomforts they may cause. And certainly these lessons cannot be appreciated through the selective narratives involved in treating with two important periods in our history.
For thirty years the WPA led the people of Guyana to believe that one of its activists was gunned down and guns planted in the trunk of his car. Was this incident part of the gun accumulation process?
For thirty years, the party while admitting that it facilitated the security of persons arrested for treason, never linked itself to those accused. Was the WPA linked to the treason accused of the late seventies? Was the WPA fermenting revolution in Guyana and was it crazy enough to believe that part of this process involved one man concealing a gun in a false-bottom suitcase? Or was that member framed?
Will there now be a narrative of silence over these matters which have been reopened because of statements attributed to one of the leaders of the party? We await the breaking of the silence.

---

---