The Henry Greene affair: I’m confused!

Feb 10, 2012 Features / Columnists, Freddie Kissoon

The Jagdeo oligarchy had been a relentless, hegemonic force for roughly nine years of his 12-year-old presidency. Between 1999 and 2002, Mr. Jagdeo was mainly subdued by the hardliners in the PPP machinery. It was the crime spree that followed the Mash Day jailbreak that led to his political supremacy. After 2005, Mr. Jagdeo became a virtual dictator, exceeding the political extremeness of President Forbes Burnham and went into depraved directions that I sincerely believe Mr. Burnham would have avoided.
I have used concepts like semi-fascism and elected dictatorship to analyze Mr. Jagdeo’s hegemony. I believe my thesis can withstand rigorous academic scrutiny. Mr. Jagdeo presided over a dictatorship in which the Executive office encroached on the sacred principle of the separation of power.
Space will not allow an enumeration and elaboration of this erasing of the demarcation between executive, legislature and judiciary under Jagdeo. Suffice it to say that well placed persons inside the dictatorship were immune to prosecution for heinous illegalities. The most notorious and sickening example is Roger Khan. The evidence, in which official power was used to facilitate Khan, is mountainous or oceanic or overwhelming.
What was Mr. Henry Greene’s role in the life of Jagdeoite domination? Here, speculation will have to be utilized in the absence of hard proof. But before we move to that realm, here is some hard proof.
Greene had his visa curtailed by the US Embassy; both his non-immigrant permit and his diplomatic pass. The WikiLeaks cables reveal that the sanction came about because of Greene’s connection to the drug trade.
The second incontrovertible fact is that despite all the rage against Greene by the US Government, he was appointed Commissioner and was retained after retirement. We need to mention that it is public knowledge that Mr. Greene is into business. He has agricultural land on the Soesdyke-Linden highway and has investment in gold mining.
We now come to our speculative venture and it centers on one question only – why have State authorities allowed for the law to take its course in the Henry Greene case?
There are two answers which this columnist will submit and will choose one; that the corridors of power have always observed the rule of law and therefore Greene should not be an exception. The second one is that in a dictatorship, as the brilliant, famous film “Night of the Generals” instructs us, the tyrants protect those who serve them in the perpetuation of oligarchic and corrupt rule.
No one can seriously watch the Guyanese people in their eyes and say that over the past fifteen years the PPP Government has meticulously adhered to the rule of law, and corrupt state officials and bad wrong-doers were punished. So we come to the second answer; why would someone strategically placed like Henry Greene now face humiliation?
Mr. Greene is finished as Police Commissioner. Even if he does not face a rape charge, he is out of the Police Force and has left in a most disgraceful manner.
I now get to the heart of my speculation. I believe that if others have been protected, then why was Greene not offered a canopy? My thinking is that there may be foreign pressure on the new Guyana Government to remove Greene from official duties so he can be made to answer an inquiry, possibly in the United States.
I would like to think that Mr. Greene is just one of several names that may interest US authorities. I am not connecting the Green story to the concept of a new dispensation. I don’t accept that argument whatsoever.
There is a new President in Guyana but, in my opinion, not a new dispensation. This columnist would have adopted the theory of a new political pathway in Guyana if new forces had opened the door to the corridors of power. No doors were opened. The inhabitants, invited since the era of Jagdeoite fascism, are still there quite happily carrying on and are happily protected as we saw from the reaction of the Office of the President to this newspaper’s article on the assets of Irfaan Ali.
We may be confused and I, for one, am confused as to why powerful men and women allowed Henry Greene to be dragged into the mess he is in at the moment when lesser servants were given body armour to protect them from the tentacles of the law.
We can only speculate. I am of the opinion that foreign pressure is behind the Greene saga. Others will follow King Henry.

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The Henry Greene affair: I’m confused!

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