WHY HENRY GREENE WAS HATED

Sep 17, 2012 Features / Columnists, Peeping Tom

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Henry Greene, the late former Commissioner of Police was buried yesterday after glowing eulogies were paid to him in a three-hour long ceremony at the National Cultural Centre. Many of those who rose to sing his praises must however ask themselves whether they could have done more to defend him from the campaign of hatred and vilification to which he was subjected and which effectively deposed him as the country’s Top Cop.
Henry Greene was no saint and never pretended to be any. But the allegation over which he lost his job should never have seen the light of day. The government did the right thing when it brought in foreign investigators to examine the allegations made against him.
However, onto this day, no one has seen it fit to publish the contents of the report by the Jamaican investigators.  Based on reports, however, it does seem as if there were serious issues of credibility concerning Greene’s accuser and they may have been reflected in the report. The Jamaican report needs to be made public so that Henry Greene’s name can be cleared and those who conspired to have him removed exposed. For the sake of his family, this report needs to be released in a sanitized version.
There was some controversy as to whether this report formed the basis of the charges that were recommended against Greene. It was this recommendation that led to Greene having to approach the courts seeking to squash that recommendation. In a landmark decision, Justice Chang ruled in favour of Greene.
There are many who still feel that Greene should have had his day in court and should have established his innocence at a trial. But would this have been fair given what was revealed in the decision of Justice Chang and his extremely well-reasoned decision?
Henry Greene would have had to be interdicted had he been charged and since he has already passed retirement age, it would have been hard to bring him back after the trial. As such, to ask him to give up his career would have been unreasonable because even if he was found innocent, he would not have been able to get back his job.
There was a vicious campaign launched against Henry Greene and many of those who were a part of this campaign said they were out to secure justice for his alleged victim. However, no sooner did Greene resign that many of those who said they would ensure justice for the alleged victim, seemed to have abandoned her. They no longer seemed to be keen on ensuring justice for her.
Why bother? They got what they wanted.  They got rid of poor Henry Greene and nothing further was heard of the allegations against him. No private charges; no civil suit; no challenge to the opinion that Justice Chang’s decision should not be appealed. Nothing!
The persons who ganged up against Henry Greene know themselves. The persons who let him go without standing up for him also know themselves.
Among those who went after Greene were persons who once worked closely with him and who had a lot of unkind things to say about the now deceased Commissioner of Police.
He was not without faults. In fact he had a lot of faults. When his visa was revoked, he himself said he thought that the revocation was because of the “girls.” He of course was not the only one having “girls” in the Guyana Police Force.
But it was not because of this fact that he was hated. Henry Greene did an excellent job as Commissioner of Police but he earned the ire of a large section of the population because they deflected their hatred of Roger Khan onto him when it was revealed in some Wikileaks cables that the US Embassy felt Greene had links with the narcotics underworld.  Those who were against him felt that this meant that he had links with Roger Khan, something that onto this day has not been proven.
In fact, the only thing that the Wikileaks cable established was that the United States did not want him as Commissioner of Police. One of their interlocutors must have told them things about Greene. But surely if the US Embassy had something criminal against Greene they would not have revoked his visa, they would have arrested him when he went to the US.
The Wikileaks cables confirm that the visa revocation had nothing to do with Greene’s alleged links with the underworld but more to do with the fact that the embassy was allegedly told that if they pulled his visa, the government would have reason to bypass Greene as Commissioner of Police.
As such, if any credibility is to be given to the Wikileaks cables, then Greene’s visa revocation had to do with giving the government a reason to not appoint him as Commissioner. The US has been known to play such games.
In the end he was appointed as Commissioner but he was reviled from very early because of the negative aspersion that the visa revocation placed on him. Greene was reviled because the revocation of his visa fed the suspicion that he was in league with Roger Khan, and the latter is so hated within Guyana that any association with him would lead to immediate ostracism by those who dislike Khan.
When Greene as Commissioner also took out the ‘Fineman’ Gang, he was hated even more by those who saw ‘Fineman’ as a hero.
Greene is now dead and buried  but those who took him out of  his job, those who made sickening remarks when he took ill, those who failed to stand by his side when he faced allegations of rape and those who did things to make his final days painful are still around. They have to live with their conscience.
 May he Rest in Peace!

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