The Linden CoI Fiasco

Nov 04, 2012 Features / Columnists, Ravi Dev

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There’s an old proverb: “Be careful what you ask for; you might just get it.” Right after the killing of three Lindeners back in July 18, the Opposition demanded a Commission of Inquiry.
The government immediately complied. The Opposition then demanded foreign Commisioners and Caricom supplied three out of the five from Jamaica and Trinidad.
The government and APNU worked out the terms of reference (ToR) for the Commission and one of these proved to be a sticking point for the AFC, which had stayed out of the negotiations. They rejected the stipulation that the Commission of Inquiry (CoI) look “”into the role, involvement (if any, of any political) of other forces in organising, mobilising and promoting the protest actions from their commencement and immediately after the shooting on July 18th 2012″.
They found support from APNU’s Regional Chairman, Sharma Solomon – even after he had signed the agreement – and the clause was excised.
I always felt that this was a retrograde decision. How were we going to Inquire into the protests leading to the killings without examining the roles of those “forces in organising, mobilising and promoting the protest actions”? By narrowing the Inquiry to just the events on the Wismar-MacKenzie Bridge on the fateful day, the entire tragedy was being removed from its context – which could explain so much of what unfolded.
In sociology (or for that matter, in any other field of inquiry) we talk about distal and proximal causation.
The former seeks to explain human social behaviour by examining the larger context in which individuals carry out their actions, while the latter focuses on more immediate factors.
In the Linden ToR, the government and APNU were not asking to identify those that riled up the Lindeners immediately after the government and APNU had brokered an agreement concerning the proposed change in electricity tariffs.
They weren’t even asking for the economic conditions of Linden to be considered as distal reasons in precipitating factors.
All that was being asked was to identify those who provoked the actions of the protestors on the Bridge. This was not distal but as proximal as you can get.
If it was thought (rightfully) that the conduct of the police and their officers in carrying out their duty to prevent the protestors from illegally preventing citizens from crossing the bridge should be inquired into, surely those who encouraged or organised the commission of that illegal act ought to be identified and inquired into.
How could one inquire into a “reaction” without considering the initial “action”?
My thought was that by ignoring what would have been exposed as the political nature of the protest, one was not only going to let some instigators off the hook, but would ensure that the Commission hearings would be reduced to a farce.
The lead lawyers seeking to place culpability for the killings on the police, after all, were not just hired lawyers – they were the Chairmen of the two Opposition political parties.
Following the shootings, APNU had been manoeuvred into a more confrontational posture, in which both Opposition parties demanded the firing of Minister of Home Affairs Clement Rohee.
This was a political tactic that inevitably increased the stakes for instability. Most importantly, it signalled an abandonment of dialogue as a mechanism for traversing the new political landscape created by the last elections.
In our estimation, the Tripartite Talks initiated by President Ramotar was a seminal transition innovation in our fast evolving political system. Over the last two years, we had warned about the need for a less confrontational mode of political mobilisation because of the disappearance of built-in automatic ethnic majorities.
In the immediate future, because of our Constitution awarding the Executive to the party securing just a plurality of votes, dialogue, not street protests, is what might secure even a modicum of progress.
So we had an Inquiry in which ‘justice’ was subverted from the very inception. That virtue, after all, is symbolised as being blind but if, with eyes open wide, we remove from scrutiny one of the two parties involved in a conflict, the outcome is always going to be tainted.
My good friend Nigel Hughes assures us that there is enough circumstantial evidence to show that the police were responsible for the killing of the three men.
But what about the video evidence, and even admissions of those ‘leaders’ who instructed the Lindeners to break the law?
Not just in blocking the bridge for hours but to violently confront the police. I was not personally involved in the Linden confrontation but as I wrote, I had some experience with the similar eruption at Agricola.
In a civilised society, other citizens also have rights and those that preach the violation of those rights must know there are sanctions.
In our small but fractured society, we must resolve our differences, political or otherwise, peacefully.

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