AFC should not support Granger’s call for inquiry from 2004 to 2010

Jan 10, 2013 Letters

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DEAR EDITOR,
After ‘disappearing’ from the scene for the past few months, David Granger is back with a motion – not with a motion to create an anti-corruption agency or to assure ethnic balance in every facet of society or to clamour for a commission of inquiry to deal with rampant racism that cripples this country, but a motion to have a commission of inquiry on criminal violence from 2004 to 2010.
Utterly despicable. Downright facetious. Intellectually heinous. Most troubling. Why? Well, David Granger, a known researcher and respected historian, and a man who has lived in Guyana virtually all his life, and most definitely since the 1990s, has somehow conveniently forgotten the murder, mayhem, brutality and bestiality that hounded this country from February 23, 2002 when five prisoners broke out of Camp Street prison and terrorized this country in a fear-filled terror rampage.
One would be tempted to say it is old age, but in the face of incontrovertible evidence that Granger’s faculties are still formidably intact, it is more a case of old tricks. It is a rotten misadventure for David Granger to start off 2013 with this macabre mess of a motion. For a man to wilfully skip two years of turmoil, violence and savagery and seek to use the democratic vehicle of Parliament to pass a motion to this effect is immoral.
It completely revokes and discards the sufferings of those who wilted and fell under the battering of those two years. It makes a complete mockery of this nation’s pain and angst and demoralizes the affliction of those who fell victim to those terrible two years. It erases February 23, 2002 to December 31, 2003, from the historiography of this country.
It also signals that David Granger, despite his grand comprehension of history and his innate knowledge of the facts of this country’s life of ethnic struggle and triumphalism, will resort to convenient morality when it suits him. If Granger tried to pull this miasma with something else, something of minuscule importance where lives were not extinguished and children not left fatherless and people not victimized and criminally devastated, I would have probably let it pass. But this inexplicable attempt to bury the torment of those who lived under the atrocity of the period from 2002 to 2004, and a blatant denial of their misery under the gun and violence of those days, cannot pass.
All those involved in the rise of criminal violence in this country have to be brought to account. You cannot start at 2004 and dismiss the catalyst of the February 23, 2002 Mash Day jailbreak and the loss of innocence in this country. If Granger is so consumed with finding the truth, we should not stop at the period of 2004 to 2010, but also launch inquiries into the murders of Walter Rodney, Father Darke and the thuggery of the House of Israel. Leaving out two years of criminal terror, miscreant agendas of ‘freedom fighting’ and whispers of political links between murderers and politicians is intolerable, no matter how politically convenient it may appear to the PNC/APNU.
If we are going to investigate one group hiring a drug lord to criminally and extra-judicially slaughter fellow criminals and innocent citizens, we should have the decency to investigate hardened villains extra-judicially and cold-bloodedly slaughtering innocents and criminals alike and whether there is truth to political backing for them.
We cannot as a country advance when we see wrong in one group defending criminals to fight crime while we similarly cannot see wrong in another group defending criminals obliterating ordinary citizens in the names of crime fighting or freedom fighting.
We need to investigate how we arrived at this frightening value system of one man’s freedom fighter is another man’s crime fighter and vice versa and the even more bizarre conception of low-lifes and thugs being freedom and crime fighters.
The criminal violence of 2004 did not occur in a vacuum, as Granger would want us to believe with this motion. There is something callously despicable about this motion and the AFC cannot support it without losing its soul. The PNC/APNU will lose its soul with this motion but like the PPP, the PNC had no soul to begin with.
Many in this country and more importantly, crossover voters (Amerindians and Mixed Races) will view this motion and its inherent bias as symptomatic of a mindset within the PNC/APNU to deny history and to twist the truth. This motion reminds us why the PNC has never and will never admit to its atrocities.
In its mind, it still seems like history is a malleable substance, moulded to its own manufactured moods. Those crossover voters will reason deep within that the PNC deliberately removed the 2002 to 2004 period from the motion for political self-protection and self-interest and in doing so, ignores the suffering of the people of Guyana during this period.
The AFC cannot agree to this motion in this form. This motion is the AFC’s Gettysburg, that seminal moment in its history where it either stands for something or falls for anything. There is no better moment for the AFC to quell the ‘PNC and AFC ah wan’ whispers by insisting the enquiry must be from February 23, 2002. The AFC should support an enquiry from 2002 to 2010, not 2004 to 2010.
When I told African-Guyanese the PNC/APNU is the worst thing that happened to them politically, I meant it. The last election result occurred because some Indians resisted the fear politics and venality of the PPP by voting for the AFC. It also happened because the PNC/APNU got for the first time in a long time a decent percentage of crossover votes from Amerindians and Mixed Races. These two effects, along with strong African turnout, led to the PPP losing its majority.
This motion by Granger threatens to undermine these two changes. It hands the PPP an opportunity to psychologically corral those Indians who left, back into the fold. While that will not be enough for the PPP to ever regain a majority, it will likely ensure the PPP maintains a plurality in the 2016 election, and the PPP knows a minority presidency is just as good as a majority one.
More devastatingly, this motion, and the sinister serpentine nature of it, will drive those crossover voters away that the PNC/APNU was able to secure for the first time, as they will see the PNC/APNU as a biased, unfair, selective and still racially entrenched party in mentality and action.
People do not take kindly to gamesmanship with life, liberty, property and limb, and February 23, 2002 to 2004 had mounting losses in all those categories. The PNC/APNU’s only hope of winning an election in Guyana is by capturing a hefty percentage of the future crossover votes. This voting group (Amerindians and Mixed Races) are still suspicious of the PNC/APNU, although some voted for the PNC in 2011.
This motion erases those gains and sinks a dagger into the heart of the PNC/APNU’s electoral fortunes in the future. Some moral-minded Africans will depart the PNC/APNU too. Then there are those Africans who see these elephant-sized political blunders occurring with great regularity and realize they voted for a pig in the poke in 2011 and no longer want any part of this circus. What a way to start the new year.
M. Maxwell      

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