The GHRA has further disgraced itself

Mar 08, 2014 Features / Columnists, Peeping Tom

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The late Walter Rodney was betrayed many times after his death. It should therefore come as little surprise that he is being sold out again by those who were close to him.
But as much as this continuing betrayal of Rodney is to be expected from forces within his party, the position taken by the Guyana Human Rights Association (GHRA) with respect to the Commission of Inquiry (COI) appointed to investigate the death of Rodney can only be described as stunning.
The position adopted by the GHRA concerning the COI into Rodney’s death is shocking. Firstly, the GHRA was formed as a direct response to the political repression that was inflicted on opponents of the Burnham regime, including Rodney and his party, the WPA.
The GHRA was a creature of that political repression. As such it was best positioned to address the COI with respect to the political climate just prior, during and subsequent to the death of Rodney. Was it not the very GHRA which had described the charges against Rodney and his colleagues as part of a plan to use the courts as an instrument of political harassment?
Secondly, the GHRA was always in the forefront of the struggle to have a Commission of Inquiry into the death of Rodney. Was it not Kwayana who also credited the GHRA, the UK Human Rights Parliamentary Committee, Lord Averbury, the Rodney family, the WPA and others with pressing demands for an investigation into the death of Rodney?
Also, the GHRA cannot claim not to have had influence in having Caribbean Rights invite a team from the International Commission of Jurists (ICJ) to visit Guyana just after democracy was restored. That team deemed the Inquest held by Hoyte into the death of Rodney as flawed. It recommended a Commission of Inquiry.
Was it not the GHRA which had highlighted that the 1980 US State Department Report on Human Rights in Guyana had accused the then PNC government of being implicated in the death of Walter Rodney and in the subsequent removal of key witnesses from the country?
In expressing its unwillingness to support the COI, the GHRA has now shed all semblances of credibility and respectability. It has dishonoured its long history in the fight for human rights and its own role in agitating for an inquiry into the death of the late historian and co-leader of the opposition Working Peoples’ Alliance.
The grounds advanced by the GHRA for opposing the COI are facetious. Firstly, it says that a COI will cause racial divisions. Well, is the GHRA implying that because the COI will stir ethnic sensitivities it should not be undertaken? Is the GHRA suggesting that any matter touching on race and ethnicity be now excluded from a public process?
This is a most untenable position for any human rights body to undertake. If the human rights campaigns that have taken place in Latin America had to be abandoned because they would stir ethnic sensitivities, much of the region would still be under authoritarian rule.
The GHRA has called for a number of things which can similarly be deemed to have a bearing on ethnic sensitivities. Should those calls be ignored?
But just how exactly can a COI which attempts to bring closure to the death of Rodney be seen as stirring ethnic cleavages?
The GHRA seems to have run out of grounds to oppose the Rodney COI. The argument about the reviving of ethnic divisions was the same argument that GUARD – which the GHRA was closely associated with – in tandem  with the WPA had used to break up the Patriotic Coalition for Democracy (PCD) at a time when the PCD was seeking a consensus slate for the 1992 elections. The same argument about ethnic divisions is being pedaled again. It had no merit then. It has none now.
The second basis for opposing the COI was that it grants an absolute pardon to all those who may have been found guilty of involvement in the death of Rodney. This provision in itself should be seen as guarding against ethnic hostility. But also in the context that this COI is taking place more than thirty years after the death of Rodney, an absolute pardon was an absolute necessity to encourage those with information to come forward.
More fundamentally, the pardon helps to promote reconciliation. The provision of the COI granting pardons was patterned along the lines of the pardon granted under the auspices of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission in South Africa. Under that process, persons who confessed to wrongdoing during the apartheid period were granted a pardon.
Not satisfied with the facetious grounds that it advances, the GHRA goes nitpicking by taking umbrage with the COI inquiring into any possible surveillance against the political opposition at the time of Rodney’s death. The GHRA says this process was marginal and has the potential of generating horror stories that can stir up Indo-Guyanese resentment against the PNCR.
The real horror story is the suggestion by the GHRA that the surveillance of political opponents was marginal.  Not only were the phones of the political opponents of the government tapped, but their every movement was monitored. And these opponents were not of one ethnicity. Even the GHRA would have been spied upon. The GHRA knows this very well, because its leaders took precautions.
The GHRA by opposing the COI has lost respect and credibility. It can now be deemed a lost cause and unfit to be regarded as a human rights organization.

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