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We have to be very mindful of these inaccuracies
Dear Editor,
I write in response to an article appearing in the Guyana Times of Friday March 28, 2014 under the caption “WPA has evidence Rodney was assassinated”. I hope this response will not be muted.
My discussion with the reporter as I recall, was not for publication, but to assist her in her assigned duty of covering the Walter Rodney inquiry. She needed background information on the period of the assassination. While I have no problem with what we discussed being made public, since most of what I said were already in the public domain, I do have problems with the inaccuracies contained in said article.
The most important of these are:
(1) I never said Rodney was “in contact with the main suspect, a bomb electronic expert”. I have no knowledge of Smith being a bomb expert. What I said was he had expertise in electronics. In light of the pending Commission of Inquiry this deserves a correction.
(2) The article went on to state: “He recalled the information given by Rodney’s older brother Donald, who was in the driver’s seat outside the Camp Street jail when a bomb hidden in a walkie-talkie exploded in his brother’s lap”. This gives the erroneous impression that Walter Rodney was outside the jail when he was assassinated, this is not true. Incidentally, I never said that Donald was Walter’s older brother.
(3) The article stated “his instructions to Walter, when he is testing this thing, was that he must come out and activate the thing so that he, Smith, could get to see how it gets ’to respond.’” That too is a gross inaccuracy. What I in fact said was that Smith wanted Walter to test the device in the vicinity of the prison fence to see how it would respond in the presence of expansive metal, but Walter refused to carry out those instructions.
(4) The article also gives the erroneous impression that I said “when Walter opened the paper bag the device exploded”. What I said is that Walter activated the device based on Smith’s instructions to Donald Rodney on which switches to be activated, and the device exploded after this was done.
(5) The paper’s report is misleading when it said he opined Rodney was “too trusting of people around him”. This gives readers the impression that I was inferring that Rodney was too trusting of people, including his close associates, which is not what I said or implied. What I said to the reporter was that Rodney was too trusting of people who approached him claiming to have an interest in the struggle.
I was referring to persons who at that time volunteered service to the party and the struggle. I also said that Walter was not in Guyana long enough to understand the culture of people saying one thing when in fact they meant something else.
While these may seem to be simple misrepresentations in the context of the present pending Commission of Inquiry, we have to be very mindful of these inaccuracies.
Tacuma Ogunseye
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