The Rodney hearing: Moral desecration of the evil kind

Jun 26, 2014 Features / Columnists, Freddie Kissoon

One of the things we humans must at all times respect is the feeling, emotion and pain that stay with a victim and the victim’s family for the rest of their lives. You cannot understand trauma if you have not experienced it. At all times we must try to fathom what goes on in the mind of those who were victims of oppression.
Could any human being understand the pain Denise Dias has to live with everyday of her life? Can any human even attempt to comprehend what a mother goes after she hears a crash, looks up the road, one block from where she lives and sees her daughter dead on the road?
Denise Dias’ daughter was killed by an irresponsible motorist. Pain and death comes in many forms but the resulting mental torment and permanent emotional anguish are the same; they live on forever.
I have a particular feeling of anger at those who demand an apology from the PNC for wrongs committed against the Guyanese people but are barefaced and morally obnoxious to deny an apology from the PPP for violence committed on others. So aren’t the victims of the PPP’s atrocity humans that have families? For people like Dolly Hassan, I guess not.
This was a long introduction to my position on Walter Rodney’s family request to the PPP Government to hold a judicial inquiry into the death of Walter more than 33 years after he was killed. I would like to think that you can’t blame a wife whose husband was murdered. I suppose you cannot blame children who lost a father.
I know the way my own kid felt when I was attacked twice. Both times in the night and I had to come home to a grieving family.
The family’s request then has to be seen in the context of trauma and trauma has no statute of limitation. But is it possible that the Rodney family played into the sinister hands of the PPP? My honest opinion is that I think it has.
But at a complex level I empathize with Patricia Rodney and her children. They know Walter was murdered and they want Guyanese history to identify and blame his killers and record it for generations to come.
In asking for the commission, I think the Rodney family had not the remotest inkling that the commission would be used for the most sickening of propaganda purposes. The Rodney family has made a strategic blunder – it doesn’t know the nature of the PPP. If the Rodney family thinks the PPP are nice people it is wrong. The lust for power brings out the most uncivilized instincts in humans.
But surely, the Rodney family must know that 22 years is a long, long time. Why did the PPP wait in 2014 when its hold on power is slipping, and slipping fast, too, to have the inquiry? Surely, it must have crossed the mind of the Rodney family that something was wrong in that Walter’s son protested more than a decade ago in front of the office of the Attorney-General to have this judicial inquiry and he was ignored.
Then an egregious factor crept in that the Rodney family found distasteful. Prime Minister Hinds seven years ago told the media that it was the Rodney family that asked for postponement of the commission to which the family quickly reacted with a denial. Why then in 2014? Because it suits the Machiavellian scheme of the PPP, I am saying to the Rodney family that the PPP is morally desecrating the name of Walter Rodney. I am saying to the Rodney family that this commission has more to do with power play by the PPP than finding the truth behind Walter’s death. Why does the Rodney family think the PPP cares about finding the truth?
The PPP wants to scandalize the PNC and its history for narrow political purposes and it is happening at the inquiry.
This does not in anyway take away from the fact that Walter was murdered by state agents and my opinion is, I believe, President Burnham was involved. But the PPP’s motive is not to expose Burnham but to put the PNC on trial for reasons of brutal realpolitik. And it is playing out in nasty ways.
The headlines of the Chronicle and NCN are taken from the commission each day that the commission is sitting. Doesn’t that tell you something? Surely, the Rodney family cannot be that naïve.
Let us put ourselves in the place of the family. The logic would be why should we care about the PPP’s political manipulation? We are concerned with exposing Walter’s killers. I hope the commission finds the killers but I doubt they will.

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The Rodney hearing: Moral desecration of the evil kind

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