Latest update January 20th, 2025 4:00 AM
Apr 02, 2020 Features / Columnists, Freddie Kissoon
History is replete with the destructive side of human nature. In countless instances, the mind is unable to grasp the motives behind self-destruction.
When a friend called to inform me that Khemraj Ramjattan was sharing a programme with Hamilton Green on the election results, I saw right before my eyes how flawed human nature is, and another example was born of the destructive side of human nature.
There are unseen, inexplicable forces that shape men and women that civilization has been unable to explain and will never explain. But there are times you wonder if there isn’t a subterranean logic that lies deep in the wilderness of life that makes sense of things we mortals cannot.
I believe the political careers of both Moses Nagamootoo and Ramjattan are over, consigned to ephemeral footnotes that will dissolve as the ink on the wasted pages of history loses its colour.
Was it this subterranean logic that drove Ramjattan to share a platform to justify a rigged election result with of all people, Hamilton Green? Few decent citizens of this land who are more than sixty years of age and few decent scholars who respect their education would publicly deny that there have been successive rigged elections from 1968 to 1985, including a corrugated 1978 referendum on changing the 1966 constitution.
Mr. Green was no innocent bystander in those fraudulent and infamous endeavours. In my experience of witnessing rigged election results from a young boy onwards, I would classify the tampering with the election results between March 4 at the Ashmin’s Building of GECOM command centre to March 13 at GECOM head office, as the most barefaced, comical and insane of election frauds.
I have seen operations from 1968 onwards that tampered with the general election – before and after voting. I have seen terrible conspiracies that rendered the results of the elections in this country absolutely depraved and sickening. But they were never so bereft of any attempt to appear to hide things. The words “appear to hide things” are important and relevant to understanding the fraud of 2020. Both Presidents Burnham and Hoyte did use methods that were attempts to hide the hatched conspiracies that made the elections unfair and un-free.
I will give only one example because of space. I saw ballot boxes removed and when the trucks were followed, police prevented that process. The boxes were later revealed the next day to be at the army head office. Burnham had an explanation – police prevented crowds from following the trucks to stop attacks on them; the boxes were best secured at a high level security building.
What happened on March 4 and March 13 that resulted in an election result perhaps would never happen again in any part of the world, simply because men and women have more commonsense than the conspirators who planned the hijacking of March 4 and March 13.
It was this kind of election rigging that Hamilton Green defended. When Green was an actor in election abuse, Ramjattan wasn’t born. History has put them together. Funny how yesterday’s men find each other. If Ramjattan found Green, Nagamootoo found self-destruction
Perhaps no political career will dissolve in obscurity more than Moses Nagamootoo’s. People start from point A in life and when they reach point Z, you could never recognize them. The psychological metamorphosis is so complete there are no traces of early identities. The psychic contortion is so deep and extensive that there are no traces of earlier character modes. The self-destruction is final, so history writes an unceremonious footnote that the wind blows into sempiternal nothingness.
I have known Nagamootoo in the struggle for free and fair election for over 45 years. It has to be an echo of pathetic, psychological regression to read these words from this soulless man; “Elections in Guyana are governed by the Constitution; the government does not run elections, which is the remit of a constitutional body.”
Was this the Nagamootoo that fought for a professional GECOM under Harold Bollers, who did the every bidding of Prime Minister Forbes Burnham? According to the gospel of this aimless politician whose career is definitely over, Forbes Burnham then never rigged a national election.
Here is Nagamootoo once more; “Guyana has responded with patriotism and dignity to the international threats.” Which Guyana is Nagamootoo talking about? The Guyana whose foreign minister invoked the wrath of one of CARICOM’s most respected former Prime Ministers, Owen Arthur, when she threatened to take away his election observer accreditation.
Nagamootoo is about to end his career, and it is so tragic that he equates patriotism with the denial of the right to have your vote counted. The protesting teen the police shot is a patriot, not Nagamootoo.
(The views expressed in this article are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the opinions of this newspaper)
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