Harmon’s letters

Mar 22, 2021 Editorial

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In recent times, as clearly part of some strategy deliberated and agreed upon by the finest minds in his orbit, Leader of the Opposition, Joseph Harmon has taken to writing letters to the international community, complaining that his political opponents in government are not playing nice with him and the political machinery, which he purports to lead.
One such example is a letter, which he sent last month to India’s External Relations Minister Subrahmanyam Jaishankar in protest of the Irfaan Ali administration’s posting of former APNU+AFC parliamentarian, Charrandass Persaud, as Guyana’s High Commissioner to India. Persaud’s ‘yes’ vote in accordance with the PPP’s No Confidence Motion (NCM) in December of 2018 would have technically seen the fall of the David Granger administration except that a mixture of legal battles and delay tactics would see elections being held not three months after the NCM as is constitutionally required, but in March of 2020. Even then, there would be no change of government until August 2020 due to what has been internationally recognized and condemned as David Granger’s attempt to steal the elections of 2020. In that letter to Jaishankar, Harmon – who was front and centre of the months attempted coup – idiotically referred to Persaud’s NCM vote as “treasonous”, despite that vote being unsuccessfully challenged as even illegal all the way up the Caribbean Court of Justice. That the Indian government did not dignify that letter with a response should have been seen as instructive and an embarrassment to Mr. Harmon.
It was clearly not. In the Opposition Leader’s latest letter, this time to the current Chair of CARICOM, Dr. Keith Rowley his petulance and false opprobrium is even more heightened:
“I have written a number of letters pointing out Guyana’s slide into a state of dictatorship under the PPP. I regret to advise that rather than an abatement, there has been a deliberate intensification of this slide. To date, President Irfaan Ali has adamantly refused to meet with the Parliamentary Opposition on the spurious grounds of ‘recognition by the Leader of the Opposition and the supporters of APNU+AFC’… This Honourable Chairman, is, without question, inflammatory, unacceptable, undemocratic and a cop out. It is also the antithesis of the spirit of inclusive and consultative leadership.”
A year ago, Harmon was second in command of the same APNU+AFC that signed off on an agreement between Guyana’s two main political parties brokered by the then CARICOM Chair, and then went and sought to invalidate that agreement within days. And after failing in that regard, still went ahead to legally challenge the outcome of the process that the agreement governed. Now, Harmon still second in command of APNU+AFC, is not only asking for CARICOM’s intervention in brokering dialogue between Guyana’s two main political parties and in doing so cites his support for a single recommendation coming out of the report on the process that not only did he seek to invalidate but the outcome of which he has currently legally challenged as invalid. Were Rowley inclined to take the charges made in the letter (indeed letters since this seems to be latest of several unacknowledged missives sent to CARCOM), neither Harmon individually nor institutionally has demonstrated the integrity worthy of response.
Even the general tone of the latest letter to CARICOM and the person to whom it is addressed to represent a great deal of cognitive dissonance on the part of Harmon and the opposition leadership in general, and this is not just one but two fronts. Firstly, a year ago, when then President David Granger, Harmon’s boss then and now, ostensibly invited CARICOM to intervene and signed off on a recount, and then indecently sent APNU+AFC candidate Ulita Moore to challenge the legality of the recount, Rowley himself was personally incensed since he had assigned his country’s Chief Elections Officer to participate, only to be accused in essence of engaging in illegality and interference. As Rowley would relate to questions from his own Parliament about him washing his hands clean of dealing with the Granger administration after that indecent subterfuge:
“It was my view and the view of this Government that being the outcome of that altruistic approach, that the Chief Elections Officer of Trinidad and Tobago ought not to be in that situation at any time to be accused in that way, in a CARICOM country. So we did not send back our Election Officer there because we want to preserve our pristine position in these matters of the conduct of free and fair elections.”
Secondly, Harmon in addressing Rowley as CARICOM Chair is addressing an office which former holders of political machinery has not had the best relationship with post-elections, from Mia Mottley excoriating the APNU+AFC attempts at rigging, to Rowley’s predecessor St. Vincent’s Ralph Gonsalves having to put Harmon to his place calling him “a mere utensil” when the now Opposition Leader sought to lash out petulantly at Gonsalves for condemning the rigging and suggesting that Granger should accept the results and take his “licks like a man.”
Harmon has to know at some fundamental level that – notwithstanding the fact that the face of the rigging, Granger himself, remains in hiding – the deficit of credibility that the APNU+AFC awarded itself from the NCM to its attempts at rigging the election is its current brand, and not even better executed sophistry than he is clearly capable of as evidenced by his letters is going to remove that tarnish. Additionally, he should recognize that personally, considering the central role he played in the events of last year, he has zero respect among the regional leadership that labelled his superior a sanctimonious gangster and he “a mere utensil” of said gangster.
As occurred when it governed and was far more substantial than it is now, the APNU+AFC coalition, its primary partner the PNC in particular, clearly has no overarching plan and is far more interested in petulance, the blind projection of its incompetence, and meaningless postures of leadership. With the PNC suffering its greatest crisis in leadership in decades as it faces a disappeared Leader and a Party Chair before the court on election fraud charges, with APNU no longer the even tenuous ‘partnership’ that it once was, with the AFC haemorrhaging its already decimated leadership on a monthly basis, Harmon’s letters to the same international community that the Coalition insulted and alienated itself from for five months last year in defiance of international pressure against its rigging are just nonsense, in that he is simultaneously accusing the international community of having illegally installed the Ali administration and then asking that community to intervene in bringing Ali to the table to discuss an agenda that is a primarily fictional list of grievances as concocted in whatever fugue that has descended upon Congress Place. Harmon’s letters have zero strategic political value and represent not the objective reality of Guyana, not any sense of real politik but of the APNU+AFC’s echo chamber.

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