Rodney a fighter for unity, justice and dignity (Pt 2)

Dear Editor,
Once more we are seeing racism being used as a policy of the State under this A Partnership for National Unity/Alliance For Change (APNU/AFC) regime. Discrimination is a tool of promoting and keeping people divided. Immediately on taking power hundreds of Indian Guyanese in the public service have been fired. The public service has been practically cleansed of Guyanese Indian origins.
The same has happened in all the public corporations and other constitutional offices. Even the Judiciary seems to bending in the direction of the dictatorship.
The People’s National Congress (PNC), now APNU, has not lost its hate of Walter Rodney.
One of the first things it did in 2015 was to halt the International Commission of Inquiry into the assassination of Rodney. Not much more was left to be done, but they stopped it.
Many of Rodney’s ex-comrades, who still pay lip service to his work, have become the new oppressors; they have joined forces and are part of parcel of the corruption and discrimination taking place. Unlike Rodney, for them and the PNC, a black dictatorship is better than a democratically elected Government and this was passed down to high-ranking Army and Police Officers.
Some of them even, very skillfully, try to show him as a violent person. Now we are being told he was amassing arms. The message here is that Burnham had a right to kill him.
In March of 1980, Walter Rodney, Eusi Kwayana and Rupert Roopnaraine held a press conference in which they handed out two documents. One claimed that the PNC took delivery of weapons from the Guyana Defence Force on behalf of the House of Israel and the other claimed that orders for the assassination of the Working People’s Alliance (WPA) members.
In that same press conference, they all denied the allegations that the WPA was engaged in a conspiracy of violence.
What was really happening was the PNC was preparing a case to murder Rodney. The propaganda was being used to poison Guyanese people’s minds to prepare them for June 13, 1980. Unfortunately, the comments of Rupert Roopnaraine recently has given some credibility to the nasty propaganda that the PNC used against his party at that time.
The PNC racist element will never forgive Rodney. They are victims of their own propaganda. His unmasking of the PNC racism was done clinically and the racial card they used against the People’s Progressive Party was ineffective against him.
That hatred persists to this day. This regime not only prevented the Rodney Commission from completing its work, but they have not made public the report of the work that was completed. They have locked it away, continuing to try to hide their bloody hands.
Those ex-comrades of Rodney who are now prominent in the new racist and oppressive offensive should really take time to evaluate their own positions. Many are as bad as, or even worse than, the PNCites. They have become beneficiaries of a corrupt and racist state.
Rodney’s life was short but meaningful and productive. He will always be remembered as a champion of the poor and powerless. His all-round intellectual work sought to liberate the minds of colonial peoples generally and black peoples in particular.
His message to the African Guyanese masses today would most likely have been to urge them not to be used by the PNC again to go against their own interests for racial satisfaction. Instead, to unite with all progressive and democratically-minded Guyanese to halt the drift to dictatorship and give dignity to all our people.

Yours truly,
Donald Ramotar
Former President