“The truth hurts” – PM Mottley on attacks from APNU/AFC

Chair of the Caribbean Community (Caricom), Barbados Prime Minister Mia Mottley, has retaliated that the “truth hurts” in response to criticisms against her coming out of the APNU/AFC camp.

PM Mottley had earlier this week joined calls for the results from the National Recount, which were certified by a special Caricom team, to form the basis for the declaration of the election results — a statement for which she has come under a barrage of attacks by the caretaker APNU/AFC, which had previously deemed Caricom as the most “legitimate interlocutor” in Guyana’s electoral process.
In response, however, the outgoing Caricom Chair posited that the Community should never avoid upholding its shared principles.
“The truth hurts, but what we must never do in Caricom is avoid the truth and avoid our principles,” she said briefly at a press conference on Friday in Bridgetown.
After Chief Elections Officer Keith Lowenfield had submitted his final elections report to the Guyana Elections Commission (GECOM), in which he invalidated over 115,000 votes, PM Mottley on Wednesday had questioned his action.
“On what grounds and by what form of executive fiat does the Chief Election Officer determine that he should invalidate one vote, far less 115,000 votes?” she asked.
The Caricom Chair said it is regrettable that the Community is now witnessing an unprecedented level of “gamesmanship”, that has left much to be desired.
Later on Wednesday night, while speaking on a Trinidad and Tobago programme hosted by Hema Ramkissoon on CNC3, Mottley said that while the elections situation in Guyana is “a little bizarre”, Caricom must stand for something.
“The Caribbean Community must stand for something with respect to the pursuit of these goals and with respect to the values that have made us stand up as a beacon in the global community…There is a Charter of Civil Society within the Caribbean Community that causes us to have to aspire to a very high level of behaviour with respect to free and fair elections and with respect to giving full effect to the will of the people,” the Barbadian leader contended.
However, in a statement that night, which was subsequently withdrawn, the APNU/AFC said “We call on Prime Minister Mottley…to refrain from enabling those who are seeking to impose fraudulent elections results on the people of Guyana and subvert the true will of the electorate.”
The Coalition went on to say, “We believe that Prime Minister Mottley’s statement is both ill-informed and ill-advised… We view the Hon. Prime Minister’s statement as not only untimely, but in fact as interference in a matter on which the Constitution of Guyana is clear.”
PM Mottley had played an integral role in Guyana’s prolonged electoral process, leading a high-level delegation of CARICOM Heads of State back in March to discuss the impasse.
At the time, President Granger and Opposition Leader Bharrat Jagdeo had agreed to a National Recount under the auspices of the CARICOM Chair, who then facilitated a special team of observers to monitor the exercise. But this activity never got underway after APNU/AFC support Ulita Moore challenged the recount in the court, forcing the team to depart.
PM Mottley had said at the time, “It is clear that there are forces that do not want to see the votes recounted for whatever reason.”
Subsequently, Caricom agreed to field another team upon the invitation of GECOM to scrutinise the National Recount, which ran from May 6 to June 8, 2020.
In its report to GECOM last week, the Caricom team said “Nothing we witnessed warrants a challenge to the inescapable conclusion that the recount results are acceptable and should constitute the basis of the declaration of results of the March 2, 2020 elections.”
Despite this, however, and the fact that President Granger as well as several senior officials of his party had deemed the regional team as the most “legitimate interlocutor” in the recount process, the APNU/AFC officials as well as their supporters have also attacked the special team, which comprised Deputy Supervisor of Elections of St. Vincent and the Grenadines, Sylvester King; Commissioner of the Antigua and Barbuda Electoral Commission, John Jarvis; and Senior Lecturer in the Department of Government at the University of the West Indies (UWI), Cynthia Barrow-Giles.