Dear Editor,
I spent the weekend speaking with citizens of every age, class, political and religious persuasion on the lower East Coast and in Cummings Lodge and Charlestown. They are generally concerned about the direction of Guyana and in some cases are anxious to see change, while others remain ambivalent since they are getting different stories from a media that is heavily biased towards the PPP administration, and where the government in violation of international practice has refused to make radio and the majority of television stations available to the opposition, and therefore professional and credible.
There are in addition two matters I wish to mention.
First the PPP must know that the young voters in particular are not concerned about the Burnham and Jagan eras; the young people were not born then and this proclivity by the PPP leaders to engage the names of Burnham and Jagan in the election debate is a deliberate attempt to avoid what needs to be the real issue and the concern of the new voters, which is the PPP performance over the past twenty-three years.
The fact that the government has earned Guyana a bad name by being listed as the most corrupt country in the region. This is a concern to young people who when they travel carry the burden of coming from a corrupt country, and where greed seems to characterize the PPP administration. The other issue is the assassination of Courtney Crum-Ewing, on which both President Ramotar and former President Bharrat Jagdeo have made some weird but serious statements, which both impugn the character of Crum-Ewing and contain allegations about the role the opposition played in this cruel act. It is becoming apparent that for reasons which may not be obscure, the police top brass may soon put down the Crum-Ewing case as unsolved. We listened to Crum-Ewing while he was alive on Channel 6 naming a government official as threatening him; if the PPP’s new take on this assassination is remotely plausible, then let us have an international group perform polygraph tests on certain persons aligned to the government.
It should be standard practice that with the ballistic information available the police should have attempted to match the licensed weapons of those persons Crum-Ewing named, since it appears that more than one weapon may have been used, and if the police lack the competence to do this, they should by now have sought assistance from elsewhere, for we must assume that the Commissioner of Police must take seriously the statement made by the Head of State that no stone must be left unturned to solve this crime. Messrs Ramotar and Jagdeo should also name persons in the opposition to be subjected to this polygraph test, so that this nation can bring an end to this wild speculation and nonsense, and hopefully identify the assassins of Courtney Crum-Ewing.
I will copy this letter to both the leaders of the opposition and the government, and if the PPP government fails to accept this challenge immediately, they must be quiet and discontinue the distortion of our history.
All Guyana must support the cost of this exercise which should be done immediately. If the Ramotar administration has clean hands they should embrace this proposal.
Yours faithfully,
Hamilton Green, JP
