Dear Editor,
Mr Roger Khan will be home soon. He may wish to confirm claims made by the Hon Attorney General (AG) that Mr Khan publicised a crime-fighting role on behalf of a past PPP regime, as reported on August 7, 2019 online and in the Chronicle.
The AG reportedly said, “Khan himself had confessed in a full page advertisement in the local newspapers about this,” which mirrors a statement in the Chronicle that “…the drug-trafficker had stated publicly in an advertisement in local newspapers that he had been fighting crime on behalf of the Bharrat Jagdeo-led government.”
Having written extensively about crime between the 2001 and 2006 elections, I do not recall any such advertised claim. Indeed, as editor of the Guyana Under Siege website during those years, I posted one of Mr Khan’s advertisements online, which still exists today.
With Mr Khan away, the PNC had over a decade to sell its version of what happened: the PPP killed people but the PNC were angels. This is why the President tries to gloss over or downplay the period by ridiculously calling it the “Troubles.”
But Mr Khan publicly offered to attend any PNC-PPP inquiry to explain his crime-fighting role (see Roger Khan ready to tell any inquiry about anti-crime role, SN: 05/17/2006). The AG needs to explain why the PNC never summoned Mr Khan or why the Granger Administration failed to produce evidence to show unquestionably that Mr Khan was a PPP state actor.
After all, it is public knowledge that former PPP Cabinet Secretary Dr Roger Luncheon (also the Secretary to the Defence Board) publicly denied any PPP link with Mr Khan and crime fighting (see Govt never engaged Roger Khan, KN: 05/19/2006).
If, as the AG seemingly has inferred, state security was delegated to drug lords, including Mr Khan, then perhaps such were the situation, if at all, due to law enforcement itself having become compromised while the PNC Opposition was tinkering with the Constitution. Indeed, on March 31, 2006, in one of his advertisements, Mr Khan said: “Myself and the Commissioner of Police were close personal friends for over four (4) years.” The AG missed this part of the advertisement, because this former lawman is now a government minister.
The AG knows that the PPP excesses he complains about have their genesis in the Forbes Burnham era. Death squad is a product of the Forbes Burnham era, not Bharrat Jagdeo’s. The AG is right to criticise the PPP given that its minister (Sash Sawh) was killed and nothing was done about it. But this kind of disrespect for the State began with Burnham, whose minister (Vincent Teekah) was killed on October 24, 1979, and nothing was done either.
Mr Khan may be accused of aiding the police with critical intelligence to combat crime or even appearing to be sympathetic to the then democratically elected regime, but the AG is wrong to suggest that Mr Khan held himself out to be a PPP crime-fighting state actor.
More importantly, what Mr Khan said in 2006 was that the Opposition PNC, with friends in the GDF and GPF and elsewhere, were destabilising the country to overthrow the Jagdeo regime or force a power-sharing regime on the electorate.
The public needs to understand this reality. The PNC is incapable of winning an election on its own despite over 50 years of electoral contests. Thus, alternative methods to acquire power must be used. This was attempted in 2001. Here is what the former US Ambassador, Mr Ronald Godard, said about the 2001 elections and election observer groups, during a 2004 interview for the Foreign Affairs Oral History Project.
“We would meet on a weekly basis coordinating our activities and we worked with the electoral tribunal very closely. They had a very highly respected civil servant, he had been the commander of their armed forces…
But, inevitably there were issues, and again there was no question about who won the election… It was the Indo Guyanese party. And there was demonstration and rioting, burning of buildings by the Afro Guyanese, and that finally sort of dampened down…
There’s a minority sector in their national assembly from the opposition. They would frequently walk out to try to discredit the legislative power doing stuff they have to do. What they were after I think was shared power, but what they really wanted was power.”
Yours faithfully,
Rakesh Rampertab
