WHILE refraining from commenting on the findings of the Walter Rodney Commission of Inquiry (CoI) report, the Working People’s Alliance (WPA) says the public should be wary of political opportunism that will flow unrestricted in the reaction to the report and the agenda of spin doctors.According to a press statement from the WPA, the inquiry could not gather all the facts, and could not include all the first-hand experiences of those persons who had lived through the period under review. It said the inquiry was also impaired by the long delay between the period of events under review and the first day of hearing, thereby making recollection of important events dim. Moreover, for any number of reasons, many witnesses could not have been available for the hearings.

“We will have to consider, too, that the Commission barely survived a persistent effort to abort the hearings, and in the end, important witnesses were not heard or did not complete their evidence”, the party noted.

The party said the CoI Commissioners bear no responsibility for the latter.
According to the party, the only victory it believes the country may have gained at the moment is that the determined struggle yielded the setting up of an inquiry into the circumstances of the death of Walter Rodney, the completion and tendering of the report to President David Granger, and the report’s imminent official release to the public.

The WPA stated that President Granger, who had the benefit of possession of the report, has registered the presidential disaffirmation of the report apparently without prior consultation with his coalition partners. “It remains to be seen whether, on further consideration, he will modify his severely critical position; or even if it remains immutable, he may help to create an environment accommodating differences so that we can rescue something positive out of it”, the party said.

The party said the citizens will understand several issues which were raised during the inquiry, including fairness, bias, the ill-disguised intent to make the Commission an instrument of political manipulation and deterrent to incipient efforts to forge an opposition alliance for national unity, and the criteria applied by the Commissioners in admitting evidence.

It said that during the inquiry the Commissioners made clear that hearsay evidence is admissible, circumstantial evidence can be relied on, and the standard of proof is on the basis of “balance of probabilities.”

Since it was an inquiry, the WPA said, the commissioners were justifiably tolerant and flexible. The party noted that the commissioners were “dealing with momentous social and political events spanning a period of great upheaval, instability, conflict and tension, and the role of citizens, civil organisations, the media, political parties, the government, security forces and the judiciary.”

“When we read the report and see the evidence, we, too, can try to arrive at our own commonsense conclusion,” the party noted.

It stated that since the government is new and has no responsibility for the period which was the subject of the inquiry, it fortifies the moral base for intensified investigations and/or another inquiry.

“Apart from the intrinsic merit of the process, the Commission would have accomplished something valuable for us as a nation if that is where the report leads us,” the party said.