ON this day in 1980, a bomb secretly concealed in a transmitting set exploded on the lap of Walter Rodney, instantly killing him and seriously injuring his brother, Donald. There was a Commission of Inquiry started under President Ramotar; when Granger became president in 2015, he ended the commission’s work.
Since Rodney was assassinated, there have been strange things that have happened in relation to the revolutionary comrades of Rodney in the Working Peoples’ Alliance (WPA) and a frenetic silence of the Rodney family in relation to these comrades.
The more the years go by, the more mysterious June 13 as part of Guyana’s calendar gets. Here are some areas of what I refer to as the inscrutable journey of June 13.
ONE -The closest comrades of Rodney joined the PNC to form APNU and became part of the government in 2015. During the reign of the WPA, all of Rodney’s trusted friends, who included Clive Thomas and Rupert Roopnaraine, agreed to end the commission’s work.
This comes close to betrayal because you have agreed that you do not want the world to know the facts of the assassination. The WPA tried to overthrow Burnham, then Burnham had Rodney killed, Burnham and his people denied involvement and actually claimed that the assassin, Gregory Smith, was a WPA terrorist, yet you chose to end the enquiry.
From 2015 to 2020, the WPA, now in government only observed one anniversary of Rodney’s death and that was in 2016, which Roopnaraine did not attend. During that period, the PNC observed the death anniversary of both leaders, Burnham and Hoyte.
Secondly, the role of Roopnaraine cries out for iconoclastic analysis. Roopnaraine died in February this year and all of his sordid secrets he took to his grave. Given his deportment from the time the PPP won power in 1992, there is a need to carefully examine his role in politics since he came on the scene in 1976.
Here are some facts on Roopnaraine that, strangely, the Rodney family is happy to be silent about. 1- Roopnaraine had a genuinely sound friendship with David Granger from the 1960s. Godwin McPherson told a prominent trade unionist that the army was involved in the murder of Rodney.
Did Roopnaraine ever approach Granger about what the army knew of Rodney’s death? 2- Roopnaraine had a long, secret relationship with the PNC during the time when the WPA was in confrontation with the Burnham government. 3- Roopnaraine refused to testify at the commission, using the asinine excuse that his closeness to Rodney would have made him too emotional to testify. 4- Ravi Dev has supplied evidence to prove that Roopnaraine tried to sabotage the efforts to have the commission during the Ramotar presidency.
5- One of two very high-level state security officers under Burnham who were named in the commission’s report as being involved in Rodney’s death turned up at Roopnaraine’s funeral. What relationship or friendship did Roopnaraine had with him for him to be there? I interpret his presence to mean that during the plan to kill Rodney, Roopnaraine knew this man. 6- Circumstantial evidence points to Roopnaraine’s involvement with foreign state security when he was a top leader in the WPA.
Space would not allow for me to elaborate, but I have offered such circumstantial evidence in other columns. I do believe that Roopnaraine was not a politically healthy activist. Bob Marley’s son said he believed that the CIA was involved in the attempt on his father’s life because of Marley’s revolutionary influence in the Caribbean.
By the same token, we should consider if the CIA was one of the planners in Rodney’s assassination and if Roopnaraine was involved. I share Ravi Dev’s public sentiment that when Roopnaraine was an Indo-Saxon elite student at Cornell University, he was probably recruited by the CIA. 7- The consensus in Guyana is that there were deeply placed moles in the WPA that led to WPA cadres being killed and some jailed. Elvin McDavid took a liking to me and subtly hinted that the Burnham government had highly prized moles in the WPA.
On this day, when the Rodney family holds a candlelight moment of silence for him under the rubric of the Walter Rodney Foundation, it is time the Rodney family and the foundation take the shame from their eyes and begin doing the politically decent thing and level with the Guyanese people as to what the family thinks about betrayal activities in the WPA that led to Rodney’s death. If they continue their sordid silence, then one could say that poor Walter was betrayed by everyone around him.
DISCLAIMER: The views and opinions expressed in this column are solely those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the official policy or position of the Guyana National Newspapers Limited.
