I GOT an email from a very well-liked, non-partisan Guyanese from the 1970s, whom I met many moons ago when I was the weekly columnist with the Catholic Standard. I met him through Father Andrew Morrison and he was on the periphery of the organisation named GUARD that agitated for free and fair elections.
Until I got the email last week, he was never in my thoughts because he left Guyana a long time ago. He indicated that he has always read me since the Kaieteur News became available online. He noted that he never thought of contacting me until he read something I wrote recently about Rupert Roopnaraine.
He indicated that he was a personal friend of Roopnaraine, whom he socialised with whenever Rupert visited London. He thinks I went too far in suggesting that Rupert may have been involved in Rodney’s murder. Obviously, he cannot be named here because I know he would have refused if asked.
I made queries to him about Roopnaraine’s behaviour from 1992 to 2020. I got the identical reply that I received from former president, Donald Ramotar, when he, Ramotar, called me about what I wrote about Martin Carter. I have written about Carter several times, but my Roopnaraine theory becomes clearer for readers if I did a brief mention here on Carter again.
I have argued that strong, pyrotechnical evidence exists that points to Carter being a Guyana-based informant for British intelligence, MI6, when he was in the PPP leadership in the 1950s. Ramotar called to say that he thinks the MI6 spy was not Carter but Forbes Burnham.
I then traced the pro-imperialist working career, openly pro-British behaviour of Carter, who was Guyana’s leading Stalinist and ultra communist, yet supported imperialist-generated violence against the PPP government in the 1960s and wrote a poem supporting such violence. I asked Ramotar for his explanation of these actions by Carter. Ramotar simply said, “I take your point.
Ramotar didn’t explain and I don’t think he can explain Carter’s subterfuge. I am extremely inflexible about my iconoclastic rethink of Carter, who I believe played a nasty, ugly, vicious and degenerate role in Guyanese politics. So I put a simple question to my acquaintance who emailed me on Roopnaraine. Before the question, I followed the format I did with Ramotar.
I described very conspiratorial and secretive associations of Roopnaraine, his relationship with state security chiefs at the time when Rodney was assassinated, his mysterious relationship with the PNC from the 1960s, his refusal to testify at the Rodney inquiry, his reactionary role in the PNC government in 2015 and his insane historical antipathy towards the PPP. Then I asked: “How do you explain these things?” Readers would not believe it when I write that his answer was identical to Ramotar’s. It was déjà vu for me. He said, “I take your point.”
No one on Planet Earth could logically explain the behaviour of Carter and Roopnaraine. To explain why the two men did what they did and see no meaning and importance in what they did is simply to display sheer dishonesty or unlimited ignorance. I will not drop my iconoclastic assessment of Carter and Roopnaraine because I firmly believe that the evidence glaringly points to their contacts with Western intelligence agencies.
I conclude with what Ravi Dev spoke publicly about on the Freddie Kissoon Show about Roopnaraine. I remind readers that Dev is one of Guyana’s most formidable intellectuals. I accept what he said. Dev’s position is that when Roopnaraine was a lecturer at Cornell University, he was recruited by the CIA to inform the CIA where Burnham was going with his anti-Western, pro-Marxist orientation and if Burnham’s politics could make the Marxist PPP a stronger force in Guyanese politics.
Roopnaraine was an instant spot for the CIA. He was definitely brilliant and had access to the English language that all, not most, but all CIA analysts didn’t have. Roopnaraine was one of the most learned and analytical social sciences minds the CARICOM region has ever seen.
Roopnaraine was the perfect fit for the CIA. And he did what the CIA asked him to do, one of which was to stop the spreading influence of the PPP as Burnham became more and more unpopular. Roopnaraine undermined Walter Rodney’s call for an uprising in 1979 by shutting out the PPP. Were the PPP involved, Burnham would have been toppled.
Roopnaraine obfuscated his role in the planning of Rodney’s assassination by insinuating that Rodney’s brother, Donald, who was with him in the car when the bomb went off, might have been planted because, after all, he was not killed in the explosion. Donald knows about the Roopnaraine accusation, so he could be asked about it.
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.