Submitted by CGID President Rickford Burke
NEW YORK: The Caribbean Guyana Institute for Democracy (CGID) Sunday launched a scathing condemnation of Guyana’s outgoing president, Bharrat Jagdeo. Accusing the Guyanese leader of stoking racial fears to incite violence and civil conflict as a campaign tactic in the run up to the November 28, general elections, the group charged that Jagdeo violated newly enacted “anti-incitement” laws.
Jagdeo triggered a deluge of outrage Saturday night when at a PPP rally at Bartica, a town in Essequibo county, he railed that if elected the opposition APNU coalition would give criminals guns to kill residents. Bartica is the hub of the gold and diamond mining community and gateway to Guyana’s natural resource-rich interior. The town, an APNU monopoly, suffered a robbery/massacre on February 17, 2008, which claimed twelve lives.
Exploiting the security angst of citizens, Jagdeo speculated that if the opposition wins the November 28 general election criminals would be armed with weapons from security forces. “You have had some theft of weapons from the army in the past but if they were to get into power… they will get the weapons to give to the bandits…“They have a track-record of supporting criminal gangs like those that killed 12 persons in Bartica on February 17, 2008.”
Prominent Bartician and President of the New York based Caribbean Guyana Institute for Democracy (CGID), Rickford Burke blasted Jagdeo’s comments as “rancorous and vituperative slime calculated to incite racial violence and terror.” Burke said that as a Bartician he was “shocked and outraged by such reprehensible, false comments which are “unbecoming of the presidency.” How dare this utterly vulgar person attempt to divide Barticians and exploit such a hallowed moment of our history – a circumstance that brought unprecedented unity amount Barticians?”
The CGID head contended that the massacre occurred under Jagdeo’s presidency and said that it was the Jagdeo administration that established ‘phantom’ death squads to engage in murder for hire, drug executions and extrajudicial killings of over 400 individuals, as stated in the United Nations McDougall report.
He said that it was Jagdeo who is complicit with drug barons who, the United States government said supplied
elements in his regime and its cohorts with guns from Columbian drug lords. “The public record suggests that these same weapons were used to kill Minister Sash Shaw, who was in dispute with convicted drug trafficker and accused murderer Roger Khan when he was assassinated, as well as journalist Ronald Waddell, with whose assassination Jagdeo’s Minister of Health Dr. Leslie Ramsammy was an alleged accomplice but was never charged and prosecuted.”
Burke accused Jagdeo of failing to protect the Guyanese people while using the State’s security forces to protect the criminal enterprise, and of turning Guyana into a narco-state that countenanced drug trafficking and murder of citizens in plain public view. He noted that Western governments possess evidence of Jagdeo ostensibly meeting with Khan. He alleged that Khan was tipped off about a US DEA drug interdiction initiative in Guyana and threatened to blow-up the location, forcing the US to abort the mission.
He cited the US State Department’s International Narcotics Control Strategy Report which, he said each year of Jagdeo’s presidency, stated that “The economic, political, and social conditions in Guyana make it a prime target for money laundering and drug trafficking given…corrupt law enforcement” and that “Allegations of corruption are widespread, and reach to high levels of government, but continue to go un-investigated.”
“The reason that US government arrived at this very conclusion for every year of Jagdeo’s tenure is because, as every Guyanese believes and court testimony establishes, he and members of his administration have been complicit with criminals who operate with impunity and a wink from the government. “These said criminals are the alleged benefactors of their political campaign and personal largesse, which they dole out from drug proceeds and blood money.” It is no wonder that President Jagdeo and his ministers have all constructed hundred-million dollar homes, which they cannot afford from their ministerial salaries,” Burke asserted.
Like Jagdeo, the CGID President also invoked Wikileaks, quoting then US Ambassador to Guyana, Roland Bullen who, in a correspondence to the US State Department commented that Jagdeo’s administration is compromised to such an extent that it would not pursue drug lord and accused murderer Roger Khan, and that if Guyana was a narco-State, then Jagdeo had surrendered the country’s leadership to Khan. Burke concluded that the Ambassador’s judgment reveals that the US government has been watching Jagdeo from a criminal perspective.
He further posited that on November 28, 2011, when Jagdeo’s presidency will practically end, the nation will rejoice and exile him to the dustbin of history, until such time that he will be called to account for unchecked corruption, rampant criminality, incitement of violence and crimes against humanity, which have been the hallmark of his presidency.
“I predict that his fate will then be recorded in the same annals as recent Arab leaders whom the “people” have brought to justice,” he contended.
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