Turning tragedy into farce: the Rodney enquiry, 20 years on
by Rupert Roopnaraine
"Since succeeding Mr. Burnham as the Executive President of Guyana, press statements attributed to you have conveyed the impression that you and your government are interested in promoting a climate of change from the state of repression that existed at the time of my husband's murder. Assuming the accuracy of these reports and impressions, I am now hoping that you will appreciate that justice demands that the Police be authorised to investigate the whereabouts of Sergeant Gregory Smith and that an independent enquiry be instituted to probe the circumstances of the death of Dr. Rodney..." Thus, Mrs Patricia Rodney, writing from Barbados to then President Hoyte in 1986. She wrote again on January 15, 1987, this time doing the work of the police and sending information on Smith's hideaway in Cayenne, his borrowed name and even his place of work and telephone number. On February 18, 1987, Eusi Kwayana, then WPA's Member of Parliament, appeared in court on the instructions of Acting Chief Magistrate Desmond Burchsmith to provide evidence in support of his application for the issue of summons for the attendance of Gregory Smith to answer to the charge of murder of Walter Rodney. The Magistrate rejected the application. Kwayana's application was the first attempt to institute a charge of murder against Smith. A year later and two years after Mrs Rodney's letter to Mr Hoyte, what the WPA was to characterise as a "demonstration inquest" was held. The Coroner, Mr Edwin Pratt, made the unsurprising finding that Walter had died by accident or misadventure. Unsurprising because Mr Pratt, who had taken the weekend to ponder the matter, chose to decline the advice of the GDF counsel tending to an open verdict, refused to give time for arrangements to be made for Donald Rodney (then a prisoner of conscience overseas) to attend court, refused to even enquire into the whereabouts of Gregory Smith or to establish by means of GDF records whether Smith was in fact a member of the GDF on June 13, 1980 when the crime was committed. It was little wonder that the WPA concluded that "Walter Rodney has been assassinated a second time by means of the coroner's direction and the consequent verdict of death by accident." Seven years were to pass before the authorities were next stirred into action. By this time, the elections of 1992 had come and gone. With President Cheddi Jagan and his PPP/Civic in office, expectation was high that finally the long called for Commission of Enquiry would be appointed to investigate the murder. One year later, nothing had been done. On December 23, 1993, Shaka Rodney mounted his silent fast and vigil outside the gates of the Office of the Attorney General, vowing to continue "indefinitely" until he received a response to the demand for the immediate arrest of Gregory Smith and the opening of an independent investigation into the assassination of his father. "We have a new Government and a return to democracy... we need to clean up our past." (Stabroek News, December 27, 1993). Finally, on January 4, 1994, at its first Cabinet meeting of the year, the government decided and announced that a "Special Committee" would be established to review the files with a view to making recommendations for further action. In the days that followed there was talk of a one-man Commission being appointed. From reports in the press, the names of Henry Forde, Karl Hudson-Phillips and Rex McKay were among those being floated for the job. In the end, nothing. No Commission, no investigation, no charge. A year later, - developments tend to be annual - in March of 1995, the International Commission of Jurists (ICJ), at the request of Caribbean Rights, despatched a Special Investigative Mission to Guyana to examine the Rodney files and make recommendations. Working from the Court of Appeal building, the ICJ team took statements from various persons and organisations, including the WPA, examined the documents made available to them and made a preliminary statement on the eve of their departure from Guyana. According to a front-page report in the Stabroek News of March 29, 1995, Dr Roger Luncheon wrote to Police Commissioner Lewis "expressing Cabinet's concerns over the police force's response to the International Commission of Jurists (ICJ) team." This was in response to the ICJ's displeasure at the failure of the police to produce the files in their possession until after the team had left. Notwithstanding the missing files, the ICJ made a number of recommendations among which were (i) that the 1980 appeal of Donald Rodney against his conviction for possession of explosives should be expedited since "justice delayed was justice denied"; (ii) that a fully empowered Commission of Enquiry should be mounted into the circumstances surrounding the death of Walter Rodney; (iii) that the 1988 inquest was marred by grave defects; (iv) that Gregory Smith be brought before the Commission. To date, there has been no action on the ICJ's 1995 recommendations. The most recent and perhaps most tortuous chapter in this most unsolved of unsolved mysteries opened in June 1996 when, after 16 years of agitation and countless twists and turns, the charge of murder was brought against Gregory Smith by Senior Counsel Doodnauth Singh, appointed as Special Prosecutor, before Chief Magistrate Juman-Yassin. An arrest warrant was issued and the pursuit of Smith began. Smith had broken cover in 1987 and given lengthy interviews to CANA from his safe-house in Cayenne. Since Guyana has no extradition treaty with France, the issue required a diplomatic engagement. In the exchanges, the French requested the court documents (details of the charge), transcripts of the statements from witnesses and all other supporting documents. In French, of course. A new problem surfaced: the laws of France do not permit the French authorities to extradite persons to a country where the death penalty operates. It is expected, if precedents are to be followed, that the French would require a statement from the highest authority in Guyana to the effect that in the event that Smith were found guilty of the crime of murder, the death penalty would not be enforced. The Guyanese authorities can be expected to balk at giving such an assurance, especially in writing. More recently, it has been communicated by the French that, according to their laws, if ten years had elapsed from the date of the crime without any proceedings having been taken in the local jurisdiction, then there would be no basis for extradition proceedings. Unlikely as it seems, the situation was saved by the private action taken by Eusi Kwayana in 1987. His application to the court for a summons to Smith to answer the charge of murder fulfilled the requirement. The French now require the court record of Kwayana's application. And here, the tale takes on a peculiarly Guyanese twist. While a record of the Kwayana action exists in the register of actions kept in the office of the clerk of the Georgetown Magistrates' Court and can be made available, the magistrate's case-jacket, that most mysterious and elusive of Guyanese documents, has gone missing. Attempts to unearth the case-jacket have so far failed.
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