According to Tacuma Ogunseye in his letter in the Stabroek News of 33/01/04 "Dialogue is not feasible with this Phantom issue pending," as the letter is captioned.
It is interesting to note and cannot escape attention that Ogunseye chose to use the word 'revelations' in place of the word 'allegations' with reference to the unsubstantiated allegations by Bacchus against the Minister of Home Affairs.
Ogunseye seems to have come to the unjustifiable conclusion that, one, we are in a "national crisis" and, two, we have "a government in a situation where it demonstrates the absence of good faith".
Ogunseye also seems to think that we are blind and deaf when he tells us that this group of killers committed numerous murders, kidnapped and tortured scores of Guyanese, "particularly African Guyanese but also including Indo Guyanese."
Since the 1997 elections, scores of Indo Guyanese were among those robbed, beaten, terrorized, molested, raped, kidnapped and murdered. Afro Guyanese suffered the same fate, though to a far lesser extent. Thanks to its extra-parliamentary actions, the PNC/R to a very significant degree has encouraged a lot of the crimes committed on innocent Guyanese. That has been so even though the main opposition party claimed that the people who perpetrated the violence were "criminal elements" who infiltrated its otherwise disciplined crowd of "peaceful" street protesters.
I am not aware, though, that the PNC/R picketed the Ministry of Home Affairs to complain that the Police were not doing a good enough job of preventing those "criminal elements" from infiltrating its street protesters, so that its name would not be unreasonably tarnished!
What I am aware of is that those persons who turned out to be "criminal elements" were accommodated by the PNC/R, or by individuals or organizations sympathetic to the PNC/R, AFTER their involvement in criminal-element activities.
But I guess that the politics of the opposition is not to admit any wrongdoing, but only to criticize and try to get political mileage from pointing to what it perceives is another's wrongdoing. I think they call it, the politics of hypocrisy.
JOHN DA SILVA