Walter Rodney has left Guyana a rich treasure, says WPA
Stabroek News
June 15, 2004
The social and political leadership of assassinated Working People's Alliance (WPA) leader, Dr Walter Rodney has left Guyana a rich treasure and the country has been richly blessed by his contributions, the WPA said.
In a statement marking his 24th death anniversary, the WPA said: "When we come to lament the lack of national consensus and the ethnic tensions which stand in the way of safety, bread and justice and people's self-organisation for a start, there can be no denial that Guyana is most richly blessed in the existence and the contributions and social and political leadership of Walter Rodney, who in his lifetime advocated and demonstrated in practice a new form of relations among the ethnic groups of our country and a new respect for trade, craft and vocation with entitlements to self-expression."
The party said further that "perhaps the failure of two regimes to investigate his violent assassination followed the pattern set in the sixties and set an unwelcome tradition of non-enquiry into our most blatant abuses of one another, which must not be tolerated."
The Caribbean region is likely to become the most adversely affected of the world's groupings, the WPA posited, as its "leaders grope in the uncertainty of globalisation without the political and economic creativity to benefit from, or even respond to the market-driven process."
Noting the rapid change in communications and its powerful impact on people in the region, the party lamented that there has been a failure to draw strength from the Caribbean's rich history and diverse cultures. "The communication revolution has worsened the tension, named by CLR James and others, between the actual Caribbean and the aspirations, preferences and expectations of the Caribbean populations and what is actually possible at home," the party contended.
And the WPA said further that in Guyana some of the negative developments are in the area of public health with HIV/AIDS, suicide and malaria, domestic violence and child abuse taking a heavy toll on both coastal and hinterland populations.
According to the party, poverty, rampant corruption, crime, the narco-traffic, widespread economic decline and failure, extra-judicial killings and misguided political violence have all fed into racial tensions which have been of major political and social significance for over half a century.