Selective Participation
PEEPING TOM
Kaieteur News
July 9, 2004
Former President of the United States of America, Jimmy Carter, has not yet arrived in the country and already the opposition has rushed back into parliament under the titillating pretext of debating the report of the Disciplined Services Commission Report. Like typical politicians, the opposition has said that they are following the principle of selective participation in the parliament until the death squad issue is settled.
Just exactly how the death squad issue is going to be settled is not clear. After all, the PNCR on last Sunday’s Nation Watch Show called for support for the Commission. Then a few days later, the same opposition said that its initial position had not changed but that it would not disrupt the Commission. That initial position was a rejection of the Commission.
What exactly the party means when it says that it would not disrupt the work of the Commission is not clear. But the PNCR is not capable of stymieing the work of the Commission or hindering its hearings. The PNCR had better dare not try to disrupt the work of that body because if it does it can find itself in serious legal problems as Presidential Commissions have punitive powers.
In any event, the PNCR lacks the capacity to impede the work of the commission; and if it is seriously interested in becoming a credible force in this country it had better behave itself.
The PNCR could not have avoided going back into parliament in order to debate the Disciplined Services Commission Report because, not to have done so, would have been to boycott a process that it had helped to initiate. It was the PNCR that pressed and pressed for an inquiry into the Police Force.
Eventually, it settled for a commission to enquire into the disciplined services. It was the same PNCR that had supported amendments to the Constitution to facilitate the work of the Commission. The PNCR had an input into the terms of reference and composition of that Commission, and therefore, it is difficult to see how it can refuse to debate the report.
The question that, however, must be asked is whether the same selective participation in Parliament could not have been applied for a matter, which is of far greater significance than the Disciplined Services Commission.
The National Budget is the instrument, which the government uses to seek approval from Parliament for the allocation of resources throughout the country. With all the PNCR talk about marginalisation, and discrimination in the allocation of resources, the PNCR chose not to apply the principle of ‘selective participation’ with regards to the national budget when its voice in defence of its constituencies were more than ever needed.
The PNCR went on television and criticised the government over the neglect of certain villages on the Corentyne, but it was the very PNCR, who failed to go into Parliament and argue against a government budget, that will determine which area gets what. This new principle of selective participation is as risible as it is novel. The PNCR’s position on its participation in Parliament was always based on its call for the Home Affairs Minister to step aside. Well, the Home Affairs Minister has stepped aside but because the PNCR is in such disarray over the acceptance of the Presidential Commission of Inquiry, it has to create a new principle to justify going to Parliament.
It has now moved beyond Gajraj to death squads as the basis for its non-participation in the highest assembly in the nation. One wonders if Gajraj is present during one of the PNCR’s selective participation in Parliament, which principle will take precedence: the one that states that they would not participate in any official activity involving Gajraj or the selective participation on “ fitting” occasions.
The PNCR’s arguments about selective participation lack credibility because its constituents elected it to that body. Parliament is not an arm of the government and therefore, to have a policy of selective participation in parliament until the death squad issue is resolved is akin to punishing the wrong entity. The PNCR’s problem has to be with the government and not with parliament.
But that party, which for so long practised the principle of paramountcy of the party over institutions of the State, does not recognise the absurdity of it boycotting a representative body over problems it has with the government.
If the PNCR was boycotting parliament over some grouse with the way that body is managed, one could appreciate the principle of selective participation. But to recuse oneself selectively from one’s constitutional and political responsibility to one’s constituents only compounds the confusion within the leading opposition party. A few years ago, the PNCR was very vocal about extra judicial killings and came out very strongly when a man died in the Brickdam lockups. At the time, we heard from certain quarters the same excuses that we are hearing now over the death in police custody of Kellowan Etwaroo.
Is the PNCR going to make the same noise over Etwaroo’s death as it did over the extra judicial killings by the alleged death squad? Is it going to raise the same storm as it did a few years ago over police brutality and extra judicial killings allegedly by the Guyana Police Force? Where does the PNCR stand on the issue of the death of this weeder?
The Guyanese people are looking. They are observing the new ideology of “selective participation” and are keen to determine whether this will be followed by a policy of “selective protests” by the main opposition.