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Mar 17, 2015 Features / Columnists, Freddie Kissoon
I would suggest you see one of the great movies ever made with one of the greatest actors of all time. In “Night of the Generals” Peter O’Toole acted as a sadistic Nazi killer of prostitutes. When the police commissioner of the city was on to him, he killed him.
Of course the Nazi party and its leaders, including Hitler, never knew of many political deaths committed by their underlings.
This is the pattern of, not most, but all dictatorships. To understand how political murder occurs in tyrannical systems, one has to study the nature of power in such oligarchies.
Dictatorship brings into being a very complex society in which there are layers and layers of power. In many instances some of these layers act independent of each other because they have different interests to protect. At the apex, there is the ruling party that will not hesitate to order assassinations to prevent their overthrow.
There is the second tier of the ruling party that is made up of people who are intensely loyal, possess authority that they fling in the face of society and will kill critics who they feel want to remove their bosses. Their bosses may not know what they are doing and probably don’t care to know.
Then you have state intelligence which in every dictatorship becomes a power unto itself. State intelligence in oligarchies is always filled with people appointed by the tyrants to watch their backs. Murders have been committed by state intelligence even in democratic societies as so many books on the CIA have shown much less in tyrannical systems.
Then there is the patronage system. Dictatorship patronizes a wide cross section of society’s strata. There is the underworld that does favours for the political elites. The underworld people benefit financially from these connections and will not hesitate to harm journalists, human rights activists and opposition politicians who they feel will put them out of business by weakening the government.
Apart from the underworld actors, there is the drug world. If political elites develop a relation with drug traffickers and money launderers, the immunity these people receive from police investigations gives them enormous scope to get rich. These people become very wealthy and their penchant for violence leads them to murder people they feel will remove their protectors in government.
Then there is the nouveau riche class. Through a complex system of favours and state contracts, this stratum also becomes very wealthy. So rich are these people that they know their empire will collapse should their backers in government fall. They will not hesitate to get rid of opposition activists who look set to topple the dictatorship.
The assassination of journalists, human rights heroes and crusading politicians does not necessarily have to come from the top of the political pyramid. Critics and activists can lose their lives because of the insecurity of people who belong to the layers described above.
In all dictatorships, without exception, assassinations have been perpetuated without direct orders from the top of the political hierarchy.
If you read the history of the Nazi Party in Government, the dictatorship under Saddam Hussein, Russia under Stalin, Libya under Gaddafi, the military dictatorship in Chile, Uruguay, Argentina and Brazil and so many other totalitarian systems, opposition activists were brutally killed by some of these other sections possessed of uncontrollable power.
Tyrone Ferguson in his book on Forbes Burnham’s rule (“To Survive Sensibly or Court Heroic Death,” page 297) argued that those close to Burnham felt that Walter Rodney was closing in on Burnham, that it was just a matter of time, and therefore to save their patron, they killed Rodney without the knowledge of Burnham.
For this columnist, it is clear that the murder of Father Darke was not state sanctioned. A goon squad attacked an opposition rally and the white priest, Father Darke, was mistaken for the most feared anti-government journalist of the day, Father Andrew Morrison of the Catholic Standard and was stabbed to death.
Ferguson’s interpretation of Rodney’s death is open for debate but not so with Ronald Waddell. Waddell was viewed with immense insecurity by the top of the pyramid that feared his activism. His death was thus ordered.
This brings us to Courtney Crum-Ewing. I will repeat my take which was carried in my three columns last week on the murder. On seeing what Crum-Ewing was doing in Diamond, I believe a call was made to one of those layers described above. Crum-Ewing had engendered the same insecurity that Waddell brought. When the caller described what Crum-Ewing was doing with his bullhorn, the instruction was then given to kill him.
Where is the BETTER MANAGEMENT/RENEGOTIATION OF THE OIL CONTRACTS you promised Jagdeo?
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