Reason why the Russian stratagem was used

Apr 30, 2020 Features / Columnists, Freddie Kissoon

Did the Guyanese people ever stopped to think why on March 5 the AFC held a press conference and tried clownishly to fool the world about attempted Russian influence in the 2020 Guyana elections? I am referring to the particular date of March 5. Why March 5?
It may be a spent force, long gone from the political horizon, but the AFC moved faster than its partner, the PNC to do damage control after Mingo’s descent into barefacedness. The PNC and AFC lost the battle to invent a plausible defense of the election rigging for one fundamental reason – Mingo’s barefacedness was witnessed by all the international observers and emissaries of the western embassies, and the officials from the Commonwealth, OAS and CARICOM.
At that stage, March 4, the game was over. I believe there are literally hundreds of ways to rig an election and create confusion in the minds of onlookers around the world. Since the Cold War started after 1945, there have been rigged elections in countless countries. I grew up with Eric Williams in Trinidad tampering with national elections.
No other country has endured a series of fraudulent polls as Guyana under presidents Forbes Burnham and Desmond Hoyte. In all cases, the fraud was there but it was not as silly and stupidly done as what Mingo did on March 4. In a previous column, I argued that the commonsensical thing to do when tampering with both the voting and counting processes in a national contest is to create space for doubt and thus you create controversy that lingers. Some people would say it was rigged. Some would say they need proof. Some would say there is too much grey area to arrive at a result.
This did not happen on March 4. The fatal mistake the “coup plotters” made is that they failed to move before March 4. They chose not to create doubt before March 4. They chose not to create controversy before March 4. That was the time the rigging would have generated confusion. What the APNU+AFC conspirators did was to rely on incompetent analysts who told them that Region 4 results catapulted the APNU+AFC to victory. To repeat what appeared in previous columns of mine this was because the APNU+AFC did not have all the statements of poll for Region 4 but was insistent that it won.
It was when the lead for the PPP for the nine regions was made known the APNU+AFC mandarins panicked. The expectations they had for Region 4 were dashed. The APNU+AFC did not get the votes they had hoped for. First example: the turn out in a massive PNC stronghold like Plaisance was only 51 percent. In a previous article captioned, “Contact Ron Cheong for data on how the 2020 election was rigged of Saturday, April 25, 2020, Cheong showed how the expected votes for the APNU+AFC was not to be.
On March 4, when Mingo did his ugly thing, the game was over. The fraud could not be obfuscated. The APNU+AFC had virtually no subtle strategy for secret, continuous tampering. Any act of fraud could only be done by open dishonest actions. From March 4 to the final agreement on the re-count, fraud has to be used and fraud will be used in the re-count. But it is rigging that cannot be hidden.
So finally, I come to the AFC’s invention of a Russian plot. Why did the AFC do it? Because it was the only game left. The intention of the AFC was not to recite victory as a church sermon but to turn the election into a geopolitical incident. If you can get the Americans, and the western countries to see a Russian conspiracy to tilt the result in the PPP’s favour then the 2020 election in Guyana will not be about who win or lose but Russia versus the US.
The intention then was to get the West to change its tune and quietly accept the Mingo insanity because geopolitics was now involved. It did not work for the AFC. Since March 5 when the AFC held it press conference and told the world that the Russians were trying to manipulate the 2020 election in Guyana, the AFC has gone completely silent about its Russian thing. Why?
They did not have proof to show the West. The police and airport officials had no evidence that the western embassies could have gathered. The “coup plotters” came tumbling down ignominiously from their tanks. The Russian story died a natural death. But it was resurrected by Michael Granger. An analysis of that other circus is forthcoming.

(The views expressed in this article are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the opinions of this newspaper.)

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