Commemorating Walter Rodne's 25 Anniversary.

In February 2005, at the time of the 40th anniversary of the assassination of Malcolm X, Professor Manning Marable brought to the fore a number of unanswered questions with respect to this assassination. Marable has been investigating this assassination for ten years and in February gave an interview to Amy Goodman of Democracy Now on the unsolved questions relating to this political assassination. See the transcript of the interview at http://www.democracynow.org/article.pl?sid=05/02/21/1458213 .
The interview is entitled "The Undiscovered Malcolm X: Stunning New Info on the Assassination, His Plans to Unite the Civil Rights and Black Nationalist Movements & the 3 'Missing' Chapters from His Autobiography."

Marable has been delving into classified documents and tracing the personal papers of both Alex Haley and members of the New York Mosque of the Nation of Islam. Marable seeks to highlight the fact that there was a convergence of interests in the assassination. His interview pointed to the role of the New York Police Department, The Cointelpro program of the FBI, elements of the intelligence services, elements from the Nation of Islam (NOI) and those from the inner entourage of Malcolm X.

He posed the question whether this assassination was a conspiracy or a convergence of interests between the governments and elements around Malcolm.

One of the central points of this interview was that there may have been a Third Group that planned the operation for the assassination. He drew attention to the fact that the persons who served sentences for the assassination were not the real assassins. I quote Marable here:

"Two of the three men, who were imprisoned, Norman Butler and Robert 15x Johnson, convicted and given life sentences, I'm absolutely convinced were innocent. The real murderers of Malcolm X have not been caught or punished. I think that now is the moment for us to rededicate ourselves to learning the truth about what happened on February 21st. The place to begin is to make all evidence public, and we have to begin with the federal government, and the FBI."

What is significant in this case is the fact that after 40 years of the celebration of Malcolm X, the bevy of researchers who are specialists on Malcolm X have not seen it fit to follow up on the unsolved questions of the assassination. In the book by Karl Evanzz, the Judas Factor: The plot to kill Malcolm X, the author focused on the international work of Malcolm and he implicated the CIA in the planning of the assassination. Unlike Marable, Evanzz calls the assassination a conspiracy.

One point that Professor Manning Marable makes is central: this is the indictment of the Black Studies community in their negligence in pursuing the research on the assassination. Marable noted,
"There are over 350 films and over 320 web-based educational resources with the title Malcolm X, yet the vast majority of them are based on secondary literatures, that is, not on primary source material. In the case of Alex Haley, Haley's material is located at the University of Tennessee at Knoxville, primarily. But there are a whole series of elaborate steps that one has to -- has to encounter in order to even begin to do research."

The real lesson here, is that the cover up of the assassination has been even more elaborate and meticulous than the actual assassination. Marable is calling on scholars everywhere to engage the assassination of Malcolm in order to get to the Truth.

The Assassination of Patrice Lumumba

Patrice Lumumba was the first democratically elected Prime Minister of the Congo. It is in this country where Belgium had committed the most outrageous genocide in the plunder and looting of the country. The killing of more than ten million has been documented in the book by Adam Hochschild, King Leopold's Ghost. In the eyes of the Belgians, the crime of Lumumba was to refute the speech of the King of Belgium at the independence celebration in June 1960. Lumumba refused to accept the representation of the Belgian mission as one of civilizing and modernizing the Congolese peoples. Lumumba was moved from office less than two months after independence. He was placed under house arrest, escaped, recaptured, beaten and tortured and eventually eliminated.

Patrice Lumumba was assassinated in the Congo in January 1961. In February 2002, the government of Belgium accepted moral responsibility for the assassination of Lumumba. The Belgian Foreign Minister declared in February 2002 that,

"In light of criteria applicable today, certain members of the government at the time and certain Belgian actors of that period carry an irrefutable responsibility for the events that led to the death of Patrice Lumumba. " (quoted from Thomas Turner, "Crimes of the West in Democratic Congo: Reflections on Belgian Acceptance of 'Moral Responsibility' for the Death of Lumumba in Genocide, War Crimes and The West).

The declaration by the government of Belgium came after forty years of research and writing on the assassination. The cables from Washington and the role of the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) in organizing the plot had been well known. In 1975 Senator Frank Church carried out investigations on the "Alleged Assassination Plots Involving Foreign Leaders" published in Senate Report 94-465, 94th Congress 1975.

There has been a spate of books on the role of the CIA and the obsession of the US government with the so-called communist threat. What these books did not make clear was the levels of coordination between the US and Belgians in the plot to eliminate Lumumba. The book which outlined the plot in the clearest terms was that of Ludo De Witte, The Assassination of Lumumba. De Witte spent several years doing archival work and interviewing those involved in the assassination. It was after this book was published that the government of Belgium was forced to open up a Parliamentary inquiry into the assassination. This Parliamentary inquiry heard testimonies from a wide cross section of operatives in the Belgian state.

Despite this parliamentary inquiry, the reality is that the information on the conspiracy to murder Lumumba is not widely diffused. Belgian and Europeans continue to represent their work in the Congo as that of civilizing Africans. More significant has been the fact that this killing and the traditions left by Mobutu has poisoned the political culture and political life of the society. Mobutu's government carried out extra judicial killings and murdered students and trade union leaders for thirty years. In 1990 there was an attempt to develop the basis for a national Palaver in the Sovereign National Conference. Neither the Congolese political careerists nor the imperial supporters in Washington, Brussels and Paris wanted the Truth to come out. The genocidal wars in the Central Africa region and the deaths of over 3 million since the removal of Mobutu attest to the fact that once the politics of impunity is embedded in a society it will take generations to heal. The iterations of violence take on a momentum of its own to the point where the perpetrators of violence seek cover from the morality of those who proclaim modernity and a civilizing mission but carry out assassinations.

Lessons for the Walter Rodney Inquiry.

Manning Marable made an appeal to progressive scholars to engage in a research program that can expose the crimes of the US government in the assassination of Malcolm X. What is known from the assassination of John F. Kennedy and Martin Luther King Jr. is that the planners of the assassinations took time to prepare the cover-up in the process of arranging the assassinations.

The same can be said of the assassination of Walter Rodney. Not only has there been a cover- up, but the disinformation campaign has been very elaborate. It has been so elaborate that there are even extreme elements who now claim that it was the Peoples Progressive Party (PPP) that planned the assassination of Walter Rodney. This was stated at a public grounding to commemorate Walter in Linden, Guyana, on June 9, where I was present. This is despite the written commentaries by Andiaye, Eusi Kwayana and Rupert Roopnarine refuting the reports by certain organizations that the PPP was involved in the assassination.

The Marable call for progressive scholars to be engaged in methodical work to unravel the layers of the plot to kill Malcolm X is just as important in the case of Walter Rodney. Prior to the Groundings in Guyana in June 2005, there were a number of scholars who sent in papers on the work of Walter Rodney. How can we inspire the research of some of these scholars in the direction of the archival material (published and unpublished) relating to the assassination? This research can benefit from the different levels of analysis which was utilized in uncovering the layers in the assassination of Malcolm X.

In the case of Malcolm X there were four groups identified who allegedly participated in the assassination.
(a) those who actually pulled the trigger at the time of the assassination
(b) the reconnaissance group that was deployed by the NYPD to ensure that all of the logistics were in place
(c) the planners of the assassination within the NYPD, the Intelligence services (FBI and CIA)
(d) members of Malcolm's circle who were ensnared in the plot.

There are a number of known facts relating to the assassination of Walter Rodney.
1. Donald Rodney, the Brother of Walter Rodney testified that Walter Rodney was handed a device by Gregory Smith.
2. It is now known that this was an explosive devise.
3. There were previous attempts to gun down Walter Rodney after June 1979 which included the assassination of Ohene Kohama
4. There were warnings for him to prepare his will. The steel band of the Guyana Police Force composed and played a piece "Run, Rodney, Run." There were small posters of the same title posted up around Georgetown.
5. A recognition booklet had been prepared for the police.
6. There was a meeting that gave the word for the elimination, a day before June 12, 1980.
7. At that meeting it was decided that the assassination would take place on June 12.
8. And Walter Rodney was killed on June 13, 1980 as a result of an explosive device.

Cover up by the Guyanese state.

The assassination was planned as a perfect murder. There was one major complication. Donald Rodney lived to give a statement to the world on June 14, 1980. Donald Rodney, the brother of Walter Rodney was with Walter when the device was handed to Walter by Gregory Smith.

From the outset the cover up involved the smear and defamation of Walter Rodney and Donald Rodney. The PNC government charged Donald Rodney for the murder of Walter Rodney, using the statement of Donald Rodney on the existence of Gregory Smith, while denying the fact that Smith was a member of the GDF.

There is now time to comb the links and the materials which throw light on this timeless crime. In this instance it is known that Gregory Smith had no personal motive for killing Walter Rodney. He was the instrument of what Castro called the "intellectual authors" of the crime. Time spent on exposing the varying efforts of the government to clear away equipment from his house and to spirit his family away from Guyana only served to expand the numbers of persons and departments involved in the cover up of the crime.
It is here important to underline the Judas connection of Gregory Smith in order to explain his prior designed role of penetrating Walter's confidence in order to bring to the fore the fact that Smith was being 'handled' for a very long time.

The painstaking work of exposing Smith has been crucial in so far as he had been the path to the "intellectual authors." A former non commissioned officer from the Guyana Defence Forces (GDF) has come forward to identify those who were involved in the clumsy and failed effort to delete the record of Gregory Smith from the GDF payroll. (In the immediate aftermath of the assassination, the government had denied that Gregory Smith was a member of the armed forces after he was identified by Donald Rodney).
The element of Gregory Smith is but one component of this plot to assassinate Walter Rodney. In some sense, the case of Gregory Smith is like that of Norman Butler and Robert 15X Johnson in the Malcolm X case.

In an interview given to Hugh Croskill of Cana Radio in 1987, Gregory Smith had protested his innocence noting that the death of Walter Rodney 'was an accident.' What did Smith mean by the word accident? Does he mean that he himself was duped and was a patsy? In his interview with the journalists Gregory Smith expressed his willingness to return to testify in an inquiry (provided that his life could be protected).
Hugh Crosskill was killed in Jamiaca in June 2002. Gregory Smith died in November 2002 (from stomach cancer).

Those in the state apparatus responsible for the cover up dragged their feet to ensure that questions of extradition and matters of the death penalty overshadowed the real issue of the assassination of Walter Rodney.

Gregory Smith expired from this world in Cayenne but it is the view of this writer that the intellectual authors are still alive.

Precedents for an Inquiry have already been set by the Guyanese state. The PNC government had strategic control over the organs of coercion up to 1992. In their inquiry they held that Rodney died because of misadventure. Other inquiries into extrajudicial killings and corruption in Guyana have not broken the traditions of impunity that has been at large in Guyanese society.

It is now clear that the inquiry into the assassination of Walter Rodney was unsatisfactory. The PPP government on account of the groundswell of public awareness created by the Groundings has reopened this question of the death of Walter Rodney with the Motion in Parliament on June 29, calling for an inquiry into the killing of Walter Rodney.

It is important for the PPP government to learn the lessons of the Congolese assassination of Patrice Lumumba. The simple lesson is that the whole state apparatus is corrupted by murders and assassinations. This means that the PPP must understand that there is a major difference between the state and the government. The government is simply one arm of the state apparatus. The military, opposition parties, the media, religious institutions, educational institutions and more importantly imperial organs constitute the relations of domination and subordination which are expressed in the form of the Guyanese state.
Conventional analyses collapse the state with the government. Traditional political
science seek to understand politics in relation to established political parties only. In the
case of Guyana where the racial formations of the ruling classes find expression in two
dominant parties, there is a coincidence of interest in perpetuating the divisions of the
working peoples.

Proclaiming the Spirit of Walter Rodney

Walter Rodney was a historian. He was meticulous in his craft of research.
A large body of information is available (both local and international) from which to pull snippets from various directions to focus attention on the traditions of assassinations in Guyana. From the period of the attempted assassination of Josh Ramsammy, through the mass murders of Jones Town, the killing of Vincent Teekah, Father Darke, Ohene Koama and other extra judicial killings, assassination has been seeping into the Guyanese political culture. To purge this tradition from the society, it is most urgent that the young people understand that murder and assassination have no statute of limitation. One lesson to be learnt from the precedent of the murder and cover up of Lumumba's assassination is that truth delayed can be made ineffective by subsequent events in the unpredictable maelstorm of political processes. It is possible that the window of opportunity for reconciliation may still be open in the case of the assassination of Walter Rodney, between the forces for democracy and the countervailing forces of Burhamism.

There are many investigations into assassinations from which this inquiry can learn. The Orlando Letelier (Chile), the case of Herbert Chitepo (Zimbabwe), and the case of the killing of the former Prime Minister of Lebanon provide useful precedents for guidelines for a thorough inquiry. The more recent assassination of the Lebanese PM - is highlighted in some detail in the website given below and entitled : Report of the Fact-Finding Mission to Lebanon inquiring into the causes, circumstances and consequences of the assassination of former Prime Minister Rafik Hariri

http://www.1stbusinesslebanon.com/ind05/un.html

One of the case procedures that might require some background info is the power of subpoena. This is crucial for the government to have the power to call witnesses, both local and international. More bibliographical research and basic study must be done in order to live up to the rich traditions of investigative research left by Walter Rodney.

Conclusion

Walter Rodney worked very hard to heal the divisions between the working peoples of Guyana and to bring back the indigenous peoples into the center of the political dialogue and decision making. The inquiry into the assassination of Walter Rodney will benefit from many-sided investigations into the circumstances and the plotters of the assassination.

Was there a conspiracy? Was there a convergence of local and foreign intelligence services to eliminate Walter Rodney? What was the role of the ruling political party? How has the GDF been affected by the killing and the continuing cover up? Who were the non military operatives that had been drawn in to the layers of the plot to eliminate Walter Rodney? How were journalists, academics and researchers compromised by the subsequent discussions on the circumstances of the assassination?

In short, the judicial inquiry is one component of what Pat Rodney has called for. At the opening ceremony of the Groundings in June 2005, she hoped the celebration of her husband's life "would bring some semblance of healing for the Guyanese people as they struggle to overcome adversity and rebuild the country that he truly loved."

Those who want healing and truth will rise above the petty politics of the political parties, as we collectively seek to engage issues of the plot to assassinate Walter Rodney and the elaborate cover up which is still in motion.

Horace Campbell
July 2005

Select References

Alona E. Evans, "Letelier v. Republic of Chile. 488 F.Supp. 665,"
The American Journal of International Law Vol. 74, No. 4 (Oct., 1980)
Judith Hippler Bello; Peter A. Barcroft , et al, International Decisions, (Re Letelier Case) The American Journal of International Law, Vol. 90, No. 2 (Apr., 1996)
Murray Edelman; Rita James Simon, "Presidential Assassinations: Their Meaning and Impact on American Society," Ethics Vol. 79, No. 3 (Apr., 1969)
Saul K. Padover," Patterns of Assassination in Occupied Territory, " Public Opinion Quarterly (Winter, 1943),
Evanzz, Karl. The Judas Factor: The Plot to Kill Malcolm X. New York: Thunder's Mouth Press
"The Undiscovered Malcolm X: Stunning New Info on the Assassination, His Plans to Unite the Civil Rights and Black Nationalist Movements & the 3 'Missing' Chapters from His Autobiography."
at http://www.democracynow.org/article.pl?sid=05/02/21/1458213
Report of the Fact-Finding Mission to Lebanon inquiring into the causes, circumstances and consequences of the assassination of former Prime Minister Rafik Hariri
http://www.1stbusinesslebanon.com/ind05/un.html
Report of the Special International Commission on the Assassination of Herbert Wiltshire Chitepo, Republic of Zambia, March 1976
Ludo DeWitte, The Assassination of Lumumba, Verso Books, London, 2001
James Petras, "A Death in Guyana Has Meaning for Third World," Latin American Perspectives Vol. 8, No. 1, The Caribbean and Africa (Winter, 1981),
Ali A. Mazrui, "Thoughts on Assassination in Africa," Political Science Quarterly Vol. 83, No. 1 (Mar., 1968)
Allen R. Vogt, "The Kennedy Assassination and the History Teacher,"The History Teacher , Vol. 20, No. 1 (Nov., 1986)
Max Holland, "After Thirty Years: Making Sense of the Assassination," Reviews in American History Vol. 22, No. 2 (Jun., 1994)
J. Bowyer Bell, "Assassination in International Politics," International Studies Quarterly, Vol. 16, No. 1 (Mar., 1972)
George K Danns, "Militarisation and Development: An Experiment in Nation-building, Transition, Vol 1, No. 1, 1978. (this provides a factual background to the Guyana/PNC state militarisation in the 1970s)
Michael West, "Seeing Darkly: Walter Rodney, Black Power and the US diplomatic Missions in Jamaica and the Caribbean" Binghamton, 2005

Thanks to Nigel Westmaas for compilation of preliminary Bibliography. Thanks to Eusi Kwayana for insightful comments).