Ministerial assassination

Periodically letters are printed in this newspaper calling for an inquiry into the killing of former Agriculture Minister Satyadeow Sawh, his sister Phulmattie, his brother Rajpat and his security guard Curtis Robertson, and this month two of these were published in our letter column. The first was carried on April 7th, written by Mr Geoffrey Da Silva, like Mr Sawh, a former Ambassador to Venezuela, while the second, submitted by Mr Roger Sawh on behalf of the Sawh family appeared yesterday, on the fifteenth anniversary of the assassination.

It was approximately midnight on April 22nd, 2006, when seven masked gunmen entered Mr Sawh’s home at LBI. The Minister was said to have been in a hammock on the verandah, while his wife, Sattie and his brother, Omprakash Sawh were in the kitchen. When they saw the gunmen looking in, Mrs Sattie Sawh alerted her husband, but before he could make his escape he was shot, collapsing inside the front door. Mrs Sawh hid herself and the gunmen did not find her.

In the meantime, Mr Omprakash Sawh had hidden his sister Phulmattie under a bed, but the gunmen did eventually locate her and kill her. They then turned their attention to the Minister again, firing their weapons at him, while they placed Omprakash on top of another brother, Rajpat Sawh, who was also in the house at the time. Mr Omprakash Sawh said he had begged the men for his sister’s life, and had given them $23,000, a digital camera and a watch, but before they left they fired another shot at them killing Rajpat in the process.

Of the three security guards Mr Robertson died, while the two others, Mr Albert Mangra and Mr Ali Khan were wounded. The family’s German Shepherd, Brutus, was also shot dead.

One might have thought that with the killing of a Minister of Government no effort would be spared to find the perpetrators and put them on trial, or failing that, hold a Commission of Inquiry to find out what happened. At the very minimum one would have expected a Coroner’s Inquest. But inexplicably, none of this seems to have happened. Other than a vague assumption without any evidence being adduced that gunmen based in Buxton were responsible, the PPP/C administration of the time appeared to invest no time or effort in establishing not just who had carried out the crime, but who had planned or maybe commissioned it.

When the Coalition government came to office, then President David Granger in 2016 told new Heads of Mission at an orientation programme that there would be a Commission of Inquiry into the killings. He said that members of the Sawh family had approached him to get justice, and he had made a broad commitment to investigate the murders. “There will be an investigation into the

circumstances which led to his death,” he was quoted as saying. However, he declined to be drawn on a timeframe for this: “We have to do some preliminary work on the evidence before we set up a formal Commission of Inquiry,” he said; “I am not setting a deadline, it is important for us and we are going to get it done.”

As is well known they did not get things done, despite Mr Granger’s penchant for CoIs of infinitely lesser consequence. Three-and-a-half years later his excuse for the failure to hold inquiries into the killings which followed the 2002 Camp Street prison break-out and its aftermath was that there was a lack of evidence and witnesses. Shifting the responsibility in Minister Sawh’s case to former President Bharrat Jagdeo, Mr Granger said: “He has in his Cabinet someone who is assassinated and he does not even hold a Coroner’s Inquest, much less a Commission of Inquiry.” He went on to remark that even Mr Sawh’s family would have sued the previous administration over its failure to protect him. This hardly exonerates the former head of state for his own dereliction. A crime is a crime is a crime, no matter under whose administration it occurs, and by the same token a government is obliged to investigate it and not put it out of official mind.

Shortly after Mr Granger’s initial announcement in 2016, Mrs Sattie Sawh had told this newspaper that she welcomed the government’s expression of interest in reopening the case, but she wanted it to be a mission aimed at finding the truth, and not be transformed into something used for political purposes. “I don’t want it to turn into a political tool,” she had said at the time.

Now Mr Roger Sawh writes: “It has been to the utter dismay of the Sawh family that, 14 years on, despite commentary, public statements, campaign promises and the invocation of the tragedy for political mileage by both sides of the divide, an inquiry has not been initiated …” Echoing Mrs Sattie Sawh he also says that the family has noted previously, “that such an inquiry must be independent, thorough, and focused on both the criminal elements and the controlling minds involved.” He then goes on to stress “urgency” given the amount of time which has elapsed.

One feels constrained to observe that it took well over thirty years before a bona fide Commission of Inquiry into the assassination of Dr Walter Rodney was held, and even then former President Granger closed it down before it had completed its investigations. In the case of Minister Sawh, fourteen years have already passed with the inevitable disappearance of witnesses and evidence that that will entail. If the PPP/C government was laggard in its approach when it was previously in office, there should be no great optimism that it will move with greater celerity now. What is not clear is why it should be so dilatory when it was one of its own ministers who was killed. And it was not anyone in a really sensitive ministry like Home Affairs, for example, who was targeted, but a person who held the much less contentious portfolio of Agriculture.

Fortunately, for all the violence we have experienced in this country, it is extremely rare for a minister of government to be assassinated. In fact, with the exception of Minister Sawh it has never happened in living memory. It is not just his family which should have the satisfaction of justice in this instance, but also the nation. In any normal country where the rule of law is rather better entrenched than it is here, the authorities would have spared no effort in trying to find not just the perpetrators, but their intellectual author. In a spirit of objectivity uncontaminated by political considerations, therefore, the local authorities need to pursue the matter at an official level. They need to uncover the truth, so the nation can know the truth and history can record the truth.

If the current government repeats the failure of the Coalition and the previous PPP/C administrations, it would not just have broken faith with its own party, but after all its promises subsequent to coming into office, would have let down the entire electorate. All it has to do to redeem itself is set a date for a Commission of Inquiry and appoint impartial Commissioners.