By Desmond Roberts
I am disappointed but not surprised over this conduct, since it was David Granger who allowed Joe to remain working in the Office of the President when the Coalition assumed office in 2015. Joe had submitted his resignation but David refused to take it. I said then that Joe would not have acted so magnanimously had the tables been turned.
I am not sure how Joe could have considered himself a ‘fit and proper’ person for the Chairman of the Elections Commission when he had already had a turn as a former Commissioner; was a senior military officer who might have shown bias in favor of his comrade-in-arms; and he was a paid worker in the Office of the President. Joe had also previously been accused of receiving three salaries simultaneously, during the PPP term in office: working in the private sector (Chairman of GTT); the parastatal organization (Chairman GGMC or the Gold Board) and an advisor in the Office of the President. Clearly he should have declared himself not ‘fit and proper’.
There have also been several instances when I personally found Joe not to be a person of high moral standards, good judgement and sound management.
My first concern over his man management was at a military location that I was the first subunit commander to establish – Bartica. I had made a deliberate effort to build excellent relations with the Guyana Police Force, the business community and the other government agencies in the area. It came as real shock to learn that in that same year (1968), then Lt Singh clearly had not discouraged the soldiers under his infantry company command from invading the Bartica Police Station beating policemen, breaking bones and ransacking the station. To confirm that it was no accident, one of his subunits repeated the performance at the Linden Police Station. As punishment, the entire company was made to walk from the Tacama Battle School to the military base at Timehri. Leadership attitudes and values percolate downwards.
You may recall the travel book that was written about Guyana in which the author quoted Joe as starring in every military operation that the GDF ever took part in. Joe reportedly claimed that he was involved in the initial reaction to the takeover of our portion of Ankoko Island by Venezuelan troops. He was still in military school in the UK during this operation, in which I was involved.
The Rupununi was another action that also involved me. Early on New Year’s Day 1969 I was Duty Officer at Timehri and was instructed by Colonel Pope to collect all the men at the military base and go directly to the GAC hangar at the airport. The standby platoon of drivers, cooks, mechanics and store men were all rounded up along with my HQ staff. Col Pope, who taught me a lot as his staff officer, refused to tell me what was the mission or where we were going. The briefing by Captain Malcolm Chan-a-Sue on the uprising took place on the aircraft. When we landed at Manari (the only large airstrip open in the area around Lethem the regional capital; all the other airstrips in the North and Central Savannahs were blocked by the Hart and Melville rebels), I was met by Joe’s infantry company which had landed there the evening before. Col. Pope flew in mid morning and instructed that we were going to launch an attack as soon as the men had eaten and received briefings. He wanted to give the rebels no chance to consolidate. Joe (a Lt.) was almost hysterical against the Chief of Staff’s – a colonel – plan. Joe argued that we should not attack until we had support weapons since we were outgunned by the rebels. Pope refused to deal with his intransigence and told Joe that he would not be in the attack and was to remain behind to secure the Manari airstrip. Col. Pope, Col. (then Lt. Col) Martindale, Captain Vernon Williams and I were taken up in a plane flown by Director of Civil Aviation, Alec Phillips, to reconnoiter the Lethem area with Pope pointing out assigned attack tasks and boundaries. When we returned to Manari I asked Pope why I was going in with a ragtag group while he was allowing Joe to sit it out with a full infantry company of his own. Pope said “Don’t you see he is afraid Desmond.” Pope even took one of Joe’s officers, then 2 Lt. Victor Wilson, and gave him to my motley oversized platoon. Pope and his adjutant Ulric Pilgrim joined me for the final assault rather than with Vernon Williams (Col. Martindale and his Adjutant David Granger accompanied him that group). After confronting the ugly scenes of the slaughter of the 5 policemen and the rebels driving away in face of an actual assault, even though they had superior knowledge of the ground and had been given superior weaponry by the Venezuelans, I was happy about my first real military action and the disciplined performance of my soldiers. Even Americans, who claimed to have served in Vietnam, and who were being held hostage in the abattoir, were high in praise of our assault approach. It was therefore painful for me to read Joe’s attempting years later to take center stage for his being left at Manari. More annoying and painful was Joe asserting that the reason why he and his men did not go into the Lethem assault was that he had been told beforehand by some unidentified person that the rebels had already left !! I was so angry and had to be persuaded not to refute his dishonesty in the news papers. Instead Joe and I and some officers exchanged furious emails in which he refused to acknowledge his reduced role and our incisive and decisive action. I have told him about three years ago that I still expected an apology to me and my men for his insult to our involvement in and his deprecation of our Lethem military action. He refused. I told him that I would forever never respect or forgive him.
Joe is an inveterate liar. While I was the senior GDF staff officer in 1971 (could be 1970) Joe attended a Parachute Course in the UK. Officers recall him limping out of the airport on his return but he was wearing his parachutist’s ‘wings’. When the course report came it stated that Joe had unfortunately failed the course because he had broken his leg. When I called Joe in to discuss his course report he claimed that the report was wrong. He claimed he had passed the course. I asked if he wanted me to query the report. He said yes. Within a short time, the British Army sent a thick dossier with every bit of cotton wool, plaster, nurses and doctors’ names, surgeries and bed space information. I was furious at the loss of my own reputation as well as that of the GDF and Guyana. I reprimanded him in very harsh language, chasing him out of my office. The file was handed to Col. Price and was never seen by me again. I assumed that it was given to Prime Minister Burnham.
Joe was confronted at a GDF officers’ reunion by the late Captain Asad Ishoof who rejected Joe’s false claim that he had participated in the New River assault to recover our territory at Camp Jaguar from the Surinamese. Asad, who led the final assault on the camp, was known not to pull punches.
There were reportedly other incidents in the GDF with Joe’s un-officerlike conduct but I was not directly involved.
Joe is not a ‘fit and proper’ person. And he should not be publicly excoriating his batch mate, fellow comrade-in-arms and his president.
