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The real Ramesh
October 21, 2001
By Denis Solomon
Someone sent me this e-mail: Osama bin Laden kept a large mirror in a cave in the mountains of Afghanistan. Every morning he would ask the mirror, "Oh mirror, who is the nastiest, wickedest, most dangerous man in the world?" And the mirror would reply: "It is you, oh Osama bin Laden". Osama would then go out, smiling, to greet his followers.
But one day Osama ran out of the cave and fell to the ground wailing and gnashing his teeth. The tribesmen rushed up to him and asked what was wrong. Through his tears, Osama bin Laden asked, "Who the hell is Ramesh Lawrence Maharaj?"
A moment's thought should suffice to bring home to anyone the irony of Ramesh Maharaj campaigning against absolutism and corruption. Ramesh's efforts to consolidate executive power over all the organs of the State are too recent to forget. With Constitutional Amendment Bill No. 3 he sought to remove the civil service and the Judiciary from the control of the Service Commissions. He spent public funds on a foreign commission of enquiry to get support for his attempts to control the Judiciary (and failed, though he claimed success).
Without consulting Parliament, and in the face of massive objections from the public, Ramesh withdrew from two international human rights treaties. He single-handedly hijacked the country's negotiating machinery for the International Criminal Court, snatching it from the President, who was the court's main initiator, and refusing to release funds for Mr Robinson's attendance at the Rome conference that gave birth to it. At the preliminary conference in Port of Spain, Ramesh initially refused to sign the final act of the meeting, allegedly at the bidding of the United States.
He then went to Rome and repeated the performance, this time aligning Trinidad and Tobago with such models of democracy as Saudi Arabia, Rwanda, Qatar and Iraq.
True, Ramesh has never proclaimed any belief in democratic government.
His objections to one-man rule have been confined to the UNC, where he failed in his attempts to get recognition as the next one-man ruler. We must conclude that in the country as a whole, dictatorship is fine with him, provided he is a part of it.
As a campaigner against corruption, Ramesh's credentials are equally suspect. Leave aside the question of whether he ever objected, in Cabinet or elsewhere, to all the scams perpetrated or condoned by the Panday government, from dog rice to Petrotrin. We may also assume that in terms of self-enrichment Ramesh's hands are clean, if only because it is hard for an Attorney General to tief.
Let us also disregard as unfounded the accusations of using commissions of enquiry to line the pockets of his English lawyer friends, thus remunerating them indirectly for the defence of his brother in Florida.
But corruption is not only about money. It is also about abuse of office, conflict of interest and bamboozlement of the public. During the six years of UNC rule Ramesh was the chief exponent of these skills. And he frequently used them to pull Panday's chestnuts from the fire.
It was Ramesh who invented the "self-suing" device when, as nominal defendant in lawsuits against the State, he conceded Evelyn Ann Patterson's suit against the Chief Justice without consulting the Chief Justice, in the interest of his own dispute with the Judiciary. This device was used again, probably on Ramesh's advice, in the case of Gypsy and Chaitan, to delay the election petition against them.
Ramesh's initial intervention in the Gypsy-Chaitan case was his totally uncalled-for request to the court to allow him to "assist the court" as the "guardian of the public interest". If ever there was a conflict of interest, this was it. As Attorney General Ramesh should have distanced himself from the matter, because as a politician he had a strong interest in Gypsy and Chaitan winning the case. Losing would mean that Ramesh would be out of office along with the UNC Government.
Ramesh did not dare to concede the constitutional motion as he had done in the Peterson matter. But he hired an English QC, James Guthrie, to handle the State's case. This amounted to using public funds in the interest of one party (Gypsy and Chaitan) against the rights of the other (Franklin and Farad Khan) to the protection of the Constitution. In addition, Guthrie's arguments were so strange that they moved one of the Khans' lawyers to remark that the Attorney General seemed to be supporting a counterclaim against himself. They also led one newspaper to wonder whether Guthrie had not been hired to lose a case for the State.
A final irony: the use of constitutional motions to delay trials has been applied in the Dhanraj Singh murder case. But the violation of his constitutional rights that Dhanraj is claiming is the grant of immunity to a former co-accused. Now, the practice of granting immunity to defendants was first used (in the Chadee trial) and then legislated (in the Plea Bargaining Bill) by Ramesh Lawrence Maharaj. Its purpose? To speed up the course of justice. Not to retard it.
Copyright © 2004 Denis Solomon