A founder member of New Patriotic Party (NPP) and former Ambassador to Serbia and Montenegro, Dr Nyaho Nyaho-Tamakloe, has called on Ghanaians to desist from trivialising the gross human rights abuses of the June 4 Uprising.
His call is based on the fact that the coup is characterised by extra-judicial killings.
Dr Nyaho-Tamakloe, therefore, described a recent article on June 4 by Dr Kobina Arthur Kennedy, an NPP stalwart as a “nostalgia which was inappropriate”.
According to Dr Nyaho-Tamakloe, the “recent fond reminiscences of June 4 1979 coup by Dr Arthur Kennedy were inappropriate because in our democratic dispensation we must be committed to democratic solutions to social economic and political problems.”
He explained that this would require a democratic discipline which politicians in countries with strong democratic cultures such as United Kingdom, United States and Canada exhibit.
He observed that the democracies of these countries had survived because of democratic discipline.
Dr Nyaho-Tamakloe said it was in the same vein that the Kufuor administration championed the National Reconciliation Commission (NRC).
He said functionaries of the coup testified at the NRC that the leadership of the Supreme Military Council (SMC) was executed without due process.
He said there was no evidence that these people had committed the offences for which they were killed.
“I was imprisoned by the SMC for plotting a coup to remove that regime and restore multi-party democracy. But I was part of the coup plot when there were no democratic options,” Dr Nyaho-Tamakloe stressed.
He further explained that the June 4 coup happened when the SMC was doing the right thing by handing over to civilian rule.
Dr Nyaho-Tamakloe said the so-called mistakes or excesses of the coup, which Dr Arthur Kennedy made light of, were at the cost of the lives and dignity of many Ghanaians.
This, he said, included Makola women who were stripped naked and lashed in public in the name of fighting corruption.
He disclosed that in the ’80s, Arthur Kennedy himself nearly became a statistics of these mistakes under the Provisional National Defence Council (PNDC) but for the generosity and support of right-thinking Ghanaians and refugee organisations overseas.
According to Dr Nyaho-Tamakloe, for Dr Arthur Kennedy to speak fondly of June 4 trivialises the pain that its victims suffered.
“We need a moral revolution. Frankly, I never thought I would say this but I miss June 4, even with all of its mistakes… because the intent was good and what we are seeing tells us why people supported June 4 even though the execution was poor,” these are some of the sentiments expressed by Dr Kobina Arthur Kennedy during a discussion of an article he authored, on ‘Me man Nti’, a current affairs talk show on Neat 100.9 FM on July 10.