The Dispatch

1979 executions regrettable but unavoidable ? Boakye-Djan

The Dispatch in its major story, reports Major Boakye-Djan, former Spokesman and Deputy Chairman of the Armed Forces Revolutionary Council (AFRC) as saying in a fax message the paper received recently that he has read with dismay the reported remarks by Flt-Lt Jerry Rawlings, the then Chairman of the AFRC that he (Rawlings) has no regrets for the executions that took place during the June 4 1979 armed uprising in Ghana.

Major Boakye-Djan is quoted as saying that for the past 20 years, he had on numerous occasions, talked and written about AFRC affairs and in particular, about those executions. "On behalf of the AFRC members, functionaries and particularly those voiceless participants who are still serving in the Ghana Armed Forces, I have consistently reported that those executions were regrettable but unavoidable, given the circumstances in which we had to operate and both the moral and legal procedures for the executions that we had to use", he is quoted as saying.

The fax message, which the paper says was dated June 4, 1999, said "for the avoidance of any doubt, those officers were executed for their ultimate responsibilities for illegal acts (high treason) of removing from office, constitutionally elected civilian governments in 1966 of Kwame Nkrumah and in 1972 of Kofi Busia; sustaining successor military regimes in office which were unaccountable to Ghanaians in their corrupt conduct of national affairs".

The message concluded that the executed officers personally profited from those regimes or allowed their agents and cronies to do so.