[ 2014-08-29 ]

Rawlings' close shave with death
Unusually, Burma Camp was in the morning more
silent than a cemetery but within that silence
lurked death, unknowingly.

Acting on intuition, the tall, lanky and
light-skinned flight lieutenant suddenly decided
to jump down from the military pick-up in which he
stood. Almost simulta­neously, a bullet from an
unknown source came whizzing through the spot
where he stood and ricocheted to hit one of the
of­ficers that had flanked him.

The next few minutes, their vehicle would go
through a spontaneous war zone, so chaotic and
characterised by a host of flying bullets and
pumping guns. But as he hanged on the side of the
vehicle and the driver was making way for the rest
of about 25 metres to branch left into the Camp
Quarters, he noticed the bullets that were flying
at them were rather hitting the lower part of the
vehicle.

Next, he waited for “the appropriate mo­ment”
and jumped off the vehicle. By that time, soldiers
- some even in their under­wear - had come out of
their bedrooms with their wives and children and
fled like birds flying in formation. As they
bolted from the bullets towards the Air Force
Station inside the Camp, the flight lieutenant
followed them, showing he equally possessed a
clean pair of heels.

That was June 4, 1979. Fast forward to June 4,
2014 - 35 years after - the flight lieutenant
recalls that “I was following them. We were all
on the run. I was going to my station. But they
were running away, I don't know where to, but away
from the bullets.”

Hitherto that moment of chaos, he had been
standing tall all morning while the nation stood
still. He had been rescued from prison by fellow
officers, and accompa­nied to the Broadcasting
House to make a famous declaration of the toppling
of the government.

Then, flanked by other officers in the back of
their military pick up, he had been chauffeured to
the place he had always known as home - the Burma
Camp.

These were “some of the interesting events”
that took place on June 4, 1979 as were told by
former Ghana President Jerry John Rawlings on June
4, 2014 at the 35th June 4 anniversary
commemorative wreath- laying ceremony organised in
Accra.

As he recounted the events that took place on that
fateful day in 1979, he said “I don't know why
sometimes God decides to give us so many lives. At
a certain moment, instinctively, I just felt a
danger situation and I faltered out of the back of
the vehicle, still holding unto the bar and at
that split second a bullet hit where I was
standing. No warning! But I'm just talking about
some­times the power of intuition.”

He told his listeners that after all the chaos
when he realised that the soldiers and the airmen
who were with him were all still alive he was
convinced that “corruption had sparked the rage
of this nation and the na­tion was in a state of
anger.”

But there was more action to come. “I continued
to go through the wire, got into the aircraft that
had been prepared for me with the weapons on
board. I took off that morning and I needed to
check whether the weapons had been properly
aligned so flew down to the sea and there was an
old vessel that had been berthed in the sea sand
for many years. That was what I used that morning
for target practice just to check whether my
weapons were proper

“So I fired a couple of shops into the middle of
the boat; they were on target and then I headed
straight to the Broadcasting House with the
fighter aircraft obviously to counter the effect
of the armoured cars which were going there.”

President Rawlings, who ruled Ghana for 11 years
as a chairman of a military council, further
recalled that the second interesting event that
occurred on June 4, 1979 was when he decided not
to open his fire on the armoured cars. “When
that moment came and I was diving the aircraft to
fire at an armoured car, at the last moment
something put me off it. I lifted the nose of the
aircraft away from the armoured car and fired
shots beyond the wall of the Broadcasting House"

Intriguingly, “later that day, when we were
hearing one another giving account of all that had
been happening, can you believe, also, that the
armoured car that I refused to fire on also had
been given orders to fire at the soldiers but he
didn't fire at the soldiers. He refused to kill
his fellow soldiers.

“The revolution had really been sparked and
people were not going to shed the blood of their
own,” President Rawlings added, in­dicating
that there were more “interesting” stories to
tell from the June 4, 1979 episode but “I will
give those to you another time.”

While he awaits an opportunity to further recount
his June 4 experience, he lamented:

“I wish so much that we had continued the
progress that was initiated. The range of anger,
the productivity, the integrity with which, you
know, we held this country and governed this
country.Unfortunately, that is not where we are"

Source - Weekend Sun

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