Latest update May 6th, 2024 12:59 AM
Oct 09, 2014 Letters
DEAR EDITOR,
Please permit to seek some clarification from Mr. Vishnu Bisram of a section of his letter of October 2, in KN. He wrote “As I stated four decades ago and repeated umpteenth times since then, it was wrong for Burnham and the PNC to persecute Indians, Amerindians, Portuguese (driving them out of Guyana) and others. It cannot be right now for any group to dominate another group, even if elected in free and fair elections.”
Persecution connotes an active program with malice in mind. I have the following questions for Mr. Bisram. At this time when there is much discussion about what kind of constitution we should have, it is important that we have our history straight. As a social scientist who gives us the results of his polls from time to time, he would be aware of the need for someone at his level to always base his contentions upon fact and evidence. So I ask:
1. How did he come to the conclusion that the PNC persecuted the groups he listed?
2. By “and others” did he mean African Guyanese? I suspect not, as this would make somewhat a nonsense of his contention.
3. Were there not significant African Guyanese who were also “persecuted”?
4. Since emigration of an ethnic group from a country may or may not be as a result of an active program, how did he know which emigrants left as a result of feeling victimised and which left for other reasons?
5. Did he conduct surveys?
6. Did he check the other ethnic groups to determine whether they felt similarly persecuted?
The clear implication is that the PPP (the only freely elected party I know in power in Guyana) is persecuting some group – presumably Africans.
My questions to him are:
1. What is the evidence of this persecution?
2. Are Mr. Glenn Lall and Mr. Anand Goolsarran African Guyanese?
3. How does Mr. Bisram distinguish between the natural result of each party providing jobs for its members first in a situation where the vast majority of its members are of one particular ethnic group and ethnic exclusion of the non-members? (This phenomenon was quite visible under the PNC as it is visible now under the PPP. Some would say there is no comparison. However, we are still awaiting the ruling of the court on the Freddie Kissoon vs. Jagdeo case to pronounce on this. Other than this we have only perceptions).
4. Is Mr. Bisram aware that in the rest of the Caribbean the situation is the same, except that we cannot tell who is not in power by the length of hair? One Caribbean politician (whose name I cannot recall) put it this way: “I know how it is. When your party is out of power you suck salt”. This was a politician from a small island in the Caribbean, not Guyana or Trinidad.
Two African Guyanese, who I know left because they found Guyana unbearable under the PNC, come readily to mind. The first is Hubert Williams of “Rodney Man of the Future” fame, who has recently written an informative article on the diaspora. The second is the owner of Phillips Drug store in the ‘80s.
I trust that Mr. Bisram understands that I am asking these questions in the interest of holding those who represent themselves to us as intellectuals, analysts, and social scientists to a higher standard than the ordinary man who simply repeats what he thinks he heard or thought he saw or learnt from his grandmother, or heard from his self-serving politician, or thinks that his particular experience is everyone else’s.
Frederick W. A. Collins
GRA catch EXXON trying to hunch GUYANA over 11 BUS dollars in one shot!!!!
May 06, 2024
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