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Oct 17, 2012 Features / Columnists, Freddie Kissoon
I knew Vic Puran since we were teenagers. For over thirty-five years we remained friends. We became closer when he was to marry into a family in Kitty. I was very close to that family. Our friendship deepened when we became UG students at the same time. He read for a literature degree; I did history.
Strangely, our opposing politics did not come between us. In the seventies he was a PPP member and in the eighties, he became an assistant to President Burnham. On campus, he belonged to the UG PYO group, while we formed Students for a Concerned Society and tried to link it with the WPA.
Vic and I were good friends to the point where I often visited his home in Shell Road, Kitty, and got to know his parents well. His younger sister and I were particularly fond of each other, but the relationship remained Platonic. After our graduation, she married a radical South African professor and migrated, and I married a fellow Wortmanville-born youth, Janet Mohamed.
In the eighties, Vic became an assistant to President Burnham. By that time I was a radical WPA activist, but Vic Puran was never hostile to the WPA. I repeat, for someone close to the Burnham Government,Vic Puran was never aggressive to WPA personnel. In all his years with President Burnham, Vic’s cordial relationship with me continued. I think Vic Puran was psychologically astute to know the WPA was essentially a patriotic party that wanted good for Guyana and that he, Vic Puran, should not do anything to harm the WPA.
After he fell out with the Burnham Government, he took a job as a sales attendant in the spare parts store of the Rahaman family on Russell Street. It was from there that he planned his entry into the legal profession. He became a lawyer and gradually earned a name for himself.
The part of Vic Puran that we forget is that long before there was any attempt to form a political party outside of the PNC to oppose the Jagdeo regime, Vic had done so. He faced ridicule from many of his associates but he persisted, even doing his own television programme on Channel 6.
He told me that he gave up because he simply did not get the numbers in the party that he needed to keep it going. The birth of the Alliance for Change came a few years later. The long friendship I shared with Vic Puran ran into jeopardy after he became the prosecutor in the treason trial.
For me, it was difficult to see Vic in the same light. I met him in Tiger Bay at the Foreman Shoe Shop that he purchased and asked him why he of all persons would take such an offer from the State. I saw the guilt in his face and he said to me he saw the evidence and therefore he agreed to take the case.
Our friendship ran into further trouble when I opened the Kaieteur News and saw that he had attacked me in a letter. He asked where Mark Benschop, Lincoln Lewis and I were when the three protestors were shot in Linden. He said that we failed our supporters and that he spit on us. Something was not right.
Since the early seventies Vic Puran and I got along excellently. I intervened to get Vic released when CANU locked in him up for obstruction of police investigation. I knew CANU’s deputy head, Vibert Innis well. I intervened with the UG authorities when he told me his daughter had a problem of victimization in the law department.
It was Vic Puran who turned up a Saturday morning at my home on Hadfield Street to ask my advice on his relation as a lawyer, with Roger Khan. My humble advice to him was to stay in politics and stay away from drug clients.
Why then would Vic write a letter in the newspaper and say he spit on me? But he did that. This “spit” letter was followed by another in which he praised President Ramotar as a good man who will change Guyana.
I met Vic and asked him about what I considered was his treachery. He said he was finished completely with politics. Then he told me why. I was speechless. I will not reveal that secret unless I get permission from Vic’s business partner, the co-owner of his agricultural farm which he was visiting when he died.
This gentleman and I grew up together, his parents accepted me as their son. My wife was extremely fond of this gentleman with a mountain of memories. This very man turned up at the People’s Parliament with his wife (whom I introduced him to on the Kitty seawall many moons ago) and spent an hour with me last Saturday evening.
I don’t think my wife and Vic’s friend, who is my good friend, would want me to reveal what Vic told me as the reason for publicly supporting the Government. But I have an obligation to my editor and would tell him if he asks.
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