Pianto della figlia

May 29, 2013 Features / Columnists, Freddie Kissoon

The daughter of Vic Puran has made a strong plea in the newspapers for justice for her father whom she alleged was murdered.
Before we proceed, protocol is in order. I did a column on Vic Puran the day after he died and offered my condolence to the family of a man I knew closely, since we were twenty years of age. I can understand as every other human, the agony of his daughter. I hope her pleas do not fall on deaf ears.
During the trial of Saddam Hussein, his eldest daughter, Raghad, spoke of how good a father he was and condemned his trial as farcical. Could Raghad have saved her father? She probably could have done so if during the long years her mother and siblings had confronted Hussein and told him that he could not have used torture, imprisonment and murder as methods to fight those who opposed him.
Maybe in Arab societies the wife and daughters are not allowed to castigate the male head of the household. But if Raghad couldn’t speak out to save other daughters why should the world have listened to her?
When dictators, mafia bosses and robbers killed people, they leave crying family members of their victims. Two Muslim fanatics murdered a soldier senselessly on a street in London last week. The soldier left a crying wife and a baby behind. These two fanatics should be jailed for life. Why should we show tolerance for the perpetrators when punishment visits them?
In human society you cannot kill other humans because they accuse you of corrupt government or stealing from your bank or for public disagreement with your behaviour. You cannot go about killing the prosecution witnesses in your criminal trial.
Hussein became a victim of his own method. If the trial was a masquerade so were the trials of his detractors that he prosecuted in his kangaroo courts. Children must stop their parents from brutalizing innocent people. They must confront their parents when their parents descend into the culture of brutality.
I met an NIS inspector whom I taught at UG years ago. He told me that his son was one of the three men killed during the July 2012 protest in Linden. A grieving father must live with his grief for the rest of his life. Someone shot and killed that man’s child.
I can only speak for myself, but as a father and husband, there is a strong no-nonsense culture in my family. My wife, but especially my daughter, will never, I repeat, never permit me to do bad things if they know. I mean there would be a virtual war in the family. I brought up my daughter that way. I nurtured her to understand that life has value no matter what is your station in life and she will confront her father if he is doing bad things to other people.
Nadira Jagan was quoted in the newspaper as saying she cannot help hating people who disparaged her mother. But her mother spent over sixty years in politics and was the President of Guyana for three years. In those six decades, good people I know have told me of untold wrongs Mrs. Jagan did to them. I believe them because I saw the viciousness in Mrs. Jagan as she directed her venom to me, my friends and countless others who disagreed with her.
Maybe Nadira would say she didn’t know about those things. Traudl Junge, Hitler’s secretary, in her memoirs said she didn’t know about the Holocaust, but she admitted that the stories about Hitler’s pathology cannot all be lies.
If the PPP government of Guyana should change, there are fathers and mothers who will have to face the courts for serious criminal offences and children will cry for justice but where were the voices of these children when their parents were violating people’s rights?
Vic Puran’s daughter is convinced that her father was murdered. This writer believes her story should not be dismissed at all. But in her cry she opened up an area for speculation. She wants to know why the important people her father knew have not sought justice for Vic.
She disagrees it is the drug lords, because they would not kill her father because he was “the best legal mind available.” But drug lords the world over don’t care about the brilliance of people they kill. That is not a factor they take into consideration. She said it is not the Government.
How much of her father’s life did she know about and did she speak to him about dangerous waters if she knew? Could she have saved him?
Writer’s note: the caption is Italian, “Cry of the daughter.”