Attacks on the press

Mar 15, 2024 Editorial

Kaieteur News – The press is coming under fire again, in fact almost every week some of the vilest comments are directed at this newspaper by no less a person than the Vice President, Bharrat Jagdeo.

It is nothing new, but in this season of political silliness we wish to place on record our concerns. In a recent report the New York-based Committee of Protect Journalists (CPJ) stated that attacks on journalists’ lives and liberty remained at near record-levels in 2023, documenting 99 journalists killed worldwide, the highest total since 2015. CPJ also documented 320 journalists imprisoned for their work as of the December 1 date of its annual prison census — near the global all-time high of more than 360 a year earlier. Israel made a rapid ascent on the 2023 list, becoming the source for over 75% of journalist killings, and rising to the sixth-worst jailer of journalists after the start of the Israel-Gaza war on October 7.

At least 78 journalists and media workers were killed in direct connection with their work, and CPJ is investigating the motives for the killings of eight others to determine whether they were work-related. Of the global total of 99 killings, 77 occurred in Israel and the Occupied Palestinian Territory and Lebanon – the Israel-Gaza war zone – and 72 of those killings were Palestinian journalists and media workers.

Outside the deaths in the Israel-Gaza war, killings dropped markedly compared to 2022, from 69 to 22 deaths. But this declining number is not an indication that journalism has become safer in other parts of the world. Indeed, CPJ’s annual prison census found that 2023 jailing of journalists – another key indicator of conditions for journalists and press freedom – remain close to record highs established in 2022.

In Guyana, the work of Kaieteur News, the people of Kaieteur News are in the firing line, made the objects of palpable rage, by a group of men in the PPP/C Government, who will stop at nothing to suppress the press, suppress truth. Stop the press, stop KN, stop the revelations about how the oil is mismanaged, stop how the many people around it are mostly bent towards corruptions, and stop all this from being presented in honest fashion to Guyanese, and a watching world. Given that Guyana now has oil, and in the kind of quantities that it does, the eyes of the world are sharply fixed on every development occurring here, because of this precious commodity that the Western world needs so much.

Oil is known to bring its own diseases and other curses, so there is vigilance the world over, on what surrounds it when it is discovered. In Guyana, secrecy has been the thick shroud that governs how this national oil patrimony is handled. The more the government tries to run, the more it corners itself, falls into a hole. The more the government works overtime to cover-up, the more of what is unacceptable comes to light. The more the government lashes out at those daring to peer behind the curtains of secrecy and pull them back, the more determined those attacked and lashed become in pursuing the scent of corruptions that grow stronger by the minute.

This is where we are at KN. If the objective is to terrorize into surrender, then consider that a failed objective from right now. This oil patrimony is too vital to the nation’s interests, too significant to the people expecting so much from it, to be left to what government, or leaders, say that that is happening with it. Better governments and cleaner men than those we have in Guyana have been near oil, and only the worst of devastations has been the lot of dependent citizens of those countries. There is no secret about the kind of governments and leaders that Guyanese have had; they are not what inspires, or comforts that the nation is in good hands. We must be watchful like never before, and we commit to doing so. To those who we have work to do, and we will do it, by God’s grace.

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Bharrat Jagdeo, Committee of Protect Journalists (CPJ), CONCERNS, newspaper, Vice President

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