Winston Murray’s grammar, semantics or epistemology?

Apr 20, 2009 Features / Columnists, Freddie Kissoon

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Mr. Winston Murray resigned from the Chairmanship of the PNC because of the imbroglio that emerged over his participation in the forum on the EPA at the Convention Centre sponsored by President Jagdeo last September.

At a press conference, Mr. Aubrey Norton aired words that appeared to have contradicted the position of support for the President’s stance on the EPA by Murray. After his resignation, strangely, Norton, not known to back down from a fight, never responded to Murray.

If Mr. Murray was operating in Europe, especially in the British ambience, he would have encountered serious problems with his leader. Only his constituency could have saved him. Let us trace the strategic mistake of Mr. Murray for which the media let him off the hook.

His attitude to the EPA forum appeared in a letter in the September 10 edition of the Stabroek News as a response to my column of September 6, castigating Mr. Murray for appearing at the EPA discussion and offering endorsement of President Jagdeo’s discovery of the fault-lines in the EPA (which were exaggerated by President Jagdeo and which Mr. Murray ought to know by now).

In that September essay of mine, I saw a contradiction in the PNC’s boycott of Carifesta and Mr. Murray’s incisive alignment with President Jagdeo’s EPA findings. It just didn’t make sense. It still does not make sense.

If you boycotted a campaign by the President (in this case the hosting of Carifesta) on the principled stand that the event would not engender unity in a country that is so tempestuously divided, then how could the opposition’s offer of intellectual camaraderie to President Jagdeo on his EPA thing bring about unity?

The rally cry is the need for Guyana to be a democracy free of ethnic tensions. If Carifesta could not have dissolved our traditional nemesis, then how would opposition support for a reworked EPA have done it?

Mr. Murray then showed me in his letter how it would happen. The explanation was not elegantly and ingeniously argued. In participating in the EPA confabulation then offering a poor argument as to why he did, Mr. Murray stumbled terribly. In the European context, he would have come in for severe criticism if he had belonged to the British Conservative Party.

Here is the reasoning of Mr. Murray as advanced in that particular Stabroek News correspondence; “In the case Carifesta…we (the PNC) could not in good conscience make a pretence of celebration and unity when there were deep concerns about governance of, and fractiousness in our society. In the case of the EPA, Mr. Kissoon cunningly casts the framework of the stakeholder consultation within the context of ‘an invitation by President Jagdeo to denounce the EPA’.”

Mr. Murray then went on to describe what President Jagdeo wrote in his invitation. It is this part of the Stabroek News letter that made me feel that Mr. Murray is perhaps practicing what he is accusing me of –cunning use of the way words are used.

Here is Mr. Murray’s citation of the President; “The activity (the EPA consultations) would be dedicated to critically examining the entire document with a view of highlighting those elements that constitute risks for Caricom.”

Surely, Mr. Murray as one of Guyana’s most experienced politicians cannot say that he didn’t know that before the September 2008 meeting at the Convention Centre, President Jagdeo publicly said, first in June then twice afterwards, that he is not signing the EPA because it has too many flaws and it was not in Guyana’s interest. Mr. Jagdeo in that June pronouncement and subsequent to that never said “parts of” he said “the EPA.”

My point is that I did nothing cunning as Mr. Murray accused me of to cast President Jagdeo’s invitation as one intended to denounce the EPA. That was the exact purpose of the stakeholders’ consultations. Mr. Murray is either playing a game of grammar, semantics or epistemology with me. I am not amused.

My dictionary has over three thousand pages. It is a monster of a book; 12 by 10 inches. It is Webster Third New International Dictionary, edited by Philip Babcock Cove. Merriam Publishing Co., Massachusetts, 1976. Here are its definitions of “denounce”: (1) -“to pronounce to be blameworthy,” (2) -“stigmatize or charge, especially publicly, unequivocally, and indignantly” (3) – “to inform against,” (4)-“inveigh against publicly.” The dictionary went on to define “denouncement” as “public accusation.”

Where was Mr. Murray in June and at the consultation when President Jagdeo was speaking at the Convention Centre? Apart from interrupting the EU Ambassador with caustic comments on the EPA, Mr. Jagdeo’s main delivery was a denouncement of the EPA. Hope to hear from you, Winston!

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