The juxtaposition

Jul 27, 2010 Features / Columnists, Freddie Kissoon

In my last Sunday column, I stated that I would look at the enumeration of Mr. Ralph Ramkarran’s life in the struggle for democracy as recounted by him in a letter to the Stabroek News of July 22, last.
Then I would juxtapose fact-sheet with the fight for democracy in Guyana during the rule of Mr. Ramkarran’s party. The deliberate omission of PPP leaders in their defence of their government’s performance is the avoidance of any mention of the length of time the PPP has been in power.
It has been 18 years, and if there is no unorthodox intervention, by the time the next national election comes around, this party would have just missed two decades of domination by one year. By any stretch of the imagination, 19 years is a long time for a group of persons to be in control of a country.
My wife was pregnant with our daughter when as a UG lecturer my union called a strike against the 1989 budget of President Hoyte. In lieu of salary, our strike relief was two hundred dollars a week paid out by Father Malcolm Rodrigues
My daughter is now 21. What does she see in Guyana in 2010? What do Mr. Ramkarran’s two children see? My daughter waits up for me because since she was a baby, I would bring a little goody for her when I come home from teaching in the nights. On May 24, I stopped at Nigel’s Supermarket to get a few items and included were potato snacks for her.
When I came home, there was nothing for her but what she saw was devastating. Some goons attacked me and threw filth all over me. This was not in the age of the PNC dictatorship whose record of fighting against Mr. Ramkarran proudly read off in his public letter. My daughter does know about PNC thugs attacking opposition critics. She was too young then. But she sees it 25 years after the death of President Burnham
This is what my daughter sees in a Guyana that Mr. Ramkarran wrote was not democratic thirty years ago. Is it democratic now? What else does she see? Her father being called all sort of names by no less than the President of Guyana himself. Then he sued me for libel and one week after, she sees him on television calling me those names again.
She sees her father being libeled by a man who can sue her father but cannot be taken to court by her father. What else does she see? She is too young to know about the state control of the media but in today’s Guyana she knows what a gutter newspaper is because each year she sees hundreds of nasty letters on her father by the very newspaper that Mr. Ramkarran says was part of the dictatorship he struggled against.
Try telling my daughter that the Chronicle of yesteryear was bad under the PNC but in today’s Guyana where Mr. Ramkarran’s party hold power, the Chronicle is of a better moral cloth.
So where does this leave the juxtaposition? To answer that, we should look inside Mr. Ramkarran’s record as published by him. After all, the young people like my daughter should know what happened in the past so that they can make the juxtaposition themselves.
Mr. Ramkarran looked at his role in the Arnold Rampersaud trial, a man charged with the capital offence in the seventies by the then Burnham Government. The seventies are long gone. But Mark Benschop was put on trial for treason by the Government of Mr. Ramkarran’s party.
Here is Mr. Ramkarran in his own words; “I was engaged in the defence of scores of PPP members and supporters locked up or charged by the police all over Guyana.” That was Mr. Ramkarran’s politics forty years ago.
Of course, I was around then and I know Mr. Ramkarran is not lying. But juxtapose then and now. Maniram (one name) is a truck driver who was merely hired to drop off protesting school children. The police hauled him in at Brickdam. They slapped three charges against him.
Then memories of what Mr. Ramkarran wrote about came tumbling down for all Guyanese to see. The police confiscated his truck. The police refused to give reasons. This writer spoke to a very senior officer who had the jurisdiction to release the vehicle. He said to me; “Man Freddie don’t ask them things; you know where this is coming from.”
I wonder if Mr. Ramkarran knows what that police officer meant. As the juxtaposition continues in a later column, I will tell Mr. Ramkarran what the officer meant.

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