The Guyanese and his passport: Nineteen years after

Apr 24, 2011 Features / Columnists, Freddie Kissoon

Almost the entire nation of Guyana would not be familiar with the name Hubert Williams. He was a journalist in the seventies with the Guyana Graphic. With his Graphic colleague, Rickey Singh, he took up permanent residence in Barbados after coming into conflict with Prime Minister Forbes Burnham.
Singh became a mouthpiece for the PPP Government after 1992 (still is; see his condemnation of Tacuma Ogunseye) while Williams migrated to Boston in the US.
The funny thing about these two men is that they are psychologically stuck in the past. In the worst case of a torn psyche, Singh and Williams remind us of the idealist who fell in love with the communist revolution and became blind to its reign of terror. All he can see and want to see is the past. The past dictates his psychology.
Singh and Williams have been unable to see anything wrong with the PPP Government these past nineteen years. For them, Burnham was and is the culprit, never mind the things the Jagdeo Government does today make Burnham look like the Pope.
Well Williams, very late in life, has traveled on the road to Damascus. Writing in the South Florida Times (April 22) in a column titled, “Travails of a Guyanese Abroad,” Williams documents the troubles, embarrassments and headaches he endured in all the countries he traveled, without exception (including the Caribbean), by just being Guyanese and having a Guyanese passport.
He even describes how travel officials of two countries insisted that they retain his passport during his stay.
The article ends without Williams expressing a sense of déjà vu. When he fled Guyana under Burnham, this was the way Guyanese were greeted by most, if not all the countries in the world. It has been nineteen years since the PNC Government left office, and déjà vu visited Mr. Williams, but he didn’t mention it.
One would like Mr. Williams to follow up his essay with another one. This time not a descriptive piece, but an analytical commentary on why Guyana is still treated in this condescending manner twenty-five years after the death of the Guyanese leader Messrs Singh and Williams so hate.
If Williams decides to make this reflection we need to remind him of some observations of the President of Guyana, who so far he has not penned a column on. President Jagdeo informed Guyanese that we have one of the best constitutions in the world in terms of consulting the citizenry. Secondly, Guyana is more advanced than most countries in this hemisphere in terms of rights.
Thirdly, Guyana escaped the wrath of the global meltdown two years ago and did not suffer the economic consequences of its Caribbean neighbours.
Strangely though, we do not see this “excellent” country being treated by the nations of the world any different from the prevailing attitudes of the seventies.
Williams is a practising journalist, and if he decides to unearth answers as to why he and his Guyanese passport were so shabbily treated around the world, he may want to look at the statement of Dr Roger Luncheon about the media made a few days ago.
The long-serving politician concluded that some people (he was referring to the media) want to make Guyana and Guyanese look bad. Make no mistake the “some people” are the private media houses.
The “some people” are never and will never be the ruling party and the Government of Guyana. We need to remind Mr. Williams that his travails are no doubt connected to the daily perversities that come out of the behaviour of the ruling party and the Government of Guyana.
As a matter of fact, should I ever meet with Williams, I would like to ask him if he ever endured a public cussing down from Prime Minister Burnham. Did Burnham cuss-up journalists in public, Mr. Williams?
This insinuation that the media put Guyana in a bad light must be unnerving to Williams. It was Williams’s crusading journalism that irritated Prime Minister Forbes Burnham that caused Williams to seek “shelter” in Barbados. We wonder if Williams is having a second episode of déjà vu, meaning that he must be able to see that it was not Mr. Burnham alone who was intolerant of crusading journalism in Guyana.
Interestingly, it was Mr. Williams’s long time friend, Rickey Singh, who was the last person to visit Stabroek News chief, David de Caires before he died. We wonder what Mr. de Caires said to Singh about the harassment of Stabroek News long after President Burnham had passed away. So will we see a column by Williams titled, “Twenty-five years after I ran from Burnham?”

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