Freddie Kissoon replies to M. Maxwell on the nature of the PNC

Oct 29, 2012 Letters

Dear Editor,
I do not reply to anonymous writers and I am hoping that M. Maxwell is a real person. I would appreciate it if he can let me know if he is. If I do not hear from him directly (he can get my e-mail address from the KN editors or pen a reply to my enquiry), I will not respond to him in the future. I am assuming that Maxwell is a male that lives outside of Guyana.
There are three points to note about his long, rambling treatment of my historical analysis of the PNC in last Sunday edition of KN. First, he thinks that the PNC leader Forbes Burnham was power drunk. I have been writing commentaries for more than two decades consisting of thousands of columns. Surely, Mr. Maxwell cannot miss the plethora of my opinions on the authoritarian instincts of Forbes Burnham. Mr. Burnham was so dictatorial that he was vindictive to my wife just to get at me. Anyone who thinks he/she can situate Mr. Burnham in the context of respect for rights is a fool. Burnham had no tolerance for dissenting politics. So on this score, Maxwell should not fault me.
Secondly, the unchanging nature of the PNC. I can assure Mr. Maxwell, I am under no illusion about the ingrained bad habits of the PNC. I can assure Mr. Maxwell that I am fully aware that the PNC’s collective leadership has terrible negative traits that sadly will never go away. I can tell Mr. Maxwell, I associate with lots of people from both the working class and the middle class, all of whom belong to the communities in this country that the PNC draws its strength from. Among these people are some of my good friends. None of them believe the PNC wants to redeem itself. None of them believe the PNC can be trusted to run a government again by itself. None of them believe the PNC is the future of Guyana.
As a footnote to this second point, I will direct Maxwell to the tone of Carl Greenidge’s letter to me in last Sunday’s KN. You would not expect a PNC leader that has been out of power for twenty years to be using that style of language to an anti-dictatorship citizen like me. But this is the PNC. I was totally shocked at Greenidge’s attitude in his letter that asked for an apology. Let me repeat the apology to him here and now.
Look at the PNC’s leader’s attitude to me and David Hinds.
This is the PNC this country knows for over sixty years. At the first tripartite meeting between President Ramotar’s team, APNU and AFC, my UG contract termination was raised by the AFC, particularly its leader Khemraj Ramjattan and Gerhard Ramsaroop. Ramotar said his government had nothing to do with the contract termination. Gail Teixeira supported her President. Ramjattan and Ramsaroop were not amused. David Granger, Debra Backer and Rupert Roopnarine stood in cold silence.
Then Ramotar got annoyed and told Ramsaroop that all he is doing is calling Freddie Kissoon’s name. Roopnarine suddenly found his voice and said to Ramotar, “Six times,” meaning that Ramsaroop called my name six times. This is what happens when one associates with the PNC.
This same PNC stood silent and remains reticent on the harassment of David Hinds. As for Rupert Roopnarine, if he is a Rodneyite then trust me, Hitler was a fanatical admirer of the Jews who loved them dearly.
I live in Guyana and I mix totally with the people that make up the PNC constituencies and I can tell the Guyanese people that it is my opinion that if there is a general election tomorrow, there will be a substantial decrease in PNC votes or APNU votes or whatever name the PNC wants to call itself. So I want Maxwell to know that my training as both a Historian and Social Scientist will not allow me to gloss over the monstrous faults of the PNC. Where Maxwell and I differ is on the role of the PNC in the sixties. His treatment of this period is childish, nonsensical, un-academic and lacked any historical treatment.
I honestly don’t want to dignify Maxwell’s emotional ranting about what occurred in the sixties. But it is foolish to see the sixties as bad guy versus a worst guy. Finally as to the pursuance of racist politics in the fifties and sixties, Maxwell ought to be ashamed of himself that he has read nothing that Kwayana wrote about the PPP’s open embrace of race politics from the fifties onwards.
Frederick Kissoon

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Freddie Kissoon replies to M. Maxwell on the nature of the PNC

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