Latest update February 13th, 2025 6:17 AM
Aug 07, 2014 Features / Columnists, Freddie Kissoon
Let me begin this column with a word on Karen De Souza. I have known her since we were young people together in the WPA. We were student contemporaries at UG. De Souza is the kind of person who would tell you what she believes in and defend her position.
Let me say a word about Shaun Samaroo. I don’t know this gentleman at all. Never met, seen, spoken to him, as far as my memory goes. I cannot remember reading anything on politics by this gentleman, except one item.
I was coming out of Hot and Spicy Restaurant on Albert Street, when this gentleman approached me and implored that I reply to an opinion he read in the Stabroek News. He felt it was my duty. He actually coerced me into doing it. He couldn’t remember who wrote the thing but pointed to “some man who write (sic) in the Stabroek News.”
I checked the SN for that day and found it. It was Shaun Samaroo who stated that the future of Guyana depends on Ministers Frank Anthony and Priya Manickchand. I thought it was the most asinine opinion I read for this year, but went on to say that the gentleman obviously is a supporter of the PPP and is entitled to his views (see my April 8, 2014 column, “I read Christopher Ram and Adam Harris but…”)
Since then I haven’t read anything by this fellow and I have no opinion on him one way or the other. On Tuesday afternoon, I received a call from a friend who reminded me that the PPP will use the Rodney Commission of Inquiry to dirty the PNC and make the PPP look like angels. He then said, “You see what they did to Karen De Souza.” I don’t read the Chronicle, so I couldn’t continue the conversation, but promised him I would consult the item.
I asked Leonard Craig if he read what the Chronicle said about De Souza and he didn’t. So I went to see it for myself. I couldn’t believe Karen De Souza would tell the Rodney Commission what Samaroo quoted her as saying. I called Karen while having lunch with Leonard Craig and Dennis Atwell of the AFC. Karen denied what Shaun Samaroo wrote about her, but couldn’t find the Samaroo report. I told her I would get a Chronicle and get back to her. Craig, Atwell and I went to Bourda Market to get a Chronicle. No success. Craig went into the Bourda constabulary office, but they said they didn’t have a Chronicle.
I drove home and went online, read what Samaroo wrote, then called Karen for a comment. This is what Samaroo quoted Karen as telling the Rodney Commission; “She noted that for her and others who lived under such harsh authoritarian conditions…the experience is far removed from today’s Guyana.” I requested Karen to quote her for this article and she agreed.
First, she told me that she did not say what Samaroo attributed to her. Secondly, she said she could not possibly have spoken in such terms because it would have contradicted what she previously told the Commission about today’s Guyana. Thirdly, according to De Souza, Samaroo was opportunistic and deceitful in putting it that way. She used the word “context” to denounce what Samaroo did. Fourthly, she agreed that the two systems – Burnham’s days and what we have now – cannot be identical. She went on to add that there is in Guyana today, the continuation of authoritarianism.
Before I conclude this article, let me inform Samaroo that for many of us who lived under Burnham and those who presently live under the PPP, the PPP’s dictatorship is worse. Samaroo may want to put words into the mouth of Karen De Souza, but De Souza knows better.
From the time the Rodney Commission was announced, I wrote I was boycotting it. I opined that it would be a big propaganda circus. And that is what it has been and will be. Samaroo was brought in recently to replace the full-time journalists that covered the Commission. Samaroo was called in to do PR work for the PPP. The De Souza spin debacle will make Samaroo’s task harder. But of course everything now makes sense.
The context of Samaroo’s sycophantic praise of Frank Anthony and Priya Manickchand can now be understood. The Samaroo show in the Chronicle should be another example to the Rodney family of what the PPP has become. Is the Rodney family itself inadvertently desecrating Walter’s name? This is the irony of tragedy and the tragedy of irony.
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