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New York Institute calls on Guyana President to repudiate racist Guyana Chronicle editorial

Caribbean Guyana Institute for Democracy (CGID)

June 24, 2008

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE

Contact: Jevon Suralie, Director of Communications

New York Institute calls on Guyana President to repudiate racist Guyana Chronicle editorial

The New York based Caribbean Guyana Institute for Democracy is blasting Guyana’s State owned newspaper, the Guyana Chronicle, for a “racist” editorial which it published yesterday, June 22, 2008

The Institute in a statement said “Five days after President Bharrat Jagdeo told a press conference in New York that there is no racial polarization in Guyana and that there is no racism against African-Guyanese, the State-owned Guyana Chronicle newspaper, run by Jagdeo’s office, published a most racist, venomous, gutter editorial directed against its President, Rickford Burke.”

The CGID observed that the Chronicle editorial titled, “Burke barking up the wrong tree,” with its not so subtle threats, could only have been written by “bigots whose singular specialty is the promotion of the ruling PPP’s despicable and pernicious Apan Jhaat brand of racism, while sowing seeds of division and hatred in Guyana.

“What else but a self serving and insidious racism could be determined by the following statement of the editorial?: “Where was this Burke man when the PNC led by Forbes Burnham closed down the Leonora Sugar Estate, one of the finest sugar estates in the country at that time? Indeed the Indo-Guyanese suffered marginalization under the PNC, but for people like Burke and others, the word marginalization did not exist then. How appropriate?

Or that Burke is racially partisan or indifferent by the imputation of the question posed as follows: Did Burke and his cohorts know that at the time the Leonora Estate was ruthlessly closed down some 95 percent of the labor force there were Indians? Was this not marginalization of Indo-Guyanese in its most evil and brutal form?

The editorial also suggests that African Guyanese did not own homes in Guyana, stating; “Afro-Guyanese who have never dreamt of owning a house in their lifetime under the PNC are now proud owners of houses.”

Quoting President Jagdeo’s comments to reporters in New York that racial insecurities are being fueled by extremists, the Institute said “We now know who those extremists are. They work in the Office of the President and at the newspapers that office controls. CGID contended that these individuals “run around Guyana like pseudo Nazis, peddling bigotry and hate so as to maintain a highly polarized society in their quest to perpetuate their Apan Jhaat politics.”

The organization said that in spite of President Jagdeo’s deceitful efforts in New York, that suggest a willingness to engage in sound discourse, the editorial sadly demonstrates that he and his cohorts are comfortable pursuing the PPP’s punt trench politics which they have imposed on Guyana, and which they use to spread seeds of racism - much like a yard fowl that scatters the grains that is fed to it by a farm wife.”

The Institute called on President Bharrat Jagdeo to strongly repudiate the racist editorial and to direct the management of the Guyana Chronicle to apologize for its bigotry and racist pandering.

The CGID also called on Caricom heads of Government, to whom President Jagdeo had complained of CGID criticism of his government’s undemocratic and racist policies, to urge Jagdeo to direct his office to desist from such racist attacks on individuals and institutions who are critical of his Government’s failures in the areas of democratic governance and human rights, and to respect the rule of law, the fundamental right of expression, and to promote the essential racial harmony so sadly absent in Guyana today.

Tags: apan jhaat, bharrat jagdeo, guyana, Rickford Burke