(Reprinted from Wednesday’s Trinidad Express)
The Commonwealth Finance Ministers now attending a meeting in Guyana will not be able to do anything directly to prevent the government of that country from perpetuating its blatant discrimination against the privately-owned Stabroek News. Non-interference in a country’s internal affairs is an established principle unless, of course, the state has collapsed and people’s lives are at obvious risk and, even here, the case is not always that clear-cut. But the newspaper’s personnel would have won added international attention by its picketing of the meeting to protest their government’s continuing failure to resume public sector advertisements which were discontinued since November last year.
The government wants the region and the world to believe that it made an “economic decision” to shift state advertisements to the also privately-owned Kaieteur News. But let nobody be fooled – it was really a “political decision” by President Bharrat Jagdeo who contends the Stabroek News is “hostile” and “biased” against his government.
But whatever President Jagdeo’s political perceptions, blinded as politicians usually are by their own naked self-interest as opposed to the population’s, a government does not have the right to take taxpayers’ money and use it in a manner that is patently discriminatory and is intended to punish its critics and reward its media friends.
As custodian of the state’s resources, as Stabroek News’ David de Caires has tirelessly pointed out, the government must distribute these in a manner that is fair and in keeping with the interests of the entire population. Indeed, Article 7 of the Declaration of Chapultepec, to which the Guyana government has subscribed, insists that the granting or withdrawal of government advertising may not be used to reward or punish the media or individual journalists.
What goes around comes around in that it is this same party which now forms the government that suffered severely from a restriction in press freedom when in opposition under the Burnham government. Now this party, which is now in power, is behaving in this Burnham-like manner. What was wrong for Mr Burnham, then, is equally wrong for Mr Jagdeo now, the present Guyanese president doing a great disservice to the long-standing democratic dreams of his people who for decades fought against dictatorship of one kind or the other.
