(Editorial reprinted from yesterday’s Trinidad Express)
Guyanese have only to go back to the bad old days of the regime of the late and not widely lamented Forbes Burnham to realise that Caribbean leaders are loath to intervene in what they perceive to be the internal affairs of other countries, however significantly those affairs run counter to the democracy in which they all claim to believe.
We refer, in this particular instance, to silence coming from the leaders of regional governments, even as Guyana’s Stabroek News continues to be hurt by the PPP/C government’s advertising boycott over the last 16 months and which, far from coming to a welcome end, has in fact been deepened.
As we have stated, the boycott has been ongoing but two recent examples demonstrate the undemocratic determination of Mr Bharrat Jagdeo’s increasingly embattled regime. Instead of the government seeking the widest dissemination of advertisements of two of its own declared important projects, it has taken good care to ensure that the paper has not been included in the advertising to do with its citizens’ security programme and the conservancy adaptation programme.
In the past, the government has sought to excuse the placing of its advertisements only in the Kaieteur News and the Guyana Chronicle on what it claims to be those two publications’ higher circulation (and state ownership respectively) but it stands to reason that with respect to, for example, citizens’ security, if the army and police are looking for recruits nationwide, they would be expected to place ads in all the newspapers.
When, as has happened, state-owned entities like the Guyana Power and Light and the Guyana Sugar Corporation, according to the Stabroek, also follow the lead of the government, it seems certain, as the paper has concluded, that an “iron-fisted grip” is being used to target independent voices such as the Stabroek, whose personnel risked injury and worse to stand up to (the dictatorship).
According to the now-again embattled paper, “the ads boycott… has been adamantly condemned by broad sections of the Guyanese society and by media groups both here and abroad. The government has not budged from its entrenched position even though several proposals have been made by Stabroek News and others for equitable and transparent distribution of these taxpayers’ funded ads”.
What this shows is that Mr Jagdeo, in the present, does not believe in press freedom-just like Mr Burnham in the past. Will Guyana, the question must be asked, ever be truly free?
