Dear Editor,
The temporary suspension of Channel 6 for four months is a necessity. And it needed to be done with the full force of the presidential executive order to get other media houses to act responsibly in the discharge of their duties.
While I am no great fan of presidential executive orders as they can lead to a situation in which a President, feeling he/she is under siege, can use these excessively. The requir-ement to act was necessary.
The importance of the President’s act is to ensure that Guyanese media houses do not disintegrate to the level of Rwanda that led to the mass killings of hundreds of thousands of people. Had a certain radio station not broadcast the need for ethnic cleansing in Rwanda I would have agreed that the decision to temporarily close CNS 6 was excessive.
Against the reality of the misuse of the media in Rwanda it was a wise decision to put the full power of the President behind the decision. Else, you would wake up one day and find more people in media houses calling for the killing of other politicians and for civil(?) society calling for the killing of people under the guise of “armed struggle”.
In Guyana already there are calls for killings of people under the guise of “armed struggle” that has possibly been responsible for the Lusignan and Bartica killings.
This is the reality of Guyana.
Yours faithfully,
Cliff Persaud
