Mr Ramkarran carries on smartly with views that the Guyanese people ought to reject

Dear Editor,

I am responding to two issues in recent editions of the Stabroek News. In your Sunday edition under the caption, `Guyana Times already getting over 19% of state ads,’ the following lines appeared; “…when Stabroek News ads were cut off, the Kaieteur News sided with the Government… the KN hierarchy instructed its staff not to offer solidarity to this newspaper.” I have been associated with Kaieteur News for a long time and when the ads were withdrawn, I denounced them in my columns on several occasions. One of your letter writers (can’t remember if it was Ms. Harper or Ms. Dias) wrote a letter castigating the attitude of the Kaieteur News and she specifically mentioned with the exception of Freddie Kissoon.

The second area of interest to me is the two consecutive letters supporting Ralph Ramkarran as the PPP’s presidential candidate.  I will not comment on Ramkarran’s candidacy as against the others because I do not support any of them since for me they are replicas of Mr. Jagdeo.

But there are some dimensions of Mr. Ramkarran’s politics that need to be brought into the public domain. Quite a lot of nonsense comes from PPP elites and are not known because they are contained in the Chronicle and few persons including journalists read the Chronicle and if they do, not often. Two weeks ago, I asked two of the hierarchy of the Kaieteur News if they had read Mr. Ramkarran’s sycophantic endorsement of the policies of Mr. Jagdeo in the Chronicle, and they didn’t.

Mr. Ramkarran has been writing an alarming column in the Mirror which is faithfully reproduced every week in the Chronicle. Here are some examples of his thought. He opines that the demonstrations in Iran over the presidential election were a direct attack on the Iranian Revolution. Not once, Mr. Ramkarran mentioned that the demonstrations were over rigged elections. There aren’t words to describe the situation where a PPP leader could overlook blatantly rigged elections in another country when the PPP itself, including Mr. Ramkarran fought against fraudulent elections in Guyana. Important to note is that there is nothing historic about the Iranian Revolution. The post-Shah regime turned out to be a government of terror similar to Jacobinism in the French Revolution.

A second example is his opportunism when examining the historical record of power-sharing. He offered his enumeration of the PPP’s overtures but chose to ignore the 1985 covenant where the PNC and PPP would have entered a joint slate. Had he acknowledged this event, it would have dented Jagan’s so-called man of principle image. It was David Hinds who chose to correct him. Thirdly, Mr. Ramkarran has a bed-fellow in Vishnu Bisram. In two consecutive columns, he heaped lavish praise on Bisram. Are we about to see another Bisram poll in which the findings will show that a substantial percentage favours Mr. Ramkarran as the PPP’s candidate for 2011?

If ordinary PPP members will be decisive in picking a candidate then Mr. Ramkarran has self-destructed. While the other competitors have shut their mouths and cannot be accused of obnoxious viewpoints, Mr. Ramkarran carries on smartly with perceptions that the Guyanese people ought to reject. Finally, I have left this for the last because I didn’t want readers to feel the judgement in this letter was personally determined. But in quite a number of his columns in the Mirror and Chronicle he takes (digs – his word) at me that are quite libelous. He knows I wouldn’t sue so he continues his digs.

In one of his digs, he adopted the bent of some of his PPP colleagues in what can be interpreted as suggesting that when I was at University, I stole library books. I hope Mr. Ramkarran knows that even if I did that, I would not have been ashamed because books educate the mind. An elementary police investigation would reveal that there have been thefts of public money by powerful politicians serving in the Government of Guyana since 1992.

Yours faithfully,
Frederick Kissoon