“I called him here to roast his balls”
Freddie Kissoon column
Kaieteur News
March 22, 2007
It makes perfect sense why a party leader and his colleagues in the hierarchy of their organisation would praise their leader who made it right up to the presidency of the country and during his reign showered immense generosity on them. All over the world you find this characteristic. It is as if it is an expression of human nature.
These people have a strong sense of obligation to their benefactor that it would hurt them psychically should they acknowledge that their hero was a bad politician, especially when he was in power.
It makes perfect sense for an ignorant, illiterate citizen to glorify his president, whether past or present, in the face of immense wrongdoing on the part of their president. Such people are not exposed to education and learning. They don't know better. Either the president was good to them or for racial reason, they would see it as the right thing to do to embrace this person they admire despite the evidence that the ruler was a bad politician.
Such is the reality of Guyana with Cheddi Jagan and Forbes Burnham. PNC leaders will go to their graves without conceding even one point about Burnham's dictatorial policies. Mr. Hamilton Green is getting on in age and there is no indication that he will ever acknowledge that Forbes Burnham did things to this country that seriously harmed it. Don't expect that from Aubrey Norton, Oscar Clarke, Vincent Alexander, Robert Corbin and the rest of PNC big wigs who were close to Burnham.
Many African racists will adhere to the belief that in a racially divided country, it is not in the interest of Africans to denounce Burnham. The enemy is the Indian leader and that is where the struggle is, not in bad-mouthing past African leaders.
An identical situation, so identical that it is incredible to believe, obtains in the PPP. People like Donald Ramotar, Kellawan Lall, Feroze Mohamed, Gail Texieira, Clement Rohee, Ralph Ramkarran see Cheddi Jagan as a god. Some racists in Berbice and elsewhere interpret Guyanese life as a struggle between the PPP representing Indians and the PNC which is an African party. Jagan, for them, represents the Indian triumph.
All of this is what you expect in such kinds of people. This is life and maybe there will always be such people. What is incomprehensible is how educated men and women, schooled for years at the university level, who engage in constant research and whose intellect is above the knowledge of the ordinary man and woman can ignore the evidence of the destruction of Jagan and Burnham and see higher qualities in these two men?
How can trained and learned minds behave like this? How can educated people stoop so low?
In Tuesday's Kaieteur News, former WPA activist from Linden, Mr. Frank Fyffe, in a letter entitled, “How could one have been so blinded to happenings?” questions how the supporters of Burnham cannot see what he was. He wrote; “What has been done (by Burnham) cannot be undone or washed away, and those in denial are only trying to insult our intelligence, as if we are of a different or lesser creation.”
Mr. Fyffe went on to describe some of Burnham's excesses.
Across Georgetown from KN on Saffon Street, Charlestown, to Stabroek News on Robb Street for that same day, Tuesday, March 20, Vishnu Bisram was telling the same story but this time about Jagan.
In a missive with the caption, “Some who criticise Jagan now praise him” informed us that Jagan was certainly a man with many faults. Bisram wrote, “Jagan was also responsible for many ills in the nation.” Bisram didn't describe these morbidities of Jagan but it is useful at this time to refer to what the President told PPP supporters in Berbice at the death anniversary of Cheddi Jagan this month.
After concluding that the media recently was distorting Jagan's image, he admonished PPP supporters for not responding. He urged them to fight Jagan's critics by knowledge. Though the President didn't explain what he meant by “knowledge” it is obvious that he is advocating research on the politics of Dr. Jagan.
But the President should be careful. The roads of research on Cheddi Jagan are paved with the bitumen of revelation, exposure and disappointment. Let PPP supporters go into the university libraries and archives around the world and what they find will be the fruits of selfish and destructive politics.
They can start with their own archives here in Guyana. Forbes Burnham died on August 6, 1985. I urge the researchers to pick up the very first edition of the Mirror after the death of Burnham and read what is on the front page. It is Jagan's declaration (and exclamation because his approach to communism was from his heart and never from his head) that the PPP had now become a fully fledged communist party that had now joined the world bloc of communist parties led by the USSR.
This is not Freddie Kissoon's opinion. Anyone can find this particular copy of the Mirror in the archives. How can an intellectual mind turn away from this kind of damning evidence of betrayal of the Guyanese people by Jagan? With Burnham's passing, Guyana had got a window of opportunity to reclaim its lost democratic institution. But here was Cheddi Jagan, without consulting his party membership, the different interest groups that made up civil society and the tiny business community, declaring that his socialist party was now transformed into a communist outfit. In whose interest and for what purpose?
The evidence that dents Jagan's political credibility is there and even if his protégés and party racists do not want to see it, educated people should accept it for what it is worth. It is the same with Burnham.
In his case, the evidence is mountainous. I will end with one example I believe symbolises the nature of the man. We owe it to Adam Harris and the late Cecil Griffith for publishing the story I will now repeat. Cecil Griffith of GBC was summoned to the pool side at Burnham's residence on Vlissengen Road. Burnham was having a swim. Griffith asked Burnham why was Henry Josiah present. Burnham told Griffith, “I called him here to roast his balls.”
Burnham had accused Josiah, a state media employee, of printing an inaccuracy about him. Is this the way a President speaks to employees of the state? Wasn't Josiah humiliated? But this was Burnham. This was what the man was made of.
How can any educated human being who passed through a university hall fail to see the true nature of these two past presidents? I guess we will never understand how the human mind works.