Dear Editor,
After reading the very mean, foul attack on Mr David de Caires, Editor-in-Chief of the Stabroek News, by Rickford Burke in last Saturday’s edition (May 24) of this newspaper (‘Stabroek News has sold its soul’), I wondered whether this is the same individual who manages an organization in New York that carries the strange, convoluted name of ‘Caribbean Guyana Insitute for Democracy’? Or if he is that political fellow who, in a letter published in the Guyana Chronicle of February 13, 2008, had boldly called on Mr Robert Corbin to “resign” as leader of the People’s National Congress Reform (PNCR) and savagely ridiculed him?
If this is the same Burke, then he would also be the rabble-rouser who craves the publicity offered him to inflate a seemingly enormous personal ego as he ventures into political engagements, spewing rabid racism. Not just against well known Guyanese of the repute of de Caires, but also in the venom he often pours on a broad mass of our diverse ethnic communities with claims like “the Indian Guyana Government attempts to drive blacks into servitude…”
In his vicious personal attack on de Caires, Burke accused the Stabroek News of having “sold its soul” to the PPP/C government for the restoration of public sector advertisements to the newspaper.
He went on to make the reckless claim that the SN was now “pursuing an anti-black agenda…” offering in the process a few examples of individuals whose perspectives and politics he naturally fully shares, but without any regard for accuracy.
As one of the regional journalists involved in seeking the resumption of public sector advertisements to the SN, and who went public quite early in denouncing the government’s decision to suspend the flow of those advertisements, I happen to know that no deal was ever cut between President Bharrat Jagdeo’s administration and de Caires on behalf of his newspaper.