– UNC MP
(Trinidad Express) Opposition MP Dr Tim Gopeesingh on Saturday charged that Government was carrying out a policy of political discrimination that was targeting one particular ethnic grouping in T&T.
“I don’t think the Prime Minister is a racist at all but he is practising inequality and massive discrimination,” Gopeesingh said at a news conference at his St Clair office.
Gopeesingh said he has known Manning for the past 30 years and had gone to university with him and believed the Prime Minister’s “best friends are East Indians”.
But he said, “What you practice as a political leader and a Prime Minister may be not the way you behave personally as an individual.”
Gopeesingh also said he was not going to apologise for the comments he made in Parliament on Friday about there being “ethnic cleansing”, and that most of the Indian doctors have had to leave the Port of Spain General Hospital.
“I felt compelled to bring it in the debate in Parliament rather than hiding it because I would have been doing an injustice to the society, particularly when people’s lives are at stake and when I see lives are being lost because of negligence and people being operated on by junior doctors who never should be practising in Trinidad and Tobago,” Gopeesingh said.
He said those junior doctors were being given licences to practise by what he called the Government’s forming of a parallel medical board, as opposed to the constitutionally appointed Medical Board.
The Government has maintained that all foreign doctors being allowed to practise in T&T are properly licensed and qualified to do their jobs.
Gopeesingh said highly qualified doctors of Indian descent from this country were being turned away from key jobs in the public health sector or were leaving out of frustration.
“This Government is guilty, and guilty of massive discrimination in the health sector,” Gopeesingh said.
Leader of Opposition Business in the Senate Wade Mark, who joined Gopeesingh at Saturday’s news conference, accused the Manning administration of “pursuing a practice of selective discrimination particularly as it relates to employment in the Public Service”.
On Friday evening, as he responded to Gopeesingh’s comments on ethnic cleansing, Manning said the Parliament was not the place for “that kind of talk” even if the Opposition MP had the evidence to prove his claim. He called for Gopeesingh to withdraw the remarks.