Following a late night meeting on Tuesday, Freddie Kissoon was returned as a columnist for the Kaieteur News, just a day after he was told he would no longer write for the newspaper.
Kissoon yesterday told this newspaper that the meeting was arranged by activist and commentator Mark Benschop and he met with publisher Glen Lall and attorney Nigel Hughes, who acted as a mediator between the two.
According to Kissoon, his daily column will now be limited to five days a week. He said this was based on a request by him and as a result no columns from him will be seen in the pages of the newspaper on Mondays and Saturdays. Kissoon said at the end of the day, he was happy that he stood up for his dignity as “one should not be abused.”
He noted that he did not go to Lall, but rather that the meeting was arranged. “There was no bitter exchange between the two of us and I must say that Mr Hughes conducted the meeting very well,” he said.
A column from Kissoon was published in yesterday’s edition of the newspaper.
On Tuesday, Kissoon had suggested that the pulling of his column was linked to the selection of the publisher’s close friend Donald Ramotar as the PPP’s presidential candidate.
However, Lall said the issue was an internal one that the management of the newspaper was attempting to resolve. Lall, who admitted that Ramotar was a close family friend, said that Kissoon crossed the line with a recent column he wrote. He added that things got heated between them on Monday and he decided to discontinue the column.
According to Lall, his issue with Kissoon stemmed from a column he penned last month on the fate of several squatters living close to the Turkeyen embankment. He said that the matter touched him and he subsequently sent two persons, including a reporter, to investigate it. However, Lall said on investigating it was found that what the columnist had written was untrue. He noted that he was upset, since the credibility of his newspaper was at stake and as a result the newspaper carried a retraction.
According to Lall, since then Kissoon had been avoiding him and after a planned meeting on Monday evening was aborted “things got out of hand.”
Kissoon had said he believed that the pulling of the column had to do with the selection of Ramotar as the PPP’s candidate. He alleged that in the past, Lall had told him that he would not allow any criticism of Ramotar.
However, he said he had later written on an incident that involved Ramotar’s son and his nephew and he also wrote about the attitude of Ramotar and his son towards him and his nephew. “Mr Lall called me and told me he resented the article and I told him I stand by it because I write on other people and if it had happened with anyone else, I would have written about it,” Kissoon said. He added that there was another more recent incident where Lall told him he should write more favourably about Ramotar. He said he refused.
Yesterday, Kissoon said that Ramotar was not raised at the meeting and he was not given directions about what he should or should not write on.
Both Lall and Kissoon had not ruled out the possibility of the column being restored as when asked whether Kissoon would be penning columns in the newspaper in the future, Lall noted that the issue had to be resolved before further considerations were made. For his part, Kissoon had said if he was called by Lall he would go “because I think the column serves a very, very important sociological and political purpose to the Guyanese nation.”
