Citing the recent verbal attack on an Aishalton teacher by President Donald Ramotar and scathing criticisms of the UK envoy by another senior government official, commentator Ralph Ramkarran says the PPP’s political discourse has become one of personal abuse and it is something that Guyanese should speak out on.
In his column in yesterday’s Sunday Stabroek, Ramkarran, who was a leading member of the PPP until he quit in a row over its unwillingness to address corruption, decried the deterioration of the political culture and adverted to the abuse that the party’s founder Dr Cheddi Jagan had been subjected to by his political opponents.
Referring to the current abuse, he said “Unless it stops, it will intimidate most into silence. For the few who remain courageous enough, they will have to live, as many now do, with a constant, daily, stream of invective about their public and private lives and activities that defies any sense of rationality or decency. Little do the perpetrators understand that it is they, not the victims, whom the degradation eventually consumes. Cheddi Jagan suffered a lifetime of humiliation and abuse. So intense it was, and over so many decades, that it tempted good people to say that history would not have been kind to him. The opposite has happened.”
Ramkarran, a Senior Counsel, charged that Ramotar in a moment which he “vaguely remembers,” underlined the culture of abuse and intimidation when he threatened teacher John Adams who was heckling at a meeting in Aishalton about former President Bharrat Jagdeo. Ramotar was reported as saying that Jagdeo would have slapped Adams if he were there. At the end of the meeting, Adams complained and reported to the police that he had been slapped by a presidential guard.
“The nature of the culture is now clearly in the process of advancing from words to fists. Unless checked, the threat of physical harm would eventually gain dominance over that of verbal abuse”, charged Ramkarran.
He pointed out that British High Commissioner to Guyana, Andrew Ayre had hinted that he expected abuse for his statements about prorogation of Parliament and the violation of the Commonwealth Charter.
Ramkarran, a former two-term speaker of the National Assembly, said that Ayre’s public comments suggest that diplomats have determined that Guyana is guilty of transgressions of fundamental principles of good governance and democratic behaviour and that these are egregious enough for them to intervene publicly. He said that they also appear to be of the view that private interventions behind closed doors have no effect on the government because it will completely ignore them.
“They may well have decided that the only antidote to recalcitrance is publicity and are prepared to pay the price of abuse in order to achieve some positive effect. We all understand that (Head of the Presidential Secretariat) Dr (Roger) Luncheon has his government behind him. Little does Dr Luncheon understand that the High Commissioner also has his government behind him, which shortly before issued a statement on Guyana calling for a restoration of the National Assembly. Why did the government not weigh in against the British Minister who dared to call for an end to the prorogation? Simply, no doubt, because it believes it can get away with the abuse of the High Commissioner but not of the Minister”, Ramkarran said.
A member of the PPP for nearly 50 years before resigning, Ramkarran said that the continuing failure to settle Guyana’s political crisis is having a debilitating impact on the Guyanese people.
“They do not want elections. They want a solution. But if hard-headedness on the issue of a coalition government is obstructing a solution and elections are the only way out then they want the prorogation to end and a date for elections to be set. The diplomatic community has obviously decided to weather the storm of abuse”, Ramkarran added.
