Dear Editor,
Dolly Hasssan is at it again. I refer to her letter in the Stabroek News of June 11, 2014 headlined, `The PNC should concede that certain mistakes were during its tenure’, the contents with its assessments were offensive. I detected a racist underpinning in her arguments.
In her recent missive of April 27, 2015 in the Stabroek News, she repeats the same polemic but is more subtle and diplomatic. She writes; “Thus, it is argued, we should forget the past—not mention how the PNC behaved when in office— and let the young people vote in ignorance. Some politicians, with glee, often boast that the young do not even remember Walter Rodney or Forbes Burnham. That to me is a shameful loss. Youths ought to learn, not block their history. I would argue instead the best voter is an informed voter. He or she should go to the polls informed about the past, I do recall that when I was a little girl in Guyana I watched my parents, shopkeepers, live a life of incremental misery, wondering what was next in the business chamber of horrors, as the heavy-fisted hand of the Burnham-led PNC regime squeezed them out of business. At the same time, though, don’t some of us with that memory wish that the PNC would articulate at least a promise not to repeat the mistakes of the past? No, this is not a call for apology. It is just a wish for a statement that expresses an understanding of the legitimate concerns of certain groups and a reassurance that they have nothing to fear as the PNC would not retrace its steps.” (end of quote)
It is one thing for a Guyanese to ask the PNC for an apology but it is a completely different sphere of thought when in the same breath you deny similar mistakes by the present PPP regime, cast the PPP administration as a democratic government and obnoxiously blame the PNC for the horrible mistakes in Guyana as Ms. Hassan did with her 2014 letter and her repetition in 2015. In the 2015 edition, there isn’t one word of bad rule by the PPP.
I believe when an East Indian demands an apology from the PNC for its authoritarian days in power and barefacedly classifies the 23 years of PPP rule as democratic and mistake-free, then that Indian can and will open himself/herself to accusations of racism. I am making that insinuation against Dolly Hassan.
It is crass for an Indian to openly declare that an African-dominated government must say sorry for its mistakes from 1968 -1985 but an Indian dominated regime from 1992 to 2015 is excused from the same politically decadent, socially depraved and culturally reprehensible pathway. Ryhaan Shah and Dolly Hassan write as if Desmond Hoyte never existed.
Words cannot describe the disgust I feel when people like Dolly Hassan write racially driven sentiments and pass them off as objectively based views. There is nothing honest about such behaviour. Here is a graphic example from Hassan’s pro-PPP stance in her 2014 missive. “Mayor Hamilton Green exemplifies how we can decay as a nation when we are governed by race-based politics… the stench of Green’s Georgetown is a metaphor for the nation.”
There is so much that is morally unacceptable about such a perception and it truly sickens one to the core. Why Georgetown is Green’s Georgetown and not Jagdeo’s Georgetown? Mayor Green has had less power and control over Georgetown from 1999 to 2011. That was the period when Bharrat Jagdeo was President. Mr. Jagdeo was an executive president. The mayor of Georgetown never had executive power within the City Council.
Are we to believe Ms. Hassan is innocent and doesn’t know how Georgetown became stink? I am told this is a person in her sixties. Surely she is experienced enough to know how Georgetown became dirty. Surely from those years (Abraham Lincoln once said it is not the years in your life that matter but the life in your years), Hassan must know that our fundamental problem since the PPP imploded in the fifties is that we have lived with race-based politics from Jagan in the fifties as Premier through the long years of PNC rule right up to the present.
Here is the part of Hassan’s 2014 letter that is extremist. She writes; “If I were to cast my ballot today (thank God Dolly Hassan does not vote in our general elections) It would not be for the PNC or the AFC. They have not yet developed the wisdom and the maturity or wisdom to govern.” Can you believe this is a person asking for the PNC to apologize? Can you imagine what will happen to PNC leaders at town hall meetings across the country when they consult with their supporters about apologizing and someone gets up and reads out aloud the June 11 letter of Dolly Hassan?
Dolly Hassan’s two letters have realized our worst fear – Indian racists will not stop at demonizing the PNC and openly deifying the PPP. For this reason, I have boycotted the Rodney Commission, and I think the PNC, WPA and others should have done the same. How can anyone say that the PNC and AFC haven’t got leaders with the capacity to govern but the PPP has? Isn’t that the expression of a very deterministic mind?
I close with the assertion that any research into the abuse of power between the Burnham junta and the Jagdeo cabal would find that Burnham was the lesser of the two evils.
Yours faithfully,
Frederick Kissoon
