A statement from the Ministry of the Presidency follows:
The Ministry of the Presidency refutes the deliberately misleading and malicious letter, which was carried in the Monday, October 31, 2016 edition of the Guyana Times, titled “Crime will be with us for the foreseeable future”, in which the author misquoted His Excellency President David Granger, in an attempt to create mischief in the society.
The author of the letter, Mr. Neil Adams, claims that the President in his address to Parliament on October 13, 2016, said that “the Opposition is responsible for crimes in Guyana and that they “were killing Black youths” when they were in Government”. He even provided statistics to support his point, stating that “400 young black men were murdered by the PPP/C regime.”
The Ministry is categorically condemning these assertions and is disappointed that such a letter could be published, despite the fact that the President’s speech was publicised via television, radio, the internet and other communication platforms. The assertions carried therein have no basis in fact and were clearly designed to mislead the public. The Ministry, therefore, is calling for an immediate retraction from the publishers of the Guyana Times.
Contrary to the letter, in his address to Parliament, the President said: “Dreams of a ‘good life’ turned into a horrible nightmare at the dawn of the new millennium. The most unforgettable experiences and most frightening evidence of our descent into chaos were the bloody, drug-driven, decade-long ‘Troubles’. The ‘Troubles’ will be remembered as the darkest hour in our history. It was a time of the un-investigated assassination of a Minister; of the investigation into the alleged implication of another Minister in the direction of a ‘death squad’; of the alleged implication of yet another Minister in the acquisition of a computer to track the telephone communication and location of adversaries targeted for assassination. It was a time of arbitrary arrests; of disappearances and of torture of young men; of the surge in armed robberies, narco-trafficking and gun-running. During that first, deadly decade, there were 1,317 murders and 7,865 armed robberies.”
The Ministry of the Presidency is calling for an immediate retraction of this headline and urges that media entities act more responsibly, by ensuring that their content is factual. While the Government of Guyana promotes and supports press freedoms, it is also important that the media responsibly treat their role to provide accurate information to the members of the public.
