I KNEW from living in Guyana and writing about Guyana that Alissa Trotz, who edited the column “In The Diaspora” (ITD) for the Stabroek News (SN), was a terribly biased person and that the SN’s editor, Anand Persaud, was equally biased and hopelessly incompetent.
Ms Trotz never carried columns critical of the opposition and anti-government civil society groups and never published articles sympathetic to the Ali presidency. But I got different vibes from the Guyana diaspora when their members approached me during their visits to Guyana and from their emails.
Ms Trotz’ s masthead boldly stated that ITD was about stories that interest the Guyana and Caribbean Diaspora. But something was wrong and that wrongness lay with Trotz and Persaud. How come ITD missed carrying stories that I find the diaspora was interested in?
It is not only encounters on the seawall. I would get emails and phone calls about enquiries of a curious political nature. It is based on those contacts I concluded that ITD, Trotz and Persaud were misleading people. The diaspora people I met on the seawall over the years that ITD and SN were in existence had curiosities, among other things, about Guyana that ITD had a moral obligation to publish.
I get emails all the time from the diaspora that make enquiries of me and that bring things to my attention. It happens quite regularly. An email correspondent from St. Lucia told me that he is disputing David Patterson’s announcement that he is from Lodge. He stated some “facts.” I am going to leave it at that.
When it comes to the WPA and the AFC in government, I could not keep those questions. They were simply unlimited. I always wonder why Trotz and Persaud never carried an ITD commentary or commentaries on the WPA and AFC in power. I swear on my parents’ grave that was a topic the Guyana diaspora was obsessed with.
I could reel off my head the billions of questions I got about the WPA and the AFC in the government and why they did this and why they did not do this and that. Yet every week, I read ITD; it was always criticisms of the PPP government and not even one analysis on the things the diaspora wanted to know about.
This was simple journalistic and newspaper dishonesty. You cannot run a diaspora column for one million Guyanese in North America, Europe and the Caribbean and not get academics and political observers to probe controversies swirling around the WPA and AFC and some very large names in Guyana like Eusi Kwayana, Clive Thomas, Rupert Roopnaraine, Christopher Ram, the Guyana Human Rights Association, etc.
The ITD never touched these subjects, but I was bombarded with those areas of interest; thus I concluded that Trotz and Persaud were wrong people operating in the media. The people who operated the SN have now switched over to an online entity named Kiskadee Watch and you have the identical diaspora column as when ITD was alive in the SN.
It is the same old story. Nothing on Azruddin Mohamed, nothing on Aubrey Norton, nothing on ragged civil society groups etc. But my experience as a long-standing media operative tells me that the diaspora wants to see critical commentary on Mohamed. They want to see an analysis of the present PNC.
I am typing this piece here on Friday afternoon and my inbox for the day has questions from the diaspora about David Patterson and the 165 signatures that sent a letter to the president on the ferry disaster. This was on Friday. On Thursday, my mailbox had stuff from the diaspora.
I wish I could open my mailbox to the public. It would prove that ITD, Trotz, Persaud and SN were doing massive injustices to the Guyana diaspora. I did an entire column on a communication I received from a first-rate American scholar after he read my series on Rupert Roopnaraine. I got an email from a former American intelligence officer after he read my piece on Roopnaraine’s questionable politics.
Were Trotz and Persaud telling the readers of SN that the diaspora was only interested in anti-government criticism? I did two reviews of the autobiography of Moses Bhagwan and got emails from people, some positive, some negative. Someone close to Bhagwan asked me to openly address Bhagwan on his views on the 2020 general and regional elections.
I chose not to do it because I concluded five years ago that Bhagwan had become politically corrupt like all WPA bigwigs from the 1970s, so he will go to his grave and not denounce the 2020 rigging. He wrote his autobiography at age 92 and did not mention it. Trotz and Persaud were simply wrong people. They still are.
DISCLAIMER: The views and opinions expressed in this column are solely those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the official policy or position of the Guyana National Newspapers Limited.