Dear Editor,

The PPP never surprises with the depth and scope of its hypocrisy, most recently with its release condemning the attacks on the French satirical magazine, Charlie Hebdo. More than anything this was an attack aimed at freedom of expression by artists and writers, and this is something the PPP is itself guilty of.

An anecdote: In early 2014, while in Germany and scheduled to do a presentation at the University of Heidelberg, I read an article in which the Minister of Culture, Dr Frank Anthony, deliberately tried to mislead the public on several aspects of his portfolio. In a letter to the editor I corrected the Minister after which he fired back evading the issues, a missive I effectively rebutted in a second letter.

The ministry went silent but two days later an e-mail was sent to German LGBT rights organization, Hirschfeld-Eddy Stiftung alleging rabid homophobia on my part, correspondence that was then forwarded to the University of Heidelberg. It read:

“This man who is a public figure has done more harm through his public attacks against the LGBT community in Guyana and has actually helped to perpetuate a negative stereotype against our people. With this in mind, it is rather astonishing that the University of Heidelberg has already funded one of Mr Johnson’s trips to Germany to host a workshop and is again funding another trip, a few weeks later for a public reading event on January 16 2014… Public homophobic writers such as Mr Johnson pose a threat to all the gains we have made. I end by enquiring if your country, organization and university will support such attacks against our community.”

The author of the letter also levelled accusations of financial impropriety against an individual close to me and who was at the time working and studying at the university. While the latter issue needed no response, my defence on the homophobia charge was almost as simple – I directed the correspondent from Hirshfeld-Eddy to the fact that I was the recipient of a PAHO health-reporting award in which I directly tackled the issue of homophobia in Guyana. My lecture proceeded as planned.

This of course was not an isolated incident. I’ve had clients intimidated; been scandalized on social media; one blog account hacked and used to make extremist comments; been denied the right to represent my country at every Carifesta or other festival since 2003; and there isn’t a week without an anonymous letter or column attacking me in either the Guyana Times or Guyana Chronicle.

The PPP has no moral currency to condemn attacks on the freedom of expression of writers and artists – it is the sole institutional perpetrator of attacks against independent creative people in Guyana.

What is important here is the use of disproportionate and extreme power to silence (creative) voices of dissent that are deemed as enemies of whatever special interests have access to that extreme power – the men who attacked Charlie Hebdo did it with guns. The PPP government carries out its attacks with clandestine e-mails and phone calls to prospective employers, and by signing away the nation’s airwaves to persons favourable to it, while denying others the same opportunity.

It does it with cowardly attack blogs run out of the Office of the President, and in cowardly anonymous columns published in the Times and Chronicle. It does it through presidential guards slapping a teacher in an indigenous village, and then pressuring the village council to ostracise the victim. It does it by the herding of Amerindian leaders into the national convention centre with the Permanent Secretary of Amerindian Affairs shouting at them to toe the PPP line or else.

It does so when a government minister walks into the national radio station and wants the winning calypso to be pulled, and when there is an outcry, the response is the pulling of all the top finalist calypsos from the state-controlled airwaves. It does so by suing journalist Freddie Kissoon for pointing out its institutionalized racism and unjustly denying him employment.

The government attacks freedom of expression when it pulls state advertisements from independent newspapers, and uses the Guyana Revenue Authority to target the publisher of Kaieteur News. It did so when Jagdeo, who recently hypocritically lectured the Sri Lankans on the abuse of state power during elections, mounted the platform in 2011 and referred to independent journalists as “vultures” and “carrion crows.” It did so when the increasingly shameless Gail Teixeira made the absurd threat of initiating UN prosecution against the free media, which she ignorantly compared to the government-controlled media in immediate pre-genocide Rwanda.

Freedom of expression in France fell under attack by extremist outsiders in a country that cherishes freedom of expression at an institutional level. In Guyana, those seeking to suppress that freedom are actually in charge of the public institutions, and they are becoming more rabid in their control. Guyanese are expressing solidarity with Charlie Hebdo but are silent on the Anil Nandlall-Kaieteur News scandal (which threatened a similar outcome, one that Kaieteur had actual previous experience of), or on the assault on John Adams, something that shows we have a fundamental disconnect from how freedom of expression, the fundamental pillar of democracy, is supposed to function in our own society. We need to wake up – je suis Charlie Hebdo, nous somme tous Charlie Hebdo.

Yours faithfully,

Ruel Johnson