A Line Kissoon Invented, Then Accused Others of Crossing

EDITORIAL RESPONSE

A Line Kissoon Invented, Then Accused Others of Crossing

Freddie Kissoon’s July 30 column builds its entire moral case on a rule that does not exist. What follows is worse than a factual lapse.

By The Board  ·  July, 2026

Freddie Kissoon’s July 30 column opens with a premise stated as settled fact: that children do not belong in Guyana’s Parliament, that their presence on July 27 was “unheard of in the world,” and that Azruddin Mohamed therefore crossed a line that is, in Kissoon’s word, “unforgivable.”

The premise is false, and not in a way that requires specialist knowledge to correct.

School civics tours through the National Assembly are a routine feature of parliamentary systems, including Guyana’s own — a fact available to anyone who attended secondary school within walking distance of the Public Buildings.

Stakeholder and special-interest hearings that bring affected families before a legislature to address the matter that concerns them are likewise unremarkable practice, not a Guyanese or global anomaly.

Kissoon’s rhetorical question — “in which country has that happened?” — has an answer, and it is: most of them, regularly.

This matters because the column’s entire architecture depends on the premise holding. Strip out “children are categorically barred from Parliament” and what remains is not a violated rule but a policy dispute over optics — whether it was wise or exploitative for the Opposition Leader to bring grieving family members, including children, into the House in connection with a disaster that killed their parents and siblings.

That is a legitimate question. It is not the question Kissoon asked. He asked it as though the answer were already written into the Standing Orders, and built a column’s worth of moral certainty on top of an assertion he never verified.

TWO DIFFERENT THINGS, COLLAPSED INTO ONE

The column treats “children in the public gallery” as interchangeable with “victims’ family members, including children, present in connection with a matter that killed their relatives.”

These are not the same category. A school tour and a stakeholder appearance by bereaved families are both examples of children in a legislature; neither is “the public wandering in to watch a sitting for entertainment,” which is the image Kissoon’s column works to conjure.

Collapsing the distinction is either careless or convenient. Given the rest of the column, convenient seems the likelier reading.

THE UNASKED QUESTION

Kissoon asks “for what purpose?” four times in various forms, treating it as rhetorical — a question with no honest answer, only a cynical one. He does not engage with the stated purpose: that these were relatives of MV Barima victims, present to make their concerns known to a government whose response to the disaster — from the handling of funeral arrangements to the timeline on salvage to the circulation of a memorial-site “Declaration of Agreement” ahead of any genuine consultation — has itself drawn sustained and specific scrutiny.

A columnist confident in his own premise does not need to ignore the competing one.

Kissoon ignores it entirely, then fills the vacuum with motive he has not demonstrated: ego, bandwagon politics, “crass mentality.”

THE PRESUMPTION OF BAD FAITH, APPLIED SELECTIVELY

The column’s roll call — Kaieteur News, Kiskadee Watch, Demerara Waves, the Guyana Human Rights Association, Transparency International Guyana, Red Thread — is presented as a list of organizations that will stay silent because they “need” Mohamed.

This is asserted, not shown. It is also asserted before any of those organizations had published anything on the matter, which means the column is not describing a silence that occurred but predicting one, and then treating the prediction as evidence of the bad faith it has not yet observed.

That is not analysis. It is a script written in advance of the facts it claims to interpret.

WHAT THE COLUMN NEVER ASKS

A column genuinely concerned with the welfare of grieving children might have asked whether the government’s own conduct in the days after July 18 — the disputed account of remarks about burial costs, the reported instruction not to photograph or film, the pre-drafted memorial declaration circulated to families ahead of a stated “consultation” process — contributed to families feeling they had no avenue but a public one. Kissoon’s column asks none of this.

It reserves its outrage entirely for the opposition’s optics and none for the government conduct that gave families cause to seek an audience in the first place.

None of this requires taking a position on whether bringing children to Parliament was, on balance, wise. Reasonable people can disagree on that. What they cannot do honestly is invent a rule that does not exist, use it to declare a line “unforgivably crossed,” and then spend a column’s remaining length assigning motive to everyone who might question the premise.

WHOSE POSITION, EXACTLY

One further point deserves the record. The column runs in the Guyana Chronicle, a state-owned newspaper, under a standard disclaimer identifying Kissoon as a paid columnist whose views are his own and not the outlet’s official position.

That disclaimer exists precisely because Chronicle is state property, and it is boilerplate practice for compensated contributors at any paper. It does not by itself prove alignment with government messaging.

But it is a fact worth placing beside the column’s own accusation — that the opposition and civil society are motivated by what they “need,” never principle — because that accusation arrives from a paid platform of the state, aimed at people writing for free.

Readers can weigh that asymmetry for themselves.

— The Board