Rhon­dor Dowlat

Op­po­si­tion Leader Kam­la Per­sad-Bisses­sar yes­ter­day re­fused to apol­o­gise to Prime Min­is­ter Dr Kei­th Row­ley for de­scrib­ing him as an “Oreo” and in­stead de­fend­ed her state­ment, in­sist­ing there “was not an io­ta of racism in my state­ments.”

In a re­lease is­sued last evening, Per­sad-Bisses­sar said whilst she took note of com­ments by some peo­ple that there may have been some in­sen­si­tiv­i­ty, she ac­knowl­edges that “rel­e­vant truths can be spo­ken with less sen­si­tive words in fu­ture.”

Dur­ing the Unit­ed Na­tion­al Con­gress’ Mon­day Night Fo­rum meet­ing, Per­sad-Bisses­sar claimed that the “one per cent” (re­fer­ring to the Syr­i­an/Lebanese com­mu­ni­ty) “owns Kei­th Christo­pher Row­ley.”

“They tried to win Mr Man­ning, they couldn’t do that…They tried their luck to own me but I sent them pack­ing…They have their ‘Oreo’ now, who is their guy in Kei­th Christo­pher Row­ley and that is how the one per cent friends and fam­i­ly of Row­ley con­trol him,” Per­sad-Bisses­sar said.

Per­sad-Bisses­sar made the state­ment as she spoke of the econ­o­my cur­rent­ly ex­pe­ri­enc­ing its sharpest de­cline in three decades and ac­cused the Gov­ern­ment of “help­ing their friends and the one per cent.”

The com­ment has drawn mixed re­ac­tion from some quar­ters of the so­ci­ety, with some con­demn­ing it as open­ly racist and meant to cre­ate di­vi­sive­ness in the so­ci­ety and call­ing for an apol­o­gy. It has al­so drawn crit­i­cism from Gov­ern­ment and mem­bers of her own par­ty. (See ed­i­to­r­i­al of Page A20)

Yes­ter­day, how­ev­er, Per­sad-Bisses­sar said her com­ments were about Row­ley’s “du­plic­i­tous na­ture.”

“His choic­es seem specif­i­cal­ly aimed at ben­e­fit­ting the elite, his friends and fi­nanciers, while the rest of the pop­u­la­tion suf­fers,” she said.

“He is not a man who cares for the av­er­age per­son, which was again demon­strat­ed by his threats to the work­ing pop­u­la­tion last week. This is a man who threat­ened to jail and sue work­ers for protest­ing re­trench­ment.”

She claimed that dur­ing the last three years, the Row­ley Gov­ern­ment had im­posed the worst suf­fer­ing on cit­i­zens.

She al­so blamed the Gov­ern­ment for “re­sort­ing to race-bait­ing,” to dis­tract from cur­rent press­ing is­sues such as the clo­sure at Petrotrin, in­creas­ing job­less­ness, in­creas­ing cost of liv­ing, ram­pant crime and the up­com­ing bud­get.

Per­sad-Bisses­sar al­so claimed her use of the “one per cent” was not con­fined to any one race or eth­nic group.

“It is a group of per­sons of var­i­ous back­grounds, races and eth­nic­i­ties whose on­ly con­cern is the ac­cu­mu­la­tion of wealth at the ex­pense of the wider so­ci­ety,” she said.