Gail Alexan­der

Lib­er­al use of the word "coolie" and oth­er ex­treme lan­guage by a Guyanese speak­er at the In­de­pen­dent Lib­er­al Par­ty's pub­lic meet­ing on Tues­day night forced in­ter­im leader Jack Warn­er to is­sue a hasty apol­o­gy yes­ter­day and to ban his friend from speak­ing at fu­ture meet­ings.In his apol­o­gy, Warn­er said he was of­fend­ed by the lan­guage of his plat­form speak­er Jailall Kissoon.

Warn­er's aide Sunil Ramjits­ingh al­so said yes­ter­day that Kissoon, who was a mem­ber of the for­mer Desmond Hoyte ad­min­is­tra­tion of Guyana, would not be on to­mor­row's ILP meet­ing agen­da, con­firm­ing the dis­tance Warn­er had since put be­tween him­self and Kissoon's con­tro­ver­sial pre­sen­ta­tion dur­ing the ILP's Ch­agua­nas West by-elec­tion meet­ing at New Set­tle­ment, Ca­roni.

Dur­ing the meet­ing, which was broad­cast live, Kissoon heav­i­ly laced his en­tire con­tri­bu­tion with ex­treme lan­guage. He start­ed by read­ing an ex­cerpt of a po­em in which one line he quot­ed was: "Rum kill me pa­pa, rum kill me ajah, rum kill me nana, um kill the bread­win­ner in the coolie fam­i­ly."Say­ing at one point to the au­di­ence, "I had to ask you In­di­ans...," Kissoon queried if Warn­er did not have the heart to love as equal­ly as "the In­di­ans." He said Warn­er was a "black coolie man" who had put the PP in pow­er.

Kissoon al­so told the au­di­ence: "A black man give you box drain in coolie con­stituen­cy–Ch­agua­nas!"The au­di­ence cheered loud­ly then.Kissoon called on at­ten­dees not to let the name of the Unit­ed Na­tion­al Con­gress de­gen­er­ate to what he re­named as "Unit­ed Na­tion of Coolies." He said that was the way peo­ple were be­ing in­flu­enced, and al­so to think of the PNM as "Par­ty of Ne­gro Move­ment."

Claim­ing oth­ers want­ed race to fac­tor in the by-elec­tion, Kissoon de­clared: "That is bulls...!"He said when a black man was giv­en the Na­tion­al Se­cu­ri­ty Min­istry, "no­body was fright­ened he would take over In­di­an gov­ern­ment–how sud­den­ly the man get bad?"Kissoon asked if Warn­er ever stole "from In­di­ans or the black man," adding, "So if he make he mon­ey from the white man, noth­ing wrong with that–is com­pen­sa­tion!"

As Kissoon spoke at this stage, Warn­er sat, un­smil­ing, with his hands cov­er­ing his mouth and low­er face.Three-quar­ters of the way through Kissoon's speech, an aide came to Kissoon's side and hand­ed him a note. Kissoon con­tin­ued his ad­dress, but switched to re­but­ting UNC claims about which Guyanese ad­min­is­tra­tion he'd worked with. He said he'd worked with one-time Guyanese pres­i­dent Desmond Hoyte and that Hoyte was sup­port­ed by T&T's Ma­ha Sab­ha leader Sat Ma­haraj and Pun­dit Gau­taram Shar­ma.

Con­tact­ed yes­ter­day, Ma­haraj said he did not com­ment on every lit­tle thing peo­ple said about him.Af­ter the ILP meet­ing, a re­lease sent to news­rooms at 4 am yes­ter­day con­veyed Warn­er's apol­o­gy for the state­ments made on his plat­form.Warn­er said: "I wish to ex­tend my sin­cer­est apolo­gies for any­thing which may have been said on my plat­form last night which would have af­fect­ed the sen­si­tiv­i­ties of the peo­ple of T&T in gen­er­al and Ch­agua­nas West in par­tic­u­lar.

"The lan­guage used specif­i­cal­ly in one pre­sen­ta­tion did not rep­re­sent the nor­mal high stan­dards with which you have come to iden­ti­fy from the ILP plat­form and cer­tain­ly can­not be en­dorsed by the lead­er­ship of the ILP."As much as one may un­der­stand the at­tempt by the speak­er to use ver­nac­u­lar with a view of reach­ing the peo­ple, the so­bri­quets used to de­scribe the racial en­claves were def­i­nite­ly un­ac­cept­able and not con­sis­tent with the phi­los­o­phy of the ILP," Warn­er said.

"In this re­gard, I wish to ex­tend my deep­est apolo­gies to the peo­ple of Ch­agua­nas West in par­tic­u­lar and T&T, in gen­er­al, who like me were of­fend­ed by the lan­guage of one of my plat­form speak­ers last night."Kissoon had al­so ap­peared on a pre­vi­ous ILP plat­form last week and Warn­er had promised to get him to re­turn af­ter the crowd then re­ceived his speech well.

Yes­ter­day, though, Ramjits­ingh said Kissoon would not be ap­pear­ing at to­mor­row's fi­nal cam­paign meet­ing. He said this wasn't be­cause of the na­ture of Kissoon's Tues­day night pre­sen­ta­tion.In an­oth­er me­dia re­lease, Warn­er's team al­so apol­o­gised for an­oth­er sit­u­a­tion aris­ing out of Tues­day's meet­ing. A state­ment sought cor­rec­tion of an ad­dress for a min­is­ter's house al­lud­ed to in the copy of Warn­er's speech. That was sent to the me­dia ear­li­er on Tues­day ahead of the ILP meet­ing.

The re­lease not­ed Warn­er had giv­en the cor­rect ad­dress in de­liv­er­ing his state­ments to Tues­day's au­di­ence.