Shal­iza Has­sanali

Ca­roni East MP Dr Tim Gopeesingh is stick­ing to his claim that there is eth­nic cleans­ing at Port-of-Spain Gen­er­al Hos­pi­tal. To sub­stan­ti­ate his claims, Gopeesingh pro­duced the names of 13 doc­tors from var­i­ous de­part­ments of the hos­pi­tal who had been forced to take VSEP, have not had their con­tracts re­newed, or were frus­trat­ed out of the sys­tem from 2008 to now. Dur­ing a press con­fer­ence yes­ter­day in Wood­brook, Gopeesingh re­spond­ed to state­ments by Prime Min­is­ter Patrick Man­ning, who stat­ed that the doc­tor's re­marks in Par­lia­ment on Fri­day were ex­pect­ed from a "gut­ter­snipe and not a par­lia­men­tar­i­an."

Gopeesingh said eth­nic cleans­ing was be­ing car­ried out among doc­tors at the hos­pi­tal. Man­ning al­so called on Gopeesingh to with­draw his com­ment. Gopeesingh said how­ev­er: "My com­ments re­flect a valid com­plaint from var­i­ous sec­tors of the med­ical fra­ter­ni­ty who, through bla­tant in­tim­i­da­tion and on­go­ing dis­crim­i­na­tion by the gov­ern­ment, have cho­sen or been forced to re­main qui­et on the is­sue."

Gopeesingh said in­sti­tu­tion­alised dis­crim­i­na­tion had a domi­no-ef­fect on de­te­ri­o­rat­ing health stan­dards, to the point where lives and limbs were lost.

Gopeesingh said he would make no apolo­gies for his state­ments, since they were valid and wor­thy of na­tion­al at­ten­tion and par­lia­men­tary de­bate. He al­so point­ed out that the is­sue he raised, as al­leged by the PM, was not based on racial re­la­tions, but tar­get­ed one group of pro­fes­sion­als based on a per­cep­tion that the group was an­ti-PNM.

With 35 years of med­ical ex­pe­ri­ence un­der his belt, Gopeesingh ad­mit­ted that it was hard for him to vent this is­sue in pub­lic. "But I did so be­cause I felt it was time that the pub­lic re­alised that the PNM is go­ing down a dan­ger­ous road of sub­vert­ing the con­sti­tu­tion­al rights and guar­an­tees of equal­i­ty of all cit­i­zens for its po­lit­i­cal pur­pos­es."

List of doc­tors

�2 Dr Ajit Ku­ruvil­la

�2 Dr Gor­don Narayns­ingh

�2 Dr He­mant Per­sad

�2 Dr John Woo

�2 Dr Mary Ahow

�2 Dr Steve Ma­hadeo

�2 Dr Robert Ram­cha­ran

�2 Dr She­henaz Mo­hammed

�2 Dr Kim Ho­sein

�2 Dr Robin Ho­sein

�2 Dr God­frey Arau­jo

�2 Dr Lall Sawh

n Dr Has­san Khan