ERC flays Harmon over divisive campaign behaviour

…says actions unhelpful to the process of promoting harmony, tolerance

Former Minister of State and Director General in the Ministry of the Presidency (MotP), Joseph Harmon, has been found by the Ethnic Relations Commission (ERC) to be the most errant of the public officials on the campaign trail recently with regards to actions, “unhelpful to the process of promoting harmony and tolerance”.

The Commission this past week, as such, had cause to officially write to “a few political parties contesting the upcoming March 2 General and Regional Elections, to cite them for public utterances, behaviours and advertisements deemed unhelpful to the process of promoting harmony and tolerance”.
The ERC, in a subsequent public missive, said that “through its elections monitors, whom have so far monitored a high percentage of the public meetings of all the political parties, it has been observed that the use of ethnically divisive language and the use of religion to disparage, racial and political profiling/stereotyping and disruption, were generally found to be used on various occasions”.
The ERC noted that from the numerous incidents flagged, 21 warranted official responses.
Of these, the ERC said, 11 had to be directed towards Harmon, General Secretary of A Partnership for National Unity (APNU).
The ERC said two of the incidents are still under active investigation, while eight letters were also directed to Peoples Progressive Party (PPP) General Secretary, Bharrat Jagdeo.
The Commission said, through its Media Monitoring Unit, they also monitored the Facebook pages of various news agencies, print media and television programmes.
According to the ERC, it was found that numerous persons made ethnically offensive comments under the posts made by the various news agencies.
The Commission, in response, cautioned those persons for making such comments and has called on the Editors-in-Chief of INEWS, Demerara Waves, HGP TV Nightly News and NCN News to stringently monitor their Facebook pages so as to ensure ethnically offensive comments are removed in a timely manner.