When Bharrat Jagdeo assumed the presidency in Guyana, we had great hope for that country, particularly in his potential to engineer a transformation of its politics.

Young and bright, we assumed that Mr. Jagdeo was largely untainted by the old order of politics, divisive to the extreme and intolerant of dissent. We assumed that in Mr. Jagdeo's Guyana, there could be no House of Israel or murders of old Jesuit priests who run pesky newspapers with which the ruling party disagreed.

Nor did we expect that a government led by Mr. Jagdeo would withdraw licences for newspapers to print, make it difficult for them to import newsprint, or use other economic weaponry to undermine the free press.

After all, Mr. Jagdeo talked the refreshing language of change and renewal. And we believed. He would, we expected, respect democracy and adhere to the Declaration of Chapultepec, on the rights of the free press, to which he had affixed his signature. Painfully, we are beginning to feel that we were horribly wrong about Mr. Jagdeo.

Indeed, at least in his attitude to the free press, Mr. Jagdeo and his ruling People's Progressive Party (PPP) are beginning to resemble one of his predecessors, Forbes Burnham. The Guyana Government's attempt to strangulate the independent newspaper, the Stabroek News, proves the point. The PPP administration is attempting to starve the newspaper out of existence in what, really, is a vulgar and unworthy act of reprisal for presumed political wrongs.

The Stabroek News' perceived sin is that it somehow, ahead of last November's general election, orchestrated the formation of the political party, Alliance for Change, as the new force to stand between the old movements, the PPP and the People's National Congress (PNC). At the very least the PPP believed that the Stabroek News backed the Alliance which, if true, would be the newspaper's right. It was the PPP's right, too, which it exercised, not to place its advertising with Stabroek News.

But Mr. Jagdeo and his government have done grave wrongs demanding of the greatest condemnation. At the launch of his election campaign, the Guyanese president launched a virulent verbal assault on the editor of the newspaper, rather than dealing with what would be permissible, robust disagreement with the policy of the paper. But what is worse, since the PPP's return to office, has been the withdrawal of government advertisments from Stabroek News.

That is not a right that any government in a liberal democratic society enjoys. As a principle, it is fundamentally flawed. The money spent by governments comes not from the private accounts of its ministers and/or party members, but rather is the resource of all the people, to be allocated in the best interest of all the society. A free press that challenges those who lead to a better quality of governance is in the interest of the society.

And in the case of Stabroek News, it is not only ethical, but makes good economic sense that government agencies and departments place their adverts in that paper. It is the country's best, most serious and largest circulating newspaper. Until the government proves otherwise with empirical data, it knows that it lies with its declarations to the contrary.

How Father Bernard Dark must weep.