ELSEWHERE IN this edition is published a statement on the shameful wielding, by the Guyana Government, of advertising as an economic weapon against its perceived newspaper critic, the Stabroek News. Similar statements are being published today in newspapers across the English-speaking Caribbean.

We expect that the administration of President Bharrat Jagdeo will attempt to characterise today's developments as his government being set upon by the friends of the Stabroek News, and even claim interference in Guyana's domestic affairs.

They will be wrong on both counts as Mr. Jagdeo will well know. For on quiet reflection, even if he fails to say so publicly or even do anything about it, Mr. Jagdeo will concede that this is an effort to save Guyana from retreat to the excesses that kept his party from government for nearly three decades and eroded the rights and dignity of the Guyanese people. Moreover, he will understand, too, that this exercise of peer review, particularly as we emerge into a single market and economy, is critical to the growth and development of the Caribbean family.

It was this doctrine of non-interference and policy of aloofness that contributed to Guyana's past descent, under the late Forbes Burnham, into undemocratic behaviour, shadows of which we fear are emerging again.

We have, to date, thought of President Jagdeo as a leader of vision, balance and capability. His discrimination against the Stabroek News, using public funds to advance party interests, throws him more to the bottom of the heap where insecure and narrow-minded politicians live.

As we have pointed out in these columns before, the Stabroek News, since its inception, has done what good newspapers do: it has reported the news and has been an indefatigable champion of good governance, individual rights and democracy. As part of this process, the Stabroek News has observed, as Walter Lippman, the famed American journalist advised, "certain rules of hygiene" in its relationship with public officials. It has not been their cronies.

There is no gainsaying that Stabroek News' activism played no small role in the return of free and fair elections, leading to the election of President Jagdeo's People's Progressive Party to government in 1992. But politicians have a notoriously strange habit, having benefited them on their way to ascendancy, of attempting to constrain institutions of openness, transparency and criticism, which is the surest way to undermine democracy.

So it is that last October, the Guyana Government and its agencies peeved at criticisms by Stabroek News, cut advertising to the newspaper, but offering the spurious argument that the decision was based on economics, and limited resources were being steered to media outlets where it would gain greatest return on its investment. The fallacy in that is Stabroek News remains the largest circulating newspaper in Guyana, and the action was in breach of the Declaration of Chapultepec, signed on Guyana's behalf by President Jagdeo, which forbids the use by governments of advertising "to reward or punish the media or individual journalists".

Clearly, the aim is to starve Stabroek News into submission or out of existence, notwithstanding an implicit undertaking by President Jagdeo earlier this year, to Caribbean media officials, that his government would mend its ways.

Indeed, it is important that Mr. Jagdeo's colleagues in the Caribbean, if they cherish democracy and democratic freedoms, of which newspapers are far more than symbolic, to frankly tell the Guyanese President that his behaviour is unacceptable. Prime Minister Portia Simpson Miller, given well-honed democratic instincts, should lead the way, understanding as she does that freedom is indivisible: its loss in Guyana will be loss felt everywhere.