That Toronto statement. . . President Slams 'Troublemakers' Wednesday, November 20, 1996 PRESIDENT Cheddi Jagan says troublemakers and propagandists are engineering a campaign of hate and attacks against him based on what he said is a deliberate distortion of remarks he made at a meeting at the Travelodge Hotel in Toronto, Canada on October 31. A video-clip of that meeting, aired on a local television station, showed the President during his address telling his audience, "The PPP is not an Indian party. The British and the Americans did not remove me from power and put Burnham in because of race. In fact, if they were using race, I should have been kept there and Burnham should have been kept out forever. Because as we know, black people are at the lowest scale of the social ladder." Local groups have protested the statement and a demonstration was staged outside State House on Monday after the President's return to the country. In a statement issued yesterday, President Jagan said that the reference to black people "must be viewed in the context in which my speech was delivered." He said that anyone who had listened to the entire address and had an iota of logic and common sense would have noted that the last sentence could not have been a reference to Afro-Guyanese but to Blacks in the United States of America. "I lived in Washington, New York and Chicago and my personal experiences and views about the social alienation of Blacks in the United States of America are well known and documented in my book, The West on Trial," the President observed. He added that "the lowest social status of Black people in America, lower than Asians, was noted by Jawaharlal Nehru in his autobiography." The President noted that on his recent trip "I took to Toronto and elsewhere the theme of unity, racial harmony, peace, and social progress for all Guyanese." He added that in his speech he had said "that we were now celebrating not just the PPP/Civic fourth anniversary in government, but the fiftieth anniversary of the Political Affairs Committee which was multi-racial and working class." He said that he had also stated "that the People's Progressive Party (PPP) victory of 18 out of 24 seats in the 1953 elections represented national, racial and working class unity; further, that when I was sworn in as President on October 9, 1992, I had said that we would make a new beginning and return to the spirit of 1953."