Dasarath Chetty’s Letter to the M&G (now removed from the Mail and Guardian’s Website)
13 May 2007 11:59
What should a university do when a prominent union member is found to be complicit in cropping himself out of a photograph that is thereafter used, unknowingly by the editors, in a university publication?
How should management respond when the good name of the university has been maligned as a result of dishonesty?
How should unions respond when confronted with duplicity within their ranks, which serves only to undermine the credibility of union leaders, and to weaken the impact of workers’ struggles?
These are questions now confronting the University of KwaZulu-Natal (UKZN) community in the light of the finding that Fazel Khan, a leader of the Combined Staff Association, was aware that his colleague Sally Giles had cropped him out of the photograph that she submitted for publication in the UKZNdaba. Despite knowing this, Khan then went on to make false statements to the Mail & Guardian, Mercury and Witness claiming that he was victimised — and by making such statements, which he knew to be untrue, he brought the university into disrepute.
Khan was also found guilty of leaking confidential university documents to the media, a charge on which he was summarily dismissed from the university. It was stated at the hearing that it was Karl Marx who released the documents to the media!
Despite knowing that UKZN management had nothing to do with the airbrushing, Khan told the M&G (September 15 2006): “There was a clear decision that I shouldn’t be in UKZNdaba and this is a dirty revenge for my actions during the strike.”
Despite Sally Giles admitting at a meeting that she had airbrushed Khan out of the photo and that Khan had seen it prior to her submission, he still went on to tell the Mercury (September 19 2006) five days later that the management does not want him “to be promoted or published in its UKZNdaba publication”. He went on to say that this was “the thinking at the top”, although he could not in any way prove that he had faced discrimination from management because of his union activities.
David Macfarlane was correct when he wrote that Stalin employed “various trickeries to make his opponents disappear from official records — including having photographs doctored so that awkward foes such as Trotsky were virtually erased.” He misinformed M&G readers, however, when he went on to claim that “UKZNdaba has pulled off the unlikely trick of making one of UKZN’s more noticeable academics disappear completely” (September 15 2006).
Macfarlane was told that the UKZNdaba editors had nothing to do with the airbrushing, yet he chose to malign the publication as “pulling off a world first” in its genre for stimulating memories of Stalin and by saying that Khan’s “political activism might well make his bosses dream of tinkering with airbrushes”.
The hearing completely vindicated university management and staff of the UKZNdaba — and most will accept that sanctioning errant members of staff for duplicity with malicious intent does not constitute a denial of academic freedom.
Macfarlane is therefore right. Memories of Stalin have been stimulated at UKZN — not by the management, but by a union leader who thinks he is Karl Marx! He has now come a cropper.
Dasarath Chetty is executive director, public affairs and corporate communications, University of KwaZulu-Natal
Fight for Fazel Khan » Blog Archive » Letters in the Mail and Guardian
May 22nd, 2007 at 8:21 am
[…] Mail and Guardian published a series of letters in response to Dasarath Chetty’s lies and misrepresentations. Here are the four that were […]