By Raffique Shah
March 28, 2024
From agent RS07 SSA
Sire,
Further to our brief but focused discussion one year ago, held at your ultra secret chamber, whose location I cannot reveal even if I tried to, I submit my first annual report for the district where I live and where I have spent all my spying life: let’s call it CB07.
Continue reading To my spy Boss: I resign
By Dr Selwyn R. Cudjoe
January 23, 2024
Keith Rowley and his Government will not solve our growing crime problem for the simple reason that Rowley has become a part of the problem rather than part of a solution. He is much too arrogant, indecisive, ill-disciplined and un-inspirational to lead such a vital national effort.
First. He says that Trinidad and Tobago is a violent society, but exempts himself from that national condition. If his description is true, we are all infected with that virus. However, Rowley is mistaken in one regard. He feels that only physical violence matters. He does not realise that verbal violence—a product of the same society of which he is a part—is as bad as physical violence and may be the precursor to physical violence. Rowley practises verbal violence against the nation each day.
Continue reading Rowley cannot solve our crime problem
By Raffique Shah
November 28, 2023
Cloistered as we are in our tiny space in the wide world, Trinidad and Tobago often resorts to grandiose statements to appear to be playing critical roles in global affairs. There is nothing inherently wrong with that, except you can delude yourself into believing your inflated ego and end up being the butt of many a barb in social circuits you have breached by false pretences.
I am not suggesting here the Dr Keith Rowley administration is guilty of dereliction of duty in international affairs, that it has missed out on important interventions that might have brought us more than goodwill. Au contraire, I believe Dr Rowley has grasped opportunities as they arose, and created others where none seemed to exist.
Continue reading Oh Palestine
By Dr Selwyn R. Cudjoe
October 31, 2023
When 85-year-old Israeli citizen Yocheved Lifshitz was released after spending 16 days as a Hamas hostage, she commented: “They didn’t break my ribs, but it hurt a lot, making it difficult to breathe.”
“Hamas,” she said, “took good care of the wounded,” referring to one person whose arm and legs were injured during their kidnapping (FT, October 25).
Continue reading Allow Palestinians to breathe
By Raffique Shah
October 03, 2023
PART 2
Ramdwar (Dennis) shouted, “Gas!”
Gas, meaning CS: Crowd Dispersal Gas commonly known as “tear gas”.
The police wasted no time. It was like the proverbial “dog whistle”. Every “ranker”, Randy Burroughs and his “Flying” squad were there, as well as a large contingent of recruits, pounced on the peaceful workers and farmers raining blows with riot staffs, which were thick and heavy. Many bones were fractured on that day.
Continue reading Bloody Tuesday
By Raffique Shah
September 19, 2023
Like most people who live in this country, many of whom, like me, will never leave the twin-island republic to live anywhere else in the world, I am not only concerned but I am disturbed by what seems to be a deteriorating crime situation, especially crime that involves violence. At a recent news conference, I heard Prime Minister Dr Keith Rowley, not for the first time say, “We have become a very violent society.” Judging from the reports of criminal activities that we get in the media, that perception seems to be the truth.
Continue reading Power in the barrel of a gun
By Raffique Shah
April 16, 2023
The criminal underworld has expanded and intensified its war against mostly law-abiding citizens by mounting brazen attacks against selected targets in open thoroughfares, damn the innocent victims who are seen as collateral damage. They have expanded ‘home invasions’ to the extent they now dominate the news.
Continue reading Three Patriotic Tinis
By Raffique Shah
September 26, 2022
One of these not-so-good days, when the good citizens in this nation have had it up to their throats with the thugs who are turning this once-peaceful country into the killing fields of the Caribbean, if not the murder and mayhem capital of the world, they will rise up like the mythical crimson tide with a fury they didn’t think they possessed, to reclaim the slice of paradise they once owned and enjoyed from the mindless criminals who have made Trinidad and Tobago a living hell, something the population will never accept as the norm.
Continue reading Only two choices
By Dr Selwyn R. Cudjoe
September 19, 2022
On a sunny day in February of 1952 I was an eight-year-old schoolboy made to attend a memorial service for King George VI, the father of the late Elizabeth II. On that day I remembered the “Taps” played by the Police Band or the Tacarigua Orphan Home Band, as the bugles rattled through the bamboos on the banks of the Tacarigua River that flowed on the western side of the church.
Continue reading Deluded Children of Empire
By Raffique Shah
July 04, 2022
We are not the most crime-ridden country in the world, notwithstanding claims to that effect by organisations and individuals that manipulate raw data from dubious sources so that they can support whatever theory or argument their authors wish to pursue.
For example, there are academics and criminologists who rely on official police numbers that could be quite misleading. To support my argument, I ask: can the police or other government agency in many densely-populated, slum-infested countries and cities (think India, Nigeria, Brazil, Mexico, the Philippines…) accurately account for every living or dead soul in such human-jungles? Hell, in the comparatively minuscule Beetham Estate or Sea Lots in Trinidad and Tobago, people live and die and never appear on records, so wheel and come back if you expect me to buy “official” data as being accurate.
Continue reading Power of the gun