By Dr. Kwame Nantambu
February 14, 2007
Within recent times Chairman of the United National Congress, Basdeo Panday, has not only blamed Prime Minister Patrick Manning for “racial tension entrenching itself in T&T” but Congress of the People Leader, Winston Dookeran, has also accused Manning of “provoking racial tensions” and erecting electoral “vote banks”.
Continue reading Correcting ‘racial tension’ in TnT
By Raffique Shah
February 11, 2007
Prime Minister Patrick Manning must learn to choose his words carefully. He is, after all, the CEO of Trinidad and Tobago, which signals that every word he utters is closely monitored by my colleagues in the media and by the public. He must recall how private statements by US President George Bush resulted in public guffaws when it turned out that mikes close to the “Chief” were switched on, and his ill-informed quips proved to be material-made-for-comics. But one does not expect better from Dubaya who comes across as imbecilic as a failed Junior Secondary school non-graduate: the man expressed shock at the size of Russia! What if he had traversed the expanse of the fallen Soviet Union?
Continue reading Already under a state of siege
By Stephen Kangal
February 11, 2007
The arbitrary and selective conduct of the police in responding to recent popular protest movements raises fundamental questions on this response and its linkage with the composition of the protective services in plural Trinidad and Tobago. In cosmopolitan societies but more so in a multicultural but in an ethnically polarised T&T our cosmopolitan people must be provided with every basis to identify with the police. The police must never be perceived or be used as a mechanism for political repression or constitute a potential threat to any democratically elected government or act as an arm of the Executive as it is being perceived today in T&T.
Continue reading Wanted: Plurality in the Police Service
by Milton Allimadi
American and British media and literature contributed mightily to the defamation of Africans – an historical crime that has conditioned Western audiences to the deaths of millions. Beginning with the Greek, Herodotus, and continuing in the pages of The New York Times, racist propaganda depicted the continent as home to misshapen monsters, savage cannibals, soul-less brutes, and sub-humans in need of white discipline.
Continue reading How European Writers Created the Racist image of Africa
By Raffique Shah
February 04, 2007
Last Thursday night, in districts as diverse as Carenage and Laventille, Morne Diablo and Enterprise, the criminal communities (oh, yes: those fellas have “communities”!) fired assorted gunshots saluting Police Commissioner Trevor Paul. Paul, along with Brigadiers Peter Joseph and Edmund Dillon, had earlier appeared on television promising to “run the criminals to the ground” over the carnival season. For the millionth time a CoP threatened “zero tolerance”, vowing to lock up jaywalkers and gay-walkers and maybe a few pickpockets and drunkards and pamphleteers. Little wonder the real criminals, the gunmen who are our new rulers, who call the shots very literally, were celebrating.
Continue reading Doing the ‘danse macabre’
By Stephen Kangal
February 02, 2007
Those of us who stood as helpless and detached spectators agonising at the repressive regime of the late Forbes Burnham of Guyana will recall that whenever the late comrade Prime Minister faced challenges with his domestic policies his political exit strategy entailed embarking upon some African foreign policy and demarche geared to divert Guyanese attention from his failures and lack of credibility at home. That is in keeping with the diversionary theory that when in trouble at home rulers choose to transfer the focus abroad.
Continue reading Manning Ducks our Problems and Runs to Africa
INVESTOR’S BUSINESS DAILY
www.investors.com/editorial
Posted 1/23/2007
Homeland Security: There’s a lot of talk about al-Qaida safe havens in Somalia, Afghanistan, Pakistan and Iraq. But the FBI is closely watching a potential hot spot in our own hemisphere.
Al-Qaida is suspected of having set up a front in the Caribbean island state of Trinidad, and sympathetic jihadists have already launched a movement there to replace Trinidad’s Westernized government with Islamic law.
Continue reading Jihad In Trinidad
By Nalinee Seelal, newsday.co.tt
January 31 2007
An elderly couple was beaten to death at their Cascade home yesterday by bandits who escaped with an iron safe, leaving behind two infant children crawling in the blood of their murdered grandparents.
The badly beaten body of retired Neal and Massy auto manager, Clyde Commissiong, 69, and his 70-year-old wife, Denise, were found covered in blood in two separate areas of their home on Riverside Road, Cascade. The discovery was made by their daughter Simone, around midday yesterday.
Continue reading Grandparents bludgeoned to death
By Dr. Kwame Nantambu
January 29, 2007
It is a universally accepted truism that Trinbagonians are the world’s perfect copycats of the modus vivendi of another foreign country. It is also a universally accepted truism that Trinbagonians copy the absolute worst aspects of daily life and values of that alien culture.
It is this truism that is progressively eating away at the very core of sane, civilized human existence in TnT. Not too long ago, there existed the “Portrait of Trinidad” during which TnT was a true, de jure paradise and Trinibagonians were “poor and polite.” This was a time when sanity, human respect/dignity, inward-looking way of life and indigenous values ruled. This was a time, indeed,” when neighbour looked after neighbour.”
Continue reading Portrait of America in TnT
By Errol F. Hosein
January 27, 2007
The recent slaughter of four individuals in Morvant including a police officer and the horrific exposure to the atrocity by a young child, is a startling reminder that few are safe from harms way in our present-day society.
We are rapidly becoming a dysfunctional society in which crime and criminals command respect. Too frequently we make comparative analysis about crime and criminal activity in other countries around the world as if to minimize the pain and suffering that we are presently experiencing. This is simply morbid.
Continue reading We are failing the promises of Independence