By Stephen Kangal
February 19, 2007
The national community must show its outrage on the post -Cabinet uttering made by Minister Valley on the crime situation and widely reported in the media on Thursday 24 January. After the Manning Administration has led many citizens without any protection into the valley of the shadow of untimely and premature death and rampant crime that also potentially threatens each one of us, Minister Valley repeats the insensitivity of his Prime Minister and proceeds to justify our spiraling crime pandemic as being part of a “global event”. It has nothing to do, according to him, with the total failure of his Government to guarantee our life, liberty, the security of the person and our hard-earned property. For him crime, like inflation, is a feature of the global village of which T&T is a part. It is externally determined.
Continue reading The Valley of Hopelessness
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”.
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?
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.
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.
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. 
The comical though heavy-handed manner in which the police handled the Inshan Ishmael issue makes one want to laugh till you cry. Here’s a man who decided to mount a crusade against the evils that bedevil the society. In the still of the night, on the eve of his planned shutdown of the country, tonnes (yeah, tonnes!) of cops swoop down on his home and drag him away from his family much the way kidnappers do. They cart him off to Police HQ, hold him for most of the day. They then charge him with publishing a pamphlet without identifying the publisher-one of the most trivial, archaic laws in our statute books!