Their critics have called them uncaring, offering only a five per cent wage rise to state workers, threatening to arrest police who "sick-out" and thing, but the Government this week revealed its compassion by giving criminals a two-week holiday, in the form of the limited-general state of emergency declared on Monday (or perhaps Tuesday-we'll have to wait for it to end to be sure exactly when it started). Last weekend, our hardworking gunmen/drug dealers/community leaders contrived to murder 11 people in two days. That, for the People's Partnership for Government by Vaps, was just too fire- trucking much. The several hundred murders before, including those of a mother and her two young children in their own home, were not particularly outrageous, it would seem, but when you're killing 11 people in one weekend, you're straying into territory normally reserved for the Attorney-General of T&T; and even our former exemplary Human Rights Bureau chief/chief hangman AG, Ramesh, took three consecutive weekends to hang his nine.
It wasn't professional jealousy that precipitated the limited-general state of emergency, but heartfelt sympathy for the plight of the criminal. Banditry/murder is very hard work, hugely taxing on the human spirit. People required to slit throats, carve breasts, gouge out eyes etc, and cuff down two buckets of spicy-crispy afterwards, need a chance to rest and recuperate, too; and it seems this is what the Government has offered them.
Because, as Senior Counsel, former Law Association president, Independent senator and scathing columnist Martin Daly has eloquently pointed out, when you play the state of emergency ace, you have to hang the criminal Jack, or you've exposed your hand for deuce. Though we'll have to wait for the final outcome to be sure, into day four (or perhaps five) of the emergency, a supposedly telling blow against crime seems likely to turn out to be merely revealing of the ineptitude that characterises any official act in Trinidad. Anyone with a smattering of legal training (and without a PNM party card, or seat in Parliament) would concede that the only thing that could arrest the rapid decline of the rule of law in Trinidad is a state of emergency. Like Muslims who abuse liberal democracy's freedoms to preserve an irrational favourable treatment for their own superstitions (so they can burn embassies in protest, but columnists can't say "boo" about their prophet), criminals abuse the notion of the rule of law for their own benefit, murdering witnesses to their crimes, and getting away literally with murder upon murder, because they know they have the right to due process-which, in the Trinidad context, will never fall due, except in state of emergency conditions, when the Constitution is suspended, and the "rights" of criminals denied.
The problem with a state of emergency, though, is that you can't keep it going forever, or it becomes a state of ordinary. So, in 11 days (or perhaps 12), everyone arrested since Monday (or Tuesday) will have to be released, or have something proven against him or her. And since the Police Service is as likely to continue to fail to take advantage of the remaining days of emergency as it has failed to make the most of the first few, all that is likely to happen is the really bad men who should have been locked up without trial 10 years ago are going to have 10 days off. And then they'll be back, refreshed and broke, and looking to pay everyone back for their loss of income. The only thing more embarrassing than the bumbling way in which coup de grace was delivered as faux pas is likely to be the bumbling way in which the PNM will respond to it. They, who landed us all in this state of anarchy, are likely to talk what they call in Barbados "bare shite," about the threat to freedom and the emergence of a police state. It wouldn't even be bad if Trinidad became a police state, if it was an open, pro-perly functioning police state that could keep your car from being stolen from your driveway and give you a new passport within a year.
Trinidad is not a police state, just a very badly run one, and for the very good reason that almost no one in Trinidad takes personal responsibility: the Police Service must be made right-but the Police Service Commission head must be allowed to disobey the police if he's in a hurry; the Integrity Commission chair must be not just forgiven but given absolution for the odd acts of intellectual piracy made necessary by newspaper deadline pressures; the same person who shrinks in horror at the evil of a palace built for peasants has no difficulty in getting cosy in $3,000 sheets. So, though, like every other cit-izen, I'm willing to give up my own rights for a time, for the benefit of us all, I'm not going to bet on the state of emergency transforming Trinidad, in 15 days, from a place where people are murdered in the driveways of police stations into one in which women can walk home alone at night in bikinis.
The only people likely to benefit from the general-limited Ess of E are bailiffs, who may seize and auction property after cinemas and restaurants are closed, because of the curfew; criminal/ constitutional lawyers, who will have many writs of habeas corpus to argue in 11 (or 12) days, and family court lawyers, who will have plenty divorce petitions to draft, when spouses all 'round town are forced to stay home together and quarrel with one another instead of one of them escaping to the Savannah for a corn soup. And maybe, one day, we'll elect a government, or ourselves become citizens honest enough to declare what we really have in Trinidad: a state of firetrucking apathy; until then, I suggest we reverse the syllables of the curfew to see it for what it really is.
BC Pires is not so much under curfew as under the influence. Read more of his writing at www.BCraw.com