Clevon Raphael

This is an ur­gent mes­sage to Na­tion­al Se­cu­ri­ty Min­is­ter Jack Warn­er: please find your­self at No 19 St Clair Av­enue, St Clair, as soon as pos­si­ble, if not be­fore.That's the ad­dress of the British High Com­mis­sion and my urg­ing you to go down there posthaste is based on a sto­ry I read in last week Wednes­day's Guardian where the ar­ti­cle, writ­ten by Charles Kong Soo, should be of se­ri­ous in­ter­est to you in the con­text of your min­is­te­r­i­al port­fo­lio.

I am not in the least be­ing face­tious and my an­ten­na was raised by the open­ing para­graph of the sto­ry, which read: "British High Com­mis­sion­er Arthur Snell be­lieves that there isn't a crime prob­lem in T&T that can't be fixed with British ex­per­tise."

I don't be­lieve that the top diplo­mat is any way fool­ing around, giv­en the se­ri­ous prob­lem that crime is pos­ing to T&T which is cost­ing $200 mil­lion an­nu­al­ly, ac­cord­ing to fig­ures giv­en by Prime Min­is­ter Kam­la Per­sad-Bisses­sar, and it is well es­tab­lished that Warn­er has been throw­ing all kind of as­sets–hu­man and fi­nan­cial–in­to the fight against the law­less breed, with lit­tle tan­gi­ble re­sults which are dis­cernible.

As I said, I am tak­ing Snell's state­ment with all the se­ri­ous­ness it de­serves and even if Warn­er does not want to do busi­ness at 19 St Clair Av­enue, the High Com­mis­sion­er's res­i­dence in Mar­aval is an ide­al set­ting away from the pry­ing me­dia, where se­ri­ous dis­cus­sions can take place.

Again, I re­peat, I am treat­ing this in­for­ma­tion with all the se­ri­ous­ness it de­serves and as I have said, we have to keep on try­ing un­til we get the right for­mu­la be­cause we can­not throw our hands in the air and al­low the crim­i­nal el­e­ments con­tin­ue their reign of ter­ror over in­no­cent cit­i­zens.

Speak­ing at a func­tion com­pris­ing British se­cu­ri­ty ex­perts, Snell said: "I don't think, gen­uine­ly, there isn't a sin­gle se­cu­ri­ty prob­lem that this coun­try faces that can't be fixed, and more im­por­tant­ly these prob­lems can be fixed by peo­ple who are here tonight."Those are tru­ly re­as­sur­ing words hence why, if I were Warn­er, I would be ex­am­in­ing in great de­tail the claims be­ing made by the British peo­ple who want to help us out of our predica­ment.

Now I want to con­trast this with a sto­ry in this vein (crime) ap­pear­ing on page A3 of the same pa­per writ­ten by Richard Lord, in which Op­po­si­tion Sen­a­tor and at­tor­ney Fitzger­ald Hinds said the PNM is go­ing to op­pose the mea­sure giv­ing some sol­diers the pow­ers of ar­rest for a two-year pe­ri­od.

I couldn't help but mar­vel at the two com­plete­ly dif­fer­ent stances tak­en–one by a group of for­eign­ers want­i­ng to as­sist T&T in curb­ing our can­cer­ous crime prob­lem and on the oth­er hand you have our own peo­ple fight­ing down the gov­ern­ment for the sake of sim­ply naked pol­i­tics.

Sen­a­tor Hinds is claim­ing that the Min­is­ter of Na­tion­al Se­cu­ri­ty was at­tempt­ing to cre­ate a pri­vate army, a laugh­able propo­si­tion be­cause of the vac­u­ous na­ture of the al­le­ga­tion. I want Sen­a­tor Hinds to pro­duce the ev­i­dence which showed, ac­cord­ing to him, the op­po­si­tion and the ma­jor­i­ty of cit­i­zens across the coun­try were fear­ful of this so-called pri­vate army he speaks so glibly about.

We know it is the role of the op­po­si­tion to keep checks and bal­ances on the gov­ern­ment and I would like Hinds and oth­er PNM spokesper­sons to dare tell the peo­ple (truth­ful­ly) that this move is de­signed to mil­i­tarise T&T, as some of them are claim­ing.

You think any gov­ern­ment of this coun­try would ever take leave of their sens­es and even dream of re­plac­ing our de­mo­c­ra­t­ic sys­tem of gov­er­nance with some form of au­to­crat­ic sys­tem? My good friend Hinds is ac­cus­ing gov­ern­ment of a "knee­jerk" re­ac­tion over some of the moves to deal with bring­ing some sort of con­trol over the crime prob­lem, but gov­ern­ment is hard­ly get­ting as­sis­tance from the loy­al op­po­si­tion.

Hinds must know that this is no knee­jerk sce­nario, this is the re­al thing where in­no­cent men, women and are chil­dren are fac­ing the bar­rel of a gun with dead­ly con­se­quences on a dai­ly ba­sis.Which begs the ques­tion...any­way I am not go­ing to say it at this time but we shall watch and con­tin­ue to mon­i­tor the op­po­si­tion's modus operan­di in treat­ing with this se­ri­ous scourge, par­tic­u­lar­ly when this crime wave was nur­tured un­der suc­ces­sive PNM gov­ern­ments and that par­ty is now ask­ing the PP gov­ern­ment to cure it overnight.

You know, last week I read a head­line which said some peo­ple were be­ing beat­en by po­lice and sol­diers. I was deeply dis­ap­point­ed when I read those on the re­ceiv­ing end were de­por­tees. I re­al­ly thought they were from you-know-where, and per­haps if their par­ents used to drop some good blows on their back­sides, most of them would have been dif­fer­ent peo­ple to­day.