How do I put this? Most of the rest of the world, with the exception of the English-speaking Caribbean, observed International Day to End Impunity for Crimes against Journalists yesterday.
For many on the mailing list of the busy-bodies across at the United Nations Information Centre, the occasion would have passed as yet another "UN Day" of this or that.
So, it would have been easy to have also missed World Cities Day on Sunday as we are almost certain to forego observance of World Tsunami Awareness Day on Saturday.
However, not many people in this part of the world know this, but "the Caribbean," via the Association of Caribbean MediaWorkers (ACM) which I currently lead, has been a part of a global effort for years now to promote greater awareness of the impact of defective systems of law and justice that allow the guilty to go free, with particular reference to crimes against journalists, photographers, musicians, artists and other public communicators.
It is not that in the Caribbean we have experienced, to any great degree, acts of impunity of the classical kind against our journalists–though our annual reporting on such incidents has recalled cases in Haiti, Suriname and Guyana. But our involvement has served as something of a pre-emptive intervention in the face of several discouraging trends.
We were prompted to get involved through the efforts of the International Freedom of Expression Exchange (IFEX) with which we have been closely aligned since 2008.
And it was in 2012 the ACM became actively involved in November 23 observances of International Day to End Impunity, then led by IFEX, by reporting on the continued failure to prosecute offenders guilty of violent crimes against journalists in the three Caricom territories mentioned.
Sadly, journalistic colleagues elsewhere in the region paid very little attention to our several public dispatches advising that while the worst, open impacts of impunity were yet to strike most of us, there is likely to come a time when we will be forced to stand up and pay closer attention.
I also had to convince people that while in the Caribbean journalists do not typically lose their lives for the work they do, they always face the danger of losing their livelihood and that the objective of silence is achievable through a variety of means.
The IFEX campaign eventually reached the halls of the UN General Assembly in 2013 when in a resolution adopted at its 68th Session, International Day to end Impunity for crimes against Journalists was declared to be observed on November 2 every year.
Sadly, our people have not yet come around to understanding that a high level of impunity in cases of violent crime, as currently obtains here in T&T, would eventually have an impact on a situation in which there is growing ambivalence on the work of journalists and, indeed, other areas of public activism.
Only two weeks ago, on this page, I attempted to remind people that if the rate of detection for murders is around the 20 per cent marker and, of those, a conviction rate of under 10 per cent persists, what you have is a situation in which people are essentially getting away with murder as the norm and not as an exception. The essential ingredients for impunity therefore indisputably apply in our context. The UN resolution recognises the connection between general conditions for impunity and focused attacks on one sector.
Such a situation, the resolution says, "Emboldens the perpetrators of the crimes and at the same time has a chilling effect on society including journalists themselves.
Impunity breeds impunity and feeds into a vicious cycle."
Now, consider the fact that our journalism is increasingly pushing against longstanding social and political boundaries with a backlash that has expressed itself through a variety of old and new means, and you will get an idea of where my worst fears are rooted.
I have said many times before, to the chagrin of many colleagues, that I have great confidence in the current crop of young journalists–pimples and all–to dare reach where previous generations have feared to tread.
I am no believer in any "golden age" of broadcasting or journalism, except that I continue to assert that the best writers and broadcasters of yesteryear are better than the best broadcasters and writers of today. However, the mind-set of this young crop has brought us a greater predisposition to eschew the tendency to respect taboo and to kowtow to authority–however rough around the edges they might be.
Whether we agree with this perspective of not, we should know that in the current period, both the stakes and the risks are much higher than they have ever been when it comes to political power, economic interests and criminal enterprise–sometimes all wrapped into a single package.
It is only a matter of time before enemies of the free press in the form of political partisans of all hues and other social agents realise that undermining the credibility of working journalists, imposing new regimes of intended censorship and generally creating conditions for suppressing news and information will be resisted, at which stage other options will be left to be considered, as they have been in Haiti, Suriname and Guyana in the recent past.
It has not helped that the human rights umbrella for all of this is not considered a priority in countries such as ours.
If anything, we are being drawn further and further way into a barren landscape in which impunity is more likely than not to become a norm when it comes to journalists and their work.
In the meantime, journalists are not being killed, but many stories die.