Kevon Felmine

Leader of the High­way Re-route Move­ment, Dr Wayne Kublals­ingh yes­ter­day de­fend­ed com­ments he made last month per­tain­ing to the se­cu­ri­ty of Prime Min­is­ter Kam­la Per­sad-Bisses­sar, say­ing he was re­fer­ring to her po­lit­i­cal safe­ty. Kublals­ingh sought to clar­i­fy his state­ments, fol­low­ing com­ments made by Na­tion­al Se­cu­ri­ty ad­vis­er to the Prime Min­is­ter, Gary Grif­fith that he (Kublals­ingh) had made an "open threat" to the se­cu­ri­ty of the Prime Min­is­ter and a "di­rect threat to the Gov­ern­ment."

Grif­fith spoke about the is­sue in at­tempt­ing to jus­ti­fy the pres­ence of high-rank­ing army of­fi­cials at the de­mo­li­tion of the move­ment's Debe camp­site, last Wednes­day. The al­leged threat­en­ing state­ments by Kublals­ingh were made on May 30, In­di­an Ar­rival Day, af­ter Per­sad-Bisses­sar re­fused to meet with mem­bers of the move­ment.

Per­sad-Bisses­sar had at­tend­ed an In­di­an Ar­rival Day func­tion at the Par­vati Girls' Hin­du Col­lege in Debe, where fe­male mem­bers were forcibly re­moved from the front en­trance of the school by heav­i­ly armed po­lice of­fi­cers. Speak­ing to re­porters af­ter the Prime Min­is­ter's de­par­ture, Kublals­ingh had said, "She will not be safe and the Gov­ern­ment will not be safe. We will launch ac­tion af­ter ac­tion, af­ter ac­tion for sev­en days, sev­en years or sev­en months un­til they stop the Mon De­sir to Debe High­way.

"They can­not stand the force, the tem­po and the force of women, that is why she had to leave in dis­grace. She is dis­graced from now in­to per­pe­tu­ity be­cause she has be­trayed her peo­ple." This state­ment, Grif­fith sug­gest­ed, was one of the rea­sons why the move­ment's camp was de­mol­ished. Speak­ing out­side the pro­posed new camp­site of the HRM in Gand­hi Vil­lage, Debe yes­ter­day, Kublals­ingh said, "I just want to re­peat those state­ments so the na­tion knows ex­act­ly what was said.

"Those state­ments were made in front of Par­vati Girls' High School and I said that this Gov­ern­ment can­not with­stand the pow­er of the women," he said. "The women had been in the fore­front of rev­o­lu­tion­ary lib­er­a­tion strug­gles in Latin Amer­i­ca and the Caribbean and the women are lead­ing this group. And I said we will cre­ate ac­tion af­ter ac­tion, af­ter ac­tion on this Gov­ern­ment un­til they re­lent."

Kublals­ingh added: "The Gov­ern­ment and the Prime Min­is­ter her­self will not be safe at all from this group. "By safe I mean po­lit­i­cal­ly safe, they will not be po­lit­i­cal­ly safe from our ac­tions, if they refuse to lis­ten to the cries of the peo­ple."