Charles Kong Soo

Na­tion­al Se­cu­ri­ty Min­is­ter Ed­mund Dil­lon says the T&T Coast Guard has an in­te­gral role to play in the fight against crime.He was speak­ing dur­ing his ad­dress at the T&T Coast Guard pass­ing out pa­rade for the 52nd re­cruit in­take at the He­li­port Train­ing Fa­cil­i­ty, Ch­aguara­mas, on Sat­ur­day.

"Crime is the num­ber one is­sue and the T&T Coast Guard has a key sup­port role in the crime fight­ing ar­se­nal.

"Our bor­ders re­quire strin­gent pro­tec­tion, which is why the Coast Guard's mar­itime pres­ence must be a dom­i­nant force, act­ing as a de­ter­rent to any il­le­gal and crim­i­nal en­try of per­sons or items through our mar­itime space.

"In the fight against crime and crim­i­nal­i­ty the most im­por­tant re­source of any or­gan­i­sa­tion is its peo­ple.

"You are an as­set far more im­por­tant than any piece of equip­ment in the ar­tillery, even the re­cent­ly ac­quired state-of-the-art TTS Nel­son 11 and the TTS Quinam, be­cause, with­out you no ves­sel works on its own," Dil­lon said.

He said T&T's porous bor­ders were a ma­jor source of the pro­lif­er­a­tion of not on­ly il­le­gal guns but il­le­gal drugs, which were both pri­ma­ry dri­vers of crime in the coun­try.

Dil­lon said that was why se­cur­ing the coun­try's mar­itime bound­aries as part of its over­all bor­der se­cu­ri­ty strat­e­gy was of such great im­por­tance to the peo­ple.He said the Coast Guard faced the enor­mous re­spon­si­bil­i­ty of pro­tect­ing ap­prox­i­mate­ly 280 kilo­me­tres of coast­line around T&T, 180 kilo­me­tres of coast­line around To­ba­go and 91 pos­si­ble ports of en­try along these coast­lines.

Dil­lon al­so high­light­ed some of the strate­gic co­op­er­a­tion ini­tia­tives un­der­tak­en in col­lab­o­ra­tion with T&T's re­gion­al and in­ter­na­tion­al coun­ter­parts.He said the Gov­ern­ment of T&T had en­gaged the Gov­ern­ment of Venezuela on strate­gic co­op­er­a­tive ini­tia­tives in the area of mar­itime se­cu­ri­ty con­sis­tent with the agen­da against cross-bor­der crimes.

Dil­lon said a de­ci­sion was al­so tak­en to re-es­tab­lish "Ven­Tri" joint naval ex­er­cis­es be­tween both T&T and Venezuela.

He said ad­di­tion­al­ly the Gov­ern­ment had re­cent­ly ap­proved the as­sign­ment of a Coast Guard of­fi­cer to act as a li­ai­son of­fi­cer to the Joint In­ter­a­gency Task Force, South­ern Com­mand in Key West, Flori­da fur­ther bol­ster­ing US-T&T se­cu­ri­ty re­la­tions as re­lates to mar­itime pro­tec­tion. Dil­lon said if these mech­a­nisms were suc­cess­ful­ly ex­e­cut­ed it would no doubt lead to less porous na­tion­al bor­ders and few­er guns on the na­tion's streets, there­by lead­ing to a re­duc­tion in firearm-re­lat­ed homi­cides and re­sult­ing in a bet­ter qual­i­ty of life for all cit­i­zens of T&T.