Ak­ile Si­mon

The Trinidad and To­ba­go De­fence Force (TTDF) stands ready and will­ing to give what­ev­er as­sis­tance nec­es­sary to its Cari­com neigh­bour, Haiti, af­ter a 7.3 earth­quake dev­as­tat­ed the coun­try, killing hun­dreds, ear­li­er this week. Pub­lic re­la­tions of­fi­cers Cpl Al Alexan­der said the TTDF had ac­ti­vat­ed its emer­gency sys­tems and were await­ing the green light. Dur­ing a brief tele­phone in­ter­view, yes­ter­day, Alexan­der said the army was yet to re­ceive word from the Na­tion­al Se­cu­ri­ty Min­istry, re­gard­ing as­sis­tance to the coun­try.

He said: "We are al­ways ready to help. From the time sit­u­a­tions like this oc­cur, we put our sys­tems in place and our troops on stand-by to go." "What­ev­er we are re­quired to do in Haiti, we are up to the task." He said there was a sys­tem in place in which the For­eign Af­fairs Min­istry will in­form the Na­tion­al Se­cu­ri­ty Min­istry on what­ev­er as­sis­tance was re­quired from the army. "Once that is done, arrange­ments will be made to fly our per­son­nel to Haiti with­in the short­est pos­si­ble time," Alexan­der said.

The last time T&T troops were in Haiti was dur­ing the 1994-1996 UN peace­keep­ing mis­sion, af­ter vi­o­lence broke out. Hait­ian Pres­i­dent Jean-Bertrand Aris­tide left the coun­try and al­leged he was kid­napped by the US. T&T al­so sent troops to Grena­da in 2004-2005, af­ter hur­ri­cane Ivan dev­as­tat­ed the is­land. The sol­diers as­sist­ed in se­cu­ri­ty, aid dis­tri­b­u­tion and re­build­ing of the coun­try.