By David Cave

Jackie Hinkson

The discreetly-titled “Unveiling” exhibition at Soft Box Studios raised more than a few eyebrows when the veils came off the pieces at the opening on June 24th. Part of a broader initiative called “Erotic Art Week”, the exhibition embraced erotic and provocative discussions in the trendy watering holes and a la mode gathering spots of the Newtown/Woodbrook area.  
As exhibitions go, it is interesting enough although, as art goes, I left this one wondering: Why this show and why now? 
As of writing, the response to the initiative has been positive.  The gallery’s bold decision to opt for a theme display instead of another solo exhibition or an exercise in randomness like the Art Society’s “Caribbean Canvas” (June 11th to the 19th) which was more Trinidadian than Caribbean, gave art lovers something intriguing to look forward to. But perhaps, therein lay the problem.  After all the titillation and aroused expectations, the end result of the Soft Box exhibition, though pleasing enough, failed to scale the heights of ecstasy.
Eroticism is a finely tuned experience. As art, it is not to be entered into lightly. Art of this nature demands a finessed sense of tension in order to be effective: too little and it fails to stimulate, too much and it offends.

Irenee Shaw

Therefore when Soft Box Studios announced the exhibition, I must admit that I feared the worst.
Fortunately the worst did not happen.  Most of the approximately fifty pieces on display are tasteful and well-executed works of art, although tastefulness might not exactly have been in Michelle Isava’s mind in  creating “Man 1”, a gigantic green phallus literally sticking out against the demure poses of Boscoe Holder’s and Jackie Hinkson’s nudes.  The element of shock may have informed Isava’s approach, but pieces like Francisco Cabral’s “Red” and “Parallel to the Moon” demonstrate how imagery can be used to evoke sensuality and eroticism. Paul Kain’s recent charcoal drawings with lithe male figures in poses reminiscent of Michelangelo’s “David”, also form part of the stronger examples of work on display.  Another notable piece is Rex Dixon’s “Eye Balling” which shows a strong morphing between reality and abstraction, very similar to the work of the Irish artist Francis Bacon.
There is also a significant degree of variety in the art on display offering a wide range of media, subject matter and intellectual treatment of the erotic theme.  In addition to traditional drawings and paintings, Francisco Cabral’s images also effectively utilise the rusty galvanized roofing to give the viewer the sensation of peering into something forbidden.  There are also examples such as Kwynn Johnson’s conceptual pieces

Asraph

consisting of embroidered text; remnants of her “Red Appropriated” exhibition that was held earlier this year.  Added to the mix are the papier maché bottles of Ashraph and the photographs of Bertrand De Peaza and Jeffrey Chock.  There is certainly an extensive scope of art to choose from that ought to satisfy a range of tastes, but one element of this exhibition that is hard to miss is the fact that it is dominated by the older art work. 
The pieces that command the show- such as those of Cabral (1993), Irenée Shaw (1990s), Hinkson (1970s) and Holder (1970s)- are larger in terms of size and complexity. These pieces are positioned closer to the entrance of the gallery, greeting the viewer and defining the first impression of the exhibition. Ultimately, “Unveiling” though quaint and attractive, is more nostalgic than titillating. 
It was great to revisit such pieces as Irenée Shaw’s large installations, now resurrected from the late 1990s.  But the changed context leaves something missing. When initially unveiled, the context of Shaw’s art had been one of self-identity and femininity, with very little to do with an overt focus on eroticism.  While in some circumstances time heals, in other cases time distorts original intentions. However, since much of what art evokes comes from what the viewer brings to the engagement, one can only hope that the personal experience of those seeing it for the first time was richly rewarded.

Boscoe Holder

Despite the good intentions of this exhibition, there is much rehashing, recycling and lack of novelty that might make a Lazarus envious.
Throughout history, erotic art, particularly when explicit, has always received a raw deal.  The essay “Art and Human Sexuality” written by art critic Geoffrey MacLean to accompany the exhibition, offers a chronology of Trinidad and Tobago art that was banned or castigated through the latter half of the 20th Century by a society that was too uptight to appreciate the beauty of skin and hedonism. 
Now, in the first decade of the 21st Century, MacLean’s lamentations appear “so 1990s”.  Today’s elevated sense of dysfunction and lack of social order leaves very little left room for shock. Which brings me back to my original question:  Why this art and why now?  Art history recalls another distinct period where the well-to-do social elite were more concerned with naughty sexual frivolity than the real issues faced by the suffering masses. It was the French Rococo period of the eighteenth century which preceded the great revolution of 1789.  It is my hope that our art aficionados will heed the harsh lessons that history can teach us.  The erotic art of the past will always have its merit;   however, using it to mask the mayhem of the present and escape reality can be a dangerous road to embark upon.
“Unveiling” continues at Softbox Studios until July 10.

De PeazaFrancisco CabralHarold Jimenez

PERHAPS the best way to understand the loss that would follow the collapse of Caricom would be to imagine a future without it.  A future that would take us back to the 17th century but where colonial authority  is expressed in terms of trade blocs. Instead of England, Spain, France, Germany, Holland et al, we raise the flags of EPA, ALBA, CAFTA, OAU, ASEAN et al. Each island, on its own, an outpost for unknown and uncaring interests.
In such a scenario, the Caribbean as a zone of relative peace, risks a return to the days when the world’s conflicting agendas were fought out in these blue waters, bloodying our shorelines and reducing us to the status of supply stations to the more mighty.
As we hustle to lock, block and cut off everything from doors, jobs and trade with our Caricom neighbours, we need to consider the reality of our fate as a group of small islands that live at the doorstep of the world’s only super power while floating in a sea bounded by centuries-old Latin obsessions.
We, particularly the people from Guyana to Jamaica, are outnumbered remnants of the Enterprise of Indies. We have much in common with Haiti, Cuba and Brazil but we have even more in common with each other. And this is why, as new and old powers begin to align and re-align themselves in preparation for the demands of the 21st century, the people of the West Indies must take serious stock of their current situation and prospects for the future.
To do this, we need to change the conversation around Caricom. There is no denying that Caricom has been reduced to the status of walking jumbie, continuing to make-as-if but, as Tagore might put it, comprehensively lost in the desert sand of dead habit.
It is not just the generations of political leaders who arrive at the job without a single thought about the Caribbean until faced with the need to buy, beg, borrow or steal. It is the entire institutional machinery that has both lost and forgotten its mandate, leaving its large number of bureaucrats scurrying hither and thither, busy serving a forgotten or unknown master. In the absence of a robust mandate, the wheels of regional integration are oiled largely by the availability of external donor funding. If funding dried up tomorrow, one wonders whether Caricom wouldn’t disappear overnight.
But even as it dries on the vine, Caricom continues to exist as a symbol of the possibility of turning history on its head so that, by adding one before zero, we might make ten and, in doing, strengthen our chances of survival.
Almost fifty years after these islands were cut loose by colonial England, the stark reality confronting us is that of a financially bankrupt region, institutional collapse and continuing dependency.
The future we imagined half a century ago not only eludes us but seems to be slipping further and further away beyond our reach, leaving one island after another grabbing at any opportunity for a bail-out just to stay afloat.
The dramatic economic reality presented by Prime Minister Patrick Manning in making his pitch for sub-regional political and economic integration is but a partial description of the failure of the Independence Project.
Unreservedly, this paper stands against the tide of insularity sweeping the West Indies. For us, the idea of an integrated Caribbean is both poetry and necessity. We have always understood the power of creating one out of many and the importance of cultural, economic and political solidarity among these tiny islands, adrift between the giants to the north and to the south.
We recognize the call to lock, block and cut off to be the natural instinct of a people who are yet to be convinced by any of the integration plans that have been put on the table before them.  And who could blame them? If regional integration is to succeed and endure, it cannot be compelled. The people must be the architect of their future, not prime ministers occupied with issues of electoral longevity, imperial pretensions or economic expediency. Integration as a central pillar of the Independence Project, must be rooted in a broad conversation at every level of Caribbean society.
Sadly, our leaders become Caribbean people only after they get into office. In Trinidad and Tobago, Patrick Manning, the latest proponent for sub-regional integration of a handful of Eastern Caribbean states, took a political lifetime to understand our interdependency. Mr Panday, before him, was no different. Once in office, he, too, developed his own sub-regional integration plan and- to no one’s surprise- ditched it the moment he was out of office. One imagines that if they, too, got the chance, Dookeran, Rowley, Maharaj, Bissessar and Warner, will present their own versions of a regional integration plan when faced with the challenges of government.  For them, political expediency trumps political necessity at this stage.
On paper, the integration plan offered, respectively, by Manning and Panday seemed reasonable enough. Both offer valid, even if different, bases for solidarity. But both are equally doomed without the declared commitment of the people. The shotgun marriage that our leaders are looking for will inevitably become grounds for divorce.  The people have to be wooed and won for this to last. In political terms, Mr Manning cannot avoid taking his plan to the people. He must be willing to stake his political future on it by making it part of the PNM’s election manifesto.  The implications are far too significant for it to be slipped through as a government-to-government initiative.
If he has what it takes to campaign for his plan through the length and breadth of the country, and to win the people’s confidence in it at the polls, then he stands a chance of becoming the right man with the right plan. In the interim, he needs to muster all the resources at his command to encourage his fellow Caricom leaders to change the conversation.

Short Story By Edmund Narine
Continued from TTR, June 2009

The moon was out, a crescent peeping through the black Bacanoit and plating Nemiah’s house, like a tenor pan, with chrome. Howler monkeys once ruled here but as the Port-of-Spain population increased, the Howler population decreased until they were completely exterminated. How the village gained its name is filled with conjecture, but the most likely one is that Howler monkeys were erroneously labeled Gorillas, and so with a road that followed the crescent arc of a dry ravine from village entrance to mountain foothills, Gorilla Crescent was born.
Days later when the moon hung like a curry calabash above the highest peaks, another meeting was called to order. Two dozen people were present. Chairman Nemiah was elated. He thanked the original four for their home work. “Your dedication is the reason why we have so many people here this evening, and that, in spite of rain showers in the middle of this supposedly dry season.”
But there was one person of the original five who was missing – Mr. Taka. Nemiah felt unhappy about that, but he had no doubts as to why Mr. Taka was absent: he had given Mr. Taka notice to move. His daughter and children needed a place to live, he had explained to Mr. Taka, and having no alternative, he had to house them in Mr. Taka’s place.
“The plan! The Plan!” A voice shouted through a window and woke Chairman Nemiah from his momentary lapse into reverie. An unruly group had gathered outside the Center, a development that Chairman Nemiah had not anticipated. Soon, the outsiders were on the inside, filling up the Center, calling for more chairs, scuffling and bantering with one another. They never settled down, yet demanded Chairman Nemiah present his plan. “The plan! The plan!“ they shouted, putting a fear in Nemiah that he had too often felt as a child. Angry, shouting men always terrified him and made him feel to run like a monkey with a mongrel at its tail.
 “What is the plan, Mr. Chairman!”
“But we people unruly, eh,” Alice Muckup addressed her husband, her remark lost in the commotion. She regretted her past elections canvassing of the squatters, the late comers who had arrived and built houses on the steep slopes which forty years earlier she and Nemiah had deemed impossible to build on when they first arrived in Gorilla Crescent. The squatters had come in five year waves - purposeful voter increases for the party in power. In 1961 and for three decades they came from St Georges and Kingstown; in the late 1990’s they arrived from Georgetown. And because they were considered mere ballots - schools, hospitals, houses were never built to accommodate them. At this meeting, however, the squatters were not the originals but the descendants. Unlike Nemiah who was a bonafide government tenant, these squatters – seduced and abandoned - existed like the Howlers they had replaced: they were a law unto themselves. Here the police never set foot unless to secure a body at daylight, often after it had been desecrated by ravaging dogs.
“The plan!” the newcomers bellowed, “What is the plan Mr. Chairman!”
“The plan,” a standing Chairman Nemiah shouted, “is a massive march against crime! That is the plan. We will march from Gorilla Crescent to Port-of-Spain and back. Every village is doing it and we will do it too.”
“The Chairman is a mad man. Aye, we talking about hanging killers! Shooting gun men! Decapitating dope pushers! And he talking about a march on crime! Come on, man. You better than Tommy. You joking.” The Rasta Man was adamant. On his head was a woven red, yellow, and green hat; but blood and slaughter was on his brain. The criminals like the Howlers were pests to be exterminated. “Kill the drug Lords! Kill the Gang leaders! Kill the Gunmen!” he shouted to deafening applause. Excitement filled the air. People danced, shook their fist in defiance, and cried “Death to the drug dealers”. And although he shouted himself hoarse, it was evident that Chairman Nemiah had lost control.
“No violence!” he shouted. “Please, no violence! Not me, I will have no part of violence.” His world was that of the obedient, the law abiding, even if the laws against marijuana and cocaine were now irrelevant, an ass.
Mr. Forthright had seen it coming. He sat in silence, staring at the throng and wishing for calm. The time had come, he thought, the people were ready to act, to take on the gang leaders, the gun men, the dope pushers, the winners in the war against crime. These screaming men and women were in fact the law-abiding of the burgeoning ghettoes – the carpenters, masons, steel benders, domestics who kept the country humming. These were the people who took to the road at fore-day morning to build the ‘skyscrapers,’ the idiot’s projects, calculated to boost self esteem and substitute dither for development. These were the people whose steelbands had been hijacked by ‘Sponsors.’ And like the middle class, Mr. Forthright, too, was once convinced that the ghettoes were created by the people who lived there, and that they were all incorrigible trouble makers and law breakers, the source of the country’s breakdown.
“Could anything good come out of Gorilla Crescent,” the Newsnight newspaper had asked rhetorically. But his sojourn at his grandfather’s house at the village entrance had now changed his views: just as Federation Park was the home of big actors so, too, the ghetto was the home of small actors. The big actors wore jackets and ties; the small actors were costumed as Rasta, Rapper, and Ghetto Chick. The big actors had their ‘skyscrapers;’ the small actors their dreadlocks, gold chains, and plastic fingernails. The ghetto was a response to rejection; the Gators, terrified behind high concrete walls and electric fences, a cry for imperial inclusion. These people, Mr. Forthright thought, were today’s Shouter Baptist struggling against British oppression in post independence Trinidad and Tobago.  Beneath the fierce Rasta and Rapper and foul-mouthed Chick was a Trini nationalist: a Trini by boat but a Trini to the bone. These screaming men were ready and willing to seize control and defend their wives, children, and communities. Increasing the armed battalions were nothing more than a shrewd Gator hedge against the coming rebellion, for what other purpose could explain the increase in military power? Mr. Forthright looked up, startled. Chairman Nemiah was calling on him.
“Mr. Forthright! Mr Forthright! Aye, Sir, you want to address the people? This is too much unruliness for me. Ladies and gentlemen, Mr. Forthright will address you,” he threw the meeting like a basketball in Mr. Forthright lap. Mr. Nemiah had had enough of the ghettoists, as Alice had labeled them. He wished they would leave Trinidad. Whether first, second, third or fourth generation, they should just pack up and leave Trinidad. Someday, he hoped, when votes and nothing else but votes concerned the Government of the day, a leader would have the courage to pick them up and ship them out. These were the people who made him feel ashamed to give his address as Gorilla Crescent. He and his wife were good people who had to suffer because of them.
Mr. Forthright, though filled with trepidation, took a defiant stance. He clapped his hands, thumped the table with a Solo bottle, and entreated the mob to calm down.
“People! People! Ladies and gentlemen,” he shouted. “Give me your ears for a moment, please.” The mob was in a raucous mood. Rowdy election campaigns its only political experience, it was illiterate to parliamentary procedure – every man was a chairman, every woman a chairwoman. Mr. Forthright steeled himself. He would have his say and Eric Williams be damned.
“What this country calls for is a government knowledgeable enough to attack the problem of crime with the creation of programs which emphasizes human development.” Mr. Forthright shouted above the din. “Human development! That’s right. That’s what I say. What is missing in this country is a recognition that we need to develop, to humanize, to empower our most precious resource - the people. And the way you begin to do that is through a devolution of power.”
“No big words,” the red, yellow, and green woolen hat Rasta shouted. “If is revolution, say REVOLUTION! Man. I am for that!”
“We don’t need more development. We have enough development in the country,” a gray-haired URP veteran said. “Watch the Hyatt and the Crowne Plaza on the Port of Spain wharf. What we need is….” The mob was right on cue.
“Action!” They shouted.
“What we need today is….”
“Action!” the mob shouted.
“What we need tomorrow is….”
“Action!” the mob howled.
Mr. Hardeed at first smiled, then, unable to contain himself he guffawed. Chairman Nemiah was aghast. He motioned Mr. Forthright to sit, and when Mr. Forthright stood his ground, Chairman Nemiah stabbed his finger in the direction of Mr. Foresight’s chair and insisted that he sit down.
Soon the mob was singing the Trinidad and Tobago national anthem and waving sweat-scented wash rags. When Chairman Nemiah ignored protocol and called for silence, it was Mr. Forthright who motioned him to be silent. Mr. Hardeed, hands clasped behind his back, his belly collapsing onto his belt, stood at attention. He eyed Mr. Forthright, savoring the sweet taste of victory. The anthem ended, the crowd began to chant. PNM! PNM! PNM! And without consent from the chairman, Mr. Hardeed spread his arms and took control of the chair. Mr. Nemiah could not believe it. In all the years he had chaired his party group meetings, he had never encountered a more energized group than this. It seemed the beginning of what Mr. Forthright called the revolution, and it was terrifying. His chairmanship snatched from him, Mr. Nemiah had no choice but to take an exit. He and Alice plunged into the mob and struggled towards the door.
If it was a moment Mr. Nemiah dreaded; it was the moment Mr. Hardeed had waited for. He shouted ‘PMN or die!’ The mob loved it; they responded, ”PMN to the bone!” Opportunity had fallen to Mr. Hardeed hands like a Rose mango with sunset cheeks. He was there to secure his candidacy, for votes, and these were votes for the picking. He gestured for order. The same order Chairman Nemiah had shouted for and could never get, Mr. Hardeed got in an instant. It could have been his briefcase, which he twirled aloft, or his dark shades, or his party tie. The unruly crowd, now numbering some one hundred men, women, and children appeared sedated. In fact they overly respected the Big Pappi –  men in jacket and ties, and especially men in party ties.
“If the PMN gained a majority in Parliament,” Mr. Hardeed cried, “if a PMN majority is successful in this election, I tell you, you the good law abiding people of Gorilla Crescent, the hangman would be banned from taking a holiday. I say no holiday, no vacation for the hangman!”
“No holiday, no vacation! No holiday, no vacation!” the mob picked up the chant and cheered Mr. Hardeed on.
“I say if the PMN win this election is licks like fire for the gun men, licks like fire for the drug dealers! Licks like fire in they backside! They can run but they cannot hide.” At this the crowd went into a frenzy and started to chant. “P-M-N! P-M-N! P-M-N,” they screamed.
Alice was terrified. Were these the supporters of the party she had backed for forty years? She and Nemiah exited the community Center as if they had been run out of Gorilla Crescent.
Change had come to Trinidad and Tobago – a furious wet season arrived and drowned out the dry. Rain showers flooded the Caroni plains. Sheets of water cascaded down the hills and valleys of the Northern Range. The Gorilla Crescent ravine overflowed its banks. Mr. Taka should have moved by May 31. But now it was August he still occupied the two room house in the Muckups backyard. At first he had made a few passing enquiries about a room; then later he and his wife had made a concerted effort to find a place, even putting a flyer in the House of Judea parlor at the village entrance. Gorilla Crescent, like an over inflated tire ready to explode, had no land, no houses, no rooms to spare. Mr. Nemiah had confronted Mr. Taka in June. He had confronted him in July. And now that it was August, Mr. Nemiah prepared to confront him again.
In the meanwhile Mary and her three children had seemingly settled in her parents’ home forever. Nemiah now slept in the kitchen; Alice in her carved out space on the living room floor. That was fine with the innocents, they along with their mother occupied the Muckups bed. But just as Nemiah had confronted Mr. Taka, Santos had confronted Nemiah. Alice watched her husband seemingly turn grey overnight, and it was his fault, she thought. His troubles could have been avoided if he had not insisted on housing Mary. She had tried with Mary. When Mary on her first sitting of the Common Entrance exam scored low, Alice sent Mary to Mr. Forthright for tutoring. But either Mary’s head was too hard or she was just more interested in boys than school, Mary again scored low on the exam. She graduated from Senior Sec reading like a grade three student. Asked what she wanted to do, she replied anything except things having to do with maths. Mary once said that she feared maths even more than she feared snakes.
On September first the Prime Minister announced the November elections date. Alice supported Mr. Forthright, running as an independent candidate; while Mr. Nemiah supported Mr. Hardeed, the PMN candidate. Alice supported Mr. Forthright because he had helped Mary, but she also supported him because since Mr. Nemiah’s first crime watch meeting in April, Mr. Forthright had opened a pre-school for children ages two to six, at no cost to their parents. Despite free schooling for two of Mary’s children, Mr. Nemiah, still a staunch PMN supporter, described Mr. Forthright’s effort as “only trying to make the PMN look bad.”
Nemiah listened to the Prime Minister’s announcement on TV. He was satisfied. He decided on a visit to Mr. Taka. Thickets of Christmas and Black Sage bush flourished among the Razor grass in the back yard since he had stopped maintaining Mr. Taka’s plot. He walked past the Rose mango and the goat tied to it and on to his tenant’s home. Razor grass flourished on both sides of the dirt tract that led to the house. He climbed the steps and knocked on Mr. Taka’s door. Someone had drawn on the green-painted cedar wood door a white shepherd in flowing robes holding a sheep and a staff with the caption “Jah Lives.”
That drawing must have been the work of one of Mr. Nemiah’s sons, for Mr. Nemiah himself had converted to Islam during his ten year jail term. Mr. Nemiah ignored the drawing: his thoughts were on his tenant. He wondered why with seven children and two adults no sound was coming from inside the house. He had expected more noise than in the Oval, yet silence prevailed. He banged on the door again, with the sudden thought that maybe unknown to him Mr. Taka had moved out. Mr. Taka, however, was at home, and apparently prepared for Mr. Nemiah’s visit. He had sent his wife and children to his sister’s house for a stay until after he had finished with the Nemiah business. The door creaked open and Mr. Taka, shirtless and in sliders, bid Mr. Nemiah an amiable “Good morning, Boss.”
Mr. Nemiah was stunned. When he last confronted Mr. Taka, Mr. Taka had attacked like the Opposition Leader. He cussed Mr. Nemiah with vivid anatomical descriptions of his wife, daughter, mother, grandmother, and even his great grandmother. Yet today Mr. Taka was sweeter than toolum. What did this mean, Mr. Nemiah wondered.
“Mr. Taka, when you moving?” Mr. Nemiah, adding saccharin to outdo Mr. Taka’s toolum, said and smiled.
“I ain’t moving,” Mr. Taka was firm but spoke softly. He stood legs apart, one upraised arm leaning against the door frame, the other propped on his waist. “I tell you two-three times already, I ain’t moving. When you ready just put me out. You is the Boss,” he laughed. “When you ready, pitch me out, but I waiting for your ass.”
The menace in Mr. Taka’s voice forced Mr. Nemiah to the offensive. He shivered. But he had to stand up to Mr. Taka. He had to be the lion in Judea. “Lord, God, what the @&* I have to deal with here! Who the @&* is you. Mr. Taka, after the three months grace I give you, you still ain’t moving? You want me to throw your big hungry ass out!”
Mr. Taka’s response was calm. He was the lion, and he knew it, in fact everybody on the URP project knew it. “I say put me out when you ready. But I say Boss Man I ready for you, you know. So put me out when you ready.” Mr. Taka took a backward step, reached down then swiftly raised himself to his former position. But there was a change - a significant change. The hand once propped on Mr. Taka’s waist now gripped a cutlass.
Mr. Nemiah jumped back. He fell hard, landing on his backside. But he was up in an instant, dusting his pants, breathing deeply in preparation for flight. He had come in peace, now violence stared him in the face. Mr. Taka might have been grand charging, but his next words forced Mr. Nemiah to realize how dangerous a situation he was in.
“The next time you knock on my door your @&* head will knock on my steps,” Mr. Taka said. “I say I ain’t moving! If you don’t understand that, then you will take what you get.”
NEXT: THE CONCLUSION

By GREGORY McGUIRE

On June 15th 2009, Dr Anslem London, Secretary for Finance and Enterprise Development, presented his administration’s Budget for the next fiscal year to the Tobago House of Assembly. For the second year running the London Budget contains more than subtle hints, which indicate that the administration in Tobago is seeking to increase its flexibility with respect to economic management of the island. The Government in Tobago may be emboldened by the reported promise of the Prime Minister to give the island greater automony. 
The motive behind Mr Manning’s pledge is questionable because of the context in which it was made.  Speaking on the proposed political union with our southern Caribbean neighbours,  Mr. Manning is well aware that within a Southern Caribbean Union, he cannot hope to give Tobago any less autonomy than would be given to either Grenada or St Lucia.  With or without greater automony, however, the question remains: Can Tobago escape the curse of dependency? Is there a chance that Tobago can develop an economy sufficiently delinked from Trinidad and Tobago that it can perhaps avoid the boom/bust swings that plague resource-based economies? The 2009-10 Budget gives a glimmer of hope but the journey has only just begun.

Dr Anslem London

The Tobago Budget for fiscal 2009-10 proposes to seek a record $3.07 Billion in allocations from the Central Government for running Tobago’s affairs.   Approximately 56 per cent is allocated to recurrent and the rest to capital expenditure. The amount requested represents an increase of 15 per cent  on last year’s request and 37 per cent above last year’s actual allocation.  While recognising that the fall in commodity prices has had a negative impact on Government revenue, Dr London justifies his request by recognizing that, along with Tourism, the Government is the biggest driver of economic activity in Tobago. He surmised that “in the current economic circumstances, the worst policy mistake that can be made by government is to recede or withdraw.  This is not the time for withdrawal, but for measured fiscal activism on the part of all levels of government” .
In this thrust to stimulate the economy in the face of external shocks, London proposed five new initiatives for fiscal 2009-10: 
• To introduce  enhanced incentives and stimuli to the tourism sector;
• To expand and enhance employment opportunities , while simultaneously moving to increase productivity and efficiency;
• To improve Project Management in the delivery of the Development Programme;
 • To modify the consumption and savings behaviour of Tobagonians;
• To develop new precautionary buffer stocks of revenue for the Assembly. 

 In addition, he proposed several Tobago specific schemes including:
• A Tobago Home and Land Ownership Savings Plan, to enable young Tobagonians to prepare themselves for the future purchase of a home or of land on which they may build;
• A Special Financial Literacy Programme, to assist daily-rated workers in managing their financial affairs;
• A Tobago Voluntary Retirement Savings and Investment Plan for daily-rated employees;
• The Tobago Employment Exchange Bureau, through the Information Technology Centre, to provide a 24-hour link between prospective employees and prospective employers.

Dr London went further to highlight “the need for special corporate tax and other incentives for Tobago that are different from, and more generous than, those that exist in Trinidad”.
While the above are steps in the right direction, they appear to fall short of a cohesive and concerted effort at putting Tobago on a self-sustaining path to transformation.  It may well be that Party directives, real or perceived,  are limiting the possibilities and actions of the Tobago PNM.  
In order to escape the curse of dependency and to achieve greater degree of fiscal independence from Trinidad, the Government and people of Tobago may wish to focus on four strategic imperatives.  
The first is a clearly articulated vision for Tobago.  The Government’s chorus of “developed country status by 2020” does not work for Trinidad and is even more inappropriate for Tobago. Still largely unspoilt, Tobago has an excellent opportunity to galvanise its development effort around the theme “ Tobago clean green safe and serene”. I have argued in several places that this is much more than a Tourism slogan and that it could influence the choices Tobago makes with respect to its Tourism, Education, Security, Agriculture and Industrial Development.  Since the development of the Comprehensive Economic Development Plan for Tobago in 2003, there has been very little reference to some of the strategies identified therein. While elements of the Plan are being  implemented, the Government in Tobago seems reluctant to make any direct reference to the Plan.  The Budget presentations of 2008 and 2009 fiscal years do not make a single reference to the Plan document, the intent of which was to guide the transformation of Tobago.    
The second imperative is the fiscal relationship between Trinidad and Tobago.  The matter of what is a fair and equitable share of the national pie for Tobago was ruled upon by a Dispute Resolutions Committee (DRC) around 2002.  
After considering several criteria including population size and state of development, the DRC ruled that Tobago should receive 4 to 6.9 per cent of the national Budget.  Several pertinent observations about the Trinidad Tobago fiscal relationship are worth noting and challenge the efficacy of the DRC ruling.
First, since 2002, direct allocations to Tobago have ranged between 3.8 and 4.2 per cent of the national Budget, while the Government in Tobago has consistently requested  a share in excess of six per cent.   However, if the quantum spent on indirect and shared services and resources—e.g fast ferry, gasoline and air bridge subsidies and infrastructure development, are added Tobago’s share of the national pie far exceeds the stipulation of the DRC. 
In the 2008-9 Budget statement the current administration pointed to several gaps and inconsistencies in the existing fiscal arrangements which limited its “operational flexibility”.  These included the prohibition on the THA with respect to the collection of VAT, corporate, personal  and some hotel taxes  in Tobago.   The current administration has also questioned whether Tobago does not have a right to royalties and revenue-sharing from the marine resources in its immediate waters.  All of the above can potentially increase the quantum of discretionary funds available to the THA to pay its way in the world.
The third imperative is an economic transformation strategy.  It is acknowledged that Tourism will remain important to the Tobago economy well into the future. Progress has been made with respect to airlift agreements which bring more tourists to the island. However much more  effort  is required on  developing the Tobago Brand,  improving and certifying hotels and guest houses and deliberately  targeting the Trinidad market.
Tourism apart, however, plans are in train for Tobago’s transformation. Much hope has been placed on the Cove Eco-Industrial and Business Park to bring in new investment and jobs.  It would be a tragedy for the Government in Tobago to sit back and wait for foreign investment to come to Cove.  As a vital piece of economic infrastructure, Cove must be transformed into a site for the modernisation of traditional firms in the Tobago economy. 

Tobago cultural goods—condiments, benna balls and other sweets, Tobago shell fish, Crab and Dumpling, Flying Fish, Tobago Pigeon Peas, Tobago Cassava, etc. must be graduated from the home kitchen and  sidewalk  to the factory and export markets. Initial moves in that direction, i.e proposed fish and cassava processing plants are encouraging.
Other elements of the economic transformation strategy should include leapfrogging into new industry in the fields of renewable energy and information technology.  There may also be also attractive possibilities in developing niche markets for education services at the tertiary level. I envisage  offshore schools for Environment Studies, Maritime Studies and Diving all catering for the needs of both local and international students.  These Schools must include strong research institutions that study and treat with the problems of the Tobago environment.
The final imperative is people development.  If Tobago chooses to capitalise on its natural environment, it will require an education and training programme that differs somewhat from what obtains in Trinidad. Tobago’s small size and small population make it perhaps much easier to accomplish such a shift than in Trinidad. Syllabi and detaching methods will need to be adjusted to capture the  imagination and interest of young  minds  while preparing them  for a restructured  Tobago economy.
Tobago still has a golden opportunity to chart a distinct path to long term economic viability independent of Trinidad. A comprehensive development agenda need to be articulated under a broad vision encompassing tourism, organic agriculture, education, sport, health, information technology, cultural goods and clean industry.

Andy Thomas, later known as Abdullah Bilal Omowale, the prisoner who stirred an international lobby for his pardon after being condemned to hang for murder, is the central character in Diary of Confinement, a  new play by Shango Baku.
The drama, which kicked off in Tobago last month, moves to Trinidad this month with readings at the Trinidad Theatre Workshop on July 17 and 18, and at the Port of Spain Library on July 20 and 21. Diary of Confinement will be produced on 25th and 26th July in the CLR James auditorium at Cipriani Labour College, Valsayn.
Thomas, a journalist who was eventually pardoned and later died from cancer, was convicted as an accomplice in the shooting of a police officer in the turbulent uprising of the 70s. According to the play’s publicity, his long-term confinement is used “as a metaphor for the compartmentalization of society into distinct areas of interest.”

THE DOC PROJECT
From the Producers

Baku paints a world of uniquely diverse characters – politicians and prisoners, crusading journalists and religious authorities, revolutionaries and gated communities. In a script of carnivalesque proportions we are invited, not to take sides  but to appreciate the breadth and depth of our  cultural persuasions and perspectives. We are challenged to understand and  embrace the kaleidoscopic reality of national life

Shango Baku takes on History in The DOC Project
The DOC Project aims at a review of local history and heritage through theatre usage. The Diary of Confinement by Shango Baku is more of process than a play. It is a point of access for exploring the collective consciousness of a nation. Baku’s script reconstructs a sensitive period in our history – the ‘Roaring 70s’ in the words of local playwright Zeno Constance – the crucial watershed in the nation’s history when people’s power imploded, with consequences that still resonate 40 years after the event. Hence the focus on public readings, schools’ participation and a broad raft of societal connections across educational, cultural, arts, and community sectors. The attempt is to motivate an integrated  inter-generational dialogue, and to engage a splintered society in redefining its identity in the light of historical experience.
Baku is no stranger to this form of theatre. In the 1980s Baku Productions produced a spectrum of plays such as One Bad Casa, Revo and Ruby My Dear that were designed to fulfill a social function by reflecting the realities of the day. Performances were mounted in the Port of Spain Savannah, in theatres and hotels, in schools and on the streets – as well as for film and TV audiences. Scenes were extracted and played as stand-alone elements in forum-style discussions. Students were given a chance to replay and redirect outcomes.

Playwright Shango Baku, second left, takes some of the theatre students through their paces.

The formula was then developed in Britain as an intervention in educational practice. The new company CETTIE (Cultural Exchange Through Theatre In Education) focused on bio-plays that celebrated the unsung heroes of Black History: Bob Marley, Marcus Garvey, Sojourner Truth, and a long list of Black achievers that included Trinbago’s Claudia Jones, orchestrator of the first carnival celebrations in Nottinghill Gate. A quarter of a century later, Baku returns from ‘exile’ with a new script and the same intent—engagement, inclusion, dialogue.
The process out kicked off in Tobago in mid –April at a performing arts magnet school in Goodwood. In 1985 Baku Productions had strongly advocated for Drama to be included as a subject in its own right on the schools’ curriculum. In early 2009 it was possible to embed the DOC Project in a flagship school, and to explore its themes with mature students. The Tobago Drama Guild, a youthful ensemble of players, had already been initiated in the script under the able tutelage of THABITI (Peter Smart). Baku and THABITI had been involved in ground-breaking dramas in the 1980s – Raoul Pantin’s Hatuey and Radio Republic 555, and Pirandello’s classic 6 Characters in Search of an Author. The present collaboration includes storyteller Theodora Ulerie of Culture House, a former administrator of Baku Productions.
There have been public readings at Goodwood High and the Itsy Bitsy Theatre run by Annette Alfred in Mt Pleasant, Tobago. Responses from students and mature audiences have been uniformly enthusiastic and informative. Elders recalled the heady days of speeches and marches in 1970, mass incursions into former no-go areas and sites reserved for the privileged, and communal defacating on the grass at Mt Irvine. (One speaker had invited marchers to sit on the grass. A faulty loud-hailer had conveyed a slightly different message!) 
Further public readings in partnership with the Tobago Libraries Service took place on 2nd, 3rd and 4th June in Charlotteville, Roxborough and Scarborough. A Gala premiere was scheduled for Saturday 13th June at Goodwood High School, with performances at the Itsy Bitsy on 3rd, 4th, and 5th July before moving to Trinidad for more readings at the TTW (July 17-18) and the Port of Spain Library (July 20-21). Diary of Confinement will be presented on 25th and 26th July at the CLR James auditorium at Cipriani Labour College, Valsayn.

The Only Road To Opposition Credibility

Basdeo Panday

At a time when the nation’s attorneys have convincingly declared their lack of confidence in the Attorney General;  when, mercilessly, the rising tide of crime sweeps  everything in its path and the government’s development programme is coming unstuck by global economic conditions, large sections of the  population remain unrepresented , relegated to the role of spectators of the bizarre road show being put on by the UNC (A), UNC (B)and UNC (C)op.
Whether people support these entities or not is immaterial. At every time, but especially now, democracy requires functioning avenues for contending opinions and alternative positions. An emasculated Opposition is in no one’s interest, not even the interest of those who support the party in power. Strong Opposition should, in principle, make Government stronger.
Not so in Trinidad and Tobago where political parties have evolved along the safe lines of ethnic preference with its arithmetical formulae for taking and keeping office.  In this context, parties could exist in the realm of permanent opposition- unless they find the tools for escaping  the trap of ethnic arithmetic.

Ramesh Lawrence Maharaj

A year and a half after the 2007 general elections, opposition forces seem committed to a dance of death, hopelessly engulfed in a morass of their own making. Neither Warner’s chequebook politics, nor Maharaj’s legal offensives, nor Panday’s rhetoric, nor Dookeran’s exhortations nor Bissessar’s charms provide a sufficient basis for building a credible opposition, mainly because none responds to the fundamental problem of legitimacy among the leaders of the various opposition elements.
Much of the discussion, so far, has revolved around the wrong-headed, upside down strategy of bringing the leaders of the different camps around a table with the aim of hammering out an agreement for collaboration under some form of alliance or unity. As in every case of democratic endeavour, the only valid basis for alliance and unity must come from the people. For the UNC A, B, C and any other, this should mean bringing people, not leaders, together. Despite his many disasters, the wily Basdeo Panday has retained leadership control, in office and out, by the cowardice of aspirants who are too afraid to put their neck on the voting block and prefer to wait in hopes of being anointed. The only way to break Panday’s stranglehold is for every aspirant to leadership to put themselves up before the full community of party members. No one who wants the leadership should be allowed to hide behind Panday’s or anyone else’s back.

Winston Dookeran

A leadership election involving a conjoined membership of all willing parties is the only transparent, legitimate basis from which Opposition unity can be built. In this regard, let the floor put the hat of every ambitious man and woman in the ring: Panday I, II), Dookeran, Bissessar, Maharaj, Warner, Tewarie, Yetming, Moonilal, Ramnath, Ramlogan, Gopaul-Nicholls. Bring the nominations and let none hide in hopes of one day inheriting the crown.
This is what those urging unity should be talking about: how to achieve the legitimacy of valid representation of the broad membership as the only way to settle the leadership question in order to build a coherent platform for a national opposition.
One may not like Panday’s politics but, like Sparrow, he is entitled to ask why should he bow out so that competition can thrive? The interest of neither nation nor opposition will be served  by a shadow political leader. Leadership must be willing to be put to the test and to accept the consequences thereafter, manos a manos.
None would better understand this than Winston Dookeran who allowed himself to be anointed rather than elected to the office of Political Leader of the UNC, only to be engulfed by the looming shadow of Basdeo Panday.

Region Marking Time While The World Moves Ahead

By SIR SHRIDATH RAMPHAL addressing the Inauguration of the Caribbean Association of Judicial Officers on June 25, 2009 in Port of Spain

The Following is an edited version of an Address delivered by Sir Shridath Ramphal at the Inauguration of the Caribbean Association of Judicial Officers On June 25, 2009 in Port of Spain.

Sir Shridath Ramphal

There is a temptation in small countries and regions far from centres of great power to believe that because we cannot influence events there, we can conduct our lives as if those events did not matter. It was never ever true of the Caribbean; colonialism was its antithesis; and markets for our production of sugar and later bananas, meant that the world beyond always was very relevant to us. The era of globalization simply smothered any temptation to think otherwise. But the new era did more than confirm our primordial needs; it enlarged and extended them and changed them qualitatively. Our two-dimensional world had gone global affecting not only us but also all others on the planet. And basic to that change was law. That is the essential truth our profession must grasp.
Commonwealth lawyers – heirs to a great tradition of fashioning a new jurisprudence out of the rigidities of the old – should be in the forefront of a movement that will fashion a new world legal order for the twenty-first century. Great challenges are already at hand in such frontier areas as the international commons….But, as the law of the sea dialogue confirms, these challenges will only be met by new systems and structures when we make the essential conceptual breakthrough about the nature of the human condition; when we acknowledge that the vision of one world has become the reality of one human community. It is worth remembering that Lord Atkin’s catalytic formulation of the duty to take care could only have entered a jurisprudence already sensitized to the concept of ‘neighbour’.
All this is a part of the new global ‘equity’ of which I speak – a consciousness that each man – not just each fellow citizen – is our neighbour, and an acknowledgement that to all men and by all men are rights and duties owed. These are the ultimate challenges to all lawyers.
You see, I hope, why I have taken you back so far; the world of sovereign freedoms, with few international rules  to constrain the behaviour of governments and people was passing – in some respects, had passed. But, let me take you back further still. In the lives of many there are moments of revelation that make all the difference thereafter. Saul’s was on the road to Damascus; mine, less mystical, had to do with a place not far away, Suez. For me, the Anglo-French-Israeli military operation against Egypt in 1956, in response to Nasser’s nationalization of the Suez Canal Company, was an awakening – an awakening to the intrinsicality of international law to human civilization. The UN Charter had provided a general prohibition against the use of force; but I was a young lawyer, and public international law was still esoteric. Suez changed all that. I felt passionately the wrong of foreign military occupation  of the Canal. Today, over fifty years later, it is ironic and salutary to recall that an American Administration (President Eisenhower) spoke up then for international law and for the UN as the custodian of its precepts. And that stand for global rules, for international law, made all the difference.
What has this to do with ‘Caribbean judiciaries in an era of globalization’? Everything, I answer; because it was a moment when law at the global level was contemptuously violated and the rule of law everywhere imperiled – even in the smallest jurisdictions where judiciaries are charged to ensure that power – political, economic, military – does not trump law.
An enlarged regime of law is the quintessential underpinning of globalization. In a globalised world, activities which were previously limited to the local or national levels are internationalized, requiring law-making beyond the single state. The result is a rules-based system of international relations including, with special relevance to our countries, international economic relations. I have spoken earlier of the Law of the Sea Convention which is now the basic law of our maritime spaces; but even more widely pertinent is the international treaty establishing the World Trade Organisation to which all Caribbean countries are now parties. 
Small countries like ours have many complaints and contests within the WTO as to its rule-making machinery and its rules; and there will be occasions of  recourse to its dispute settlement machinery – as there has been already between Antigua & Barbuda and the United States. The Caribbean struggles alongside the rest of the developing world to make the WTO fairer to developing countries, and to small states among them: fairer than it is now. Hence necessary battles like those at Seattle, at Cancun, at Doha, at Hong Kong, at Geneva. Necessary, because as small developing countries we need a rules-based international trading system, rather than face the hazards of trade in a globalised world without equitable legal rules that bind all countries – a world in which economic power holds sway unimpeded. Caribbean judiciaries have to be aware of this body of new law and its implications (sometimes in terms of rights) for Caribbean countries. If, in the Caribbean, domestic law, and what I believe we must now begin to recognize as regional law, is to be applied consistently with international law we had better gear up ourselves as lawyers for the new realities. That is a challenge of our time

Of course, this process of looking beyond the strict boundaries of domestic law will not be strange to Caribbean judiciaries who have already to take account of the law of the Community in and under the Revised Treaty of Chaguaramas. This jurisprudence is developing slowly and Caribbean lawyers, not just judges, have a major responsibility to be at the forefront of its development. Innumerable rights and obligations will be explored and defined and enforced over the years ahead. I believe that in the process Governments will discover that in CARICOM’s evolution they have indeed pooled their sovereignties, and properly so. The understanding by Caribbean judiciaries of the aims and aspirations of Caribbean Governments signatories to the Revised Treaty of Chaguaramas will be every inch as important to Caribbean people as the judicial opinion of Chief Justice John Marshall in Marbury v. Madison was and is to the American people – in what Simeon McIntosh describes as ‘a  construction of the meaning of the American Republic itself’.
I do not want to imply by anything I have said that the rule of international law in our globalised world is secure beyond  denial – any more than the rule of law at domestic levels anywhere is impervious to threat. Four years ago, at the 50th Anniversary Commonwealth Law Conference in London, in an address which I entitled “Can the Rule of Law in the Commonwealth be Secure in a Lawless World?” I was constrained to speak of current retrogressions.
The 21st century has not dawned well for humanity. Instead of going forward, for example, to a new era of global security that responds to law and collective will and common responsibility, we are going backwards to the spirit and methods of the sheriff’s posse dressed up masquerade as global action.
There should be no question of which way we go; but the right way requires assertion of the values of internationalism – including very specially the primacy of the rule of law worldwide – and institutional structures, like the International Criminal Court, that secure and sustain those values. Instead, these  first years of this century in particular have shown, though the signs were there decades before, that the ambition for world domination, which has ever been a global curse, remains so still.
All of this did not happen overnight. September 11, 2001 was not the fons et origo of present dangers. The decision, as we now know, to effect regime change in Iraq was taken within the first months of the Bush administration. International terrorism in any form is a grotesque abomination; and 9/11 was an enormously criminal act of terrorism. It was also enormously stupid – even by the distorted standards of those who perpetrated it. What it did was to provide a timely opportunity for a new imperium to emerge with plumes of a virtue and trumpets of righteousness. It offered opportunities otherwise only dreamt of by the globally regressive forces of the right. It gave plausible validation to an assault on the rule of law internationally. And that assault has come.
The magnitude of the assault on international law by the Bush administration from 2000 to 2008 in furtherance of what ‘neo-con’ ideologues conceived as the Project for the New American Century, was simply staggering – particularly coming from a nation that had played so large a part in erecting that edifice of global rules and the ethic of internationalism. That political environment has now changed providing an opportunity for law to be once more ascendant; but even before the change in the political environment, American judiciaries had taken up the challenge and begun to reassert the values of law.
In 2004, in the Rasul and Hamdi cases, the American Supreme Court began the fight back. They were the first two cases relating to the Bush Administration’s policies in the ‘War on Terror’ to reach the Court. Each case resulted in defeat for the Administration and affirmed the jurisdiction of the United States courts to review the legality of executive detention even in times of emergency or perceived emergency. Given the magnitude of the threat to the rule of law that the Administration’s policies at Guantanamo Bay held for all the world, the Commonwealth Lawyers Association which co-mingles the lawyers of over 50 Common Law jurisdictions (including our own) took the exceptional (and exceptionally worthy) step of filing an amicus curiae brief with the US Supreme Court in the Rasul case: the most practical way, you might think, of identifying  common law jurisdictions worldwide with the issues at stake in these ‘non-combatant’ cases. They did so as well in the House of Lords case in 2005 (dealing with ‘confessions’ secured under torture). It was everybody’s business.
In delivering the opinion of the Court allowing habeas corpus to run to the ‘legal black hole’ of Guantanamo Bay, Justice Stevens drew expressly on the case law addressed in the CLA brief in tracing the history of the writ back to Magna Carta and referring to English authorities going back over four centuries. I like to think that in both jurisdictions the CLA was acting for all Caribbean lawyers. The very next day, in Sosa v Alvarez Machain the Supreme Court indicated that claims alleging breaches of international law norms, including torture, by United States authorities committed outside the United States would be actionable in United States courts. The attempt to remake the global legal rules was beginning to falter.
What followed the Rasul and Hamdi cases had at its heart Common Article 3 of the Geneva Conventions. No country had done more to put them in place or respect them than the United States. The Geneva Conventions were agreed in 1949 as part of the post-Second World War settlement to create a new rules-based global order. The aim was to limit the horrors of war by setting minimum standards that everyone had to follow.   Common Article 3 is so called because it appears in each of the four Geneva Conventions. It reflects the most fundamental of the  Conventions’ rules: that anyone who was not taking an active part in hostilities must be treated humanely, in all circumstances. Some acts are considered so heinous that they are expressly prohibited by Common Article 3; they include cruel treatment and torture, as well as outrages upon personal dignity, in particular, humiliating and degrading treatment .
In Hamdan v. Rumsfeld (in 2006) (the Supreme Court) by a majority of five to three ruled that Common Article 3  had been violated. Of the eight Justices, only two – Clarence Thomas and Samuel Alito – agreed with the Administration’s arguments that Common Article 3 wasn’t applicable at all; the majority ruled that Common Article 3 established ‘requirements’ that the US was bound to follow and all the Guantanamo detainees could rely upon it as of right.Ultimately, (wrote Prof. Sands), the Americans’ violations of  Geneva at Guantanamo were  brought to an end by the decisions of the court’s.
Allow me now, two final comments pertinent to our Caribbean Court of Justice and to our Community itself.
It is almost axiomatic that the Caribbean Community should have its own final Court of Appeal in all matters. A century old tradition of erudition and excellence in the legal profession of the Region leaves no room for hesitancy. Ending the jurisdiction of the Judicial Committee of the Privy Council was actually treated as consequential on Guyana becoming a Republic 39 years ago. I am frankly ashamed when I see the small list of Commonwealth countries that still cling to that jurisdiction – a list dominated by the Caribbean. Now that we have created our Caribbean Court of Justice in a manner that has won the respect and admiration of the common law world, it is an act of abysmal contrariety that we have withheld so substantially its appellate jurisdiction in favour of that of the Privy Council – we who have sent Judges to the International Court of Justice, to the International Criminal Court and to the International Court for the former Yugoslavia, to  the Presidency of the United Nations Tribunal on the Law of the Sea; we from whose Caribbean shores have sprung in lineal descent the current Attorneys General of Britain and of the United States.
This paradox of heritage and hesitancy must be repudiated by action – action of the kind Belize has just taken to embrace the appellate jurisdiction of the CCJ and abolish appeals to the Privy Council. It is enlightened action taken by way of constitutional amendment, and Belize deserves the applause of the Caribbean Community – not just its legal fraternity. Those countries still hesitant must find the will and the way to follow Belize – and perhaps it will be easier if they act as one. The truth is that the alternative to such action is too self-destructive to contemplate. If we remain casual and complacent about such anomalies much longer we will end up making a virtue of them and lose all we have built.
To ensure against that – and to give confidence to our publics in so doing – Governments must be as assiduous in demonstrating respect for all independent constitutional bodies, like the Director of Public Prosecutions, for example, as the Caribbean Court of Justice itself must be in demonstrating its own independence. In the end, the independence of Caribbean judiciaries must rest on a broad culture of respect for the authority and independence of all Constitutional office holders so endowed.
And in the particular matter of the Caribbean Court of Justice we must act positively, not negatively. We must not abolish appeals to the Privy Council merely because we disagree with its rulings in capital punishment cases; that abolition, which must come, must be a consequence of our determination to endow our own Caribbean Court of Justice with the status of our final Court of Appeal in all matters; a consequence of the exercise of our right to self-determination in judicial matters too. We have not established the Caribbean Court of Justice to give decisions to our liking; but to give decisions under law.
Finally, we would confirm the myopia of which lawyers are often accused if we did not recognize that our Community faces dangers on other fronts – dangers which are apposite to all Caribbean judiciaries The basic premise of our regional lives is that West Indians are one people; and like all comingled people are of many varieties. In our case, the varieties have enriched the composite oneness, yielding now a characteristic mosaic identity of which we all tend to be proud and often boast. Personally, I have been a West Indian from the first moment of awareness of such things; and wherever I have lived in the region – from Guyana to Trinidad, to Jamaica, to Barbados – I have been in my West Indian home.  I am not unique in this; it is true for most ordinary West Indians; the more ’ordinary’, the more true. It is always a sadness when, however propelled, our societies are caught in a downward spiral of separateness with fellow West Indians cast as ‘outsiders’;  those times when, as Annalee Davis (the Barbadian Researcher) has described them, we become “locked into nationalist crevices … and exclusivist cultural legitimacy”.
We are at such a time, and both policies and practices are deepening Caribbean divides. ‘The knock on the door at night’ is not within our regional culture; still less are intimations of ‘ethnic cleansing’. No Caribbean leader would countenance such departures from our norms and values; but all must not only believe, but also act as if they believe, that we forget our oneness at our peril; whether the ‘otherness’ that displaces it is  an accidental place of regional birth, or otherness of any kind.  I say ‘accidental’ because in the  Caribbean the age-old process of trans-migration has made us all family: as a great Barbadian regionalist, the Rt. Excellent Errol Barrow, reminded us twenty-three years ago – concluding in his practical common-sense way that:
“If we have sometimes failed to comprehend the essence of the regional integration movement, the truth is that thousands of ordinary Caribbean  people do in fact live that reality every day.   … we are a family … and this fact of regional togetherness is lived every day by ordinary West Indian men and women in their comings and goings.”
So indeed it was; and for a very long time. My great-great grandfather on my mother’s side came to Guyana from Barbados looking for land and settlement, and found them – and so it has been up and down the chain of island societies that free movement fused into one: freedom curbed ironically with the arrival of our separate ‘national’ freedoms. But the roots of those family trees are now spread out in the sub-soil of the Caribbean. Social antipathy and divisiveness deny them; but DNA’s defy even Constitutions.
“CARICOM is at risk”, we have been warned.  So it is; and few are blameless.  Political leaders, in particular, have to be less casual about CARICOM, less minimalist in their ambition for it, less negative in their vision of it. Its foundations have been built on our oneness; not on the geography of a dividing sea.  The Revised Treaty of Chaguaramas  is not just embellished parchment; it is  the logic of that oneness in a world which threatens our separate survival. And the revised treaty is not all; there are international Conventions to which all CARICOM member states are parties that are relevant to our rights and obligations to each other as human beings, much less family. The Caribbean Community is now our regional mansion within a global home. We have to make it more secure and habitable – through reaching goals like the CSME (or even the CSM), and reaching them together.

Next month (July) is the 20th Anniversary of the Grand Anse Resolution on Preparing the Peoples of the West Indies for the Twenty-first Century – the Resolution  that established the West Indian Commission.  Nearing the end of the new century’s first decade, we are still ‘preparing’. No wonder ‘CARICOM is at risk’. In the era of globalization, we retrogress if we simply mark time while the world moves ahead. As CARICOM’s political directorate meet in Georgetown at their XXXth Summit they must demonstrate credibly that they still believe in Caribbean integration, that they care about securing it against risk, and that they are serious in their commitment to the objectives of the Treaty of Chaguaramas.  I believe the people the Caribbean yearn for that assurance from inspired leadership.
And so must we all here; for without CARICOM, without the Community, where is the Caribbean Court of Justice; where, even, are Caribbean judiciaries?  The siren song of separatism lures us to self-destruction – as it once did with the federal nation we were about to be 47 years ago. The Federation – ‘The West Indies’ – (how quickly we have forgotten its name) did not founder on technical rocks; it foundered on political ones. We have now re-built painstakingly over nearly half a century; and are again ‘about to be’ – this time an economic community. And again the siren sings seductive songs of separatism. In our collective self-interest, resistance of that enticement has become a major challenge of our time; and it is from our political directorates that the will to resist must mainly come.
The Caribbean Court of Justice, with the full jurisdiction with which it must soon be endowed, with its rich inheritance of the common law and of that international law which is the under-pinning of globalization, is for me the greatest assurance that as a Community of Caribbean people we can meet and overcome the challenges of the time.

EARL BEST looks back at the WI in England last month

Is there cause for urgent West Indian cricketing concern? It’s early days yet and Dave Richardson, the ICC’s General Manager for Cricket, has only just released his balloon so obviously we do not yet know precisely what will happen. But hear what he has to say: “It’s an important point that Test cricket should be played against teams that are at least competitive with each other. Ideally, you want to have the top teams playing against each other, and then teams of lesser standing playing against each other, maybe in a second division or a lesser competition such as the Intercontinental Cup.”
There’s of course no identification of who are the “top” teams and who are the “teams of lesser standing”. But whether we won, lost or drew the just completed four-match ODI series against India, had the West Indians gone on to win last month’s ICC World Twenty/20 tournament in England, we would all still be singing the praises of Chris Gayle’s men. And not worrying for a second about in which of Richardson’s two groups we are likely to be placed when the chips finally come down.
 It’s not that beating India is not important; it’s just that winning a major world tournament is much more important than winning a single series, Test, ODI or otherwise. My feeling is that few West Indian supporters were genuinely surprised or even disappointed at the outcome of the two-Test four-ODI series against England which preceded the Twenty/20 World Cup. Without quite putting it into words, most commentators seemed to have concluded that the home side’s earlier win in the Caribbean was a fluke – an “aberration” for those who treasure political correctness – and had little doubt that the result would be reversed when home advantage changed hands.
But notwithstanding the complete whitewash in that short series, the memory of the 2004 Champions Trophy clouding our judgement, West Indian supporters continued to believe that our team was in with a chance of victory in the Twenty/20 tournament. And our hopes inflated by the events of the early matches, many of us were massively disappointed when we eventually went out in the semi-final, outplayed from start to finish by the talented Sri Lankans.
So the questions arise: should we not have been rejoicing that we managed to get as far at the semis rather than lamenting that we failed to win the trophy or even to progress to the final? On the evidence only of our performance in the two preceding series against England, could we seriously have expected Gayle and company to do better than they did?
How realistic was it for us to expect the regional side to get past Sri Lanka? Are we, in short, deluding ourselves about the real meaning of the continuing lack of achievement by our cricketers? Are we hankering nostalgically after a glorious past that will never come back? Are we doomed to remain in the cricketing backwaters for many years to come? And finally, what does the recent performance of the team tell us about how we now stack up against the rest of the Test cricketing world?
Frankly, June did not tell us very much that we did not already know. But with Bangladesh back in the Caribbean for their first visit since 2004 and down to play two Tests, three ODIs and a Twenty/20, we could be in for some revealing times over the month ahead. Perhaps we shall get the confirmation by month’s end that, as Lloyd Best predicted many years ago, we have already been overtaken by at least one of the then existing minnows. Or will we rather see a clinical, categorical scuttling of any suggestion that the Caribbean side no longer can earn a place in the top tier?
One needs look no further back for the origin of the suggestion than to when the victorious West Indians arrived in England. From a West Indian point of view, very little of what they did in their first assignment is worth remembering. It was licks, licks and more licks, whatever the format, whatever the venue.
In the Twenty/20 tournament, however, the team’s favourite form if their skipper is to be believed, there were welcome wins. The seven-wicket defeats of Australia at the Oval and India at Lord’s gave the team and its supporters a huge lift but it may also have created expectations grounded not in reality but in illusion. Did scrutiny of the performance in either match, for example, lead to the conclusion that the team- as opposed to several of its members as individuals- were finding their best form? Both defeats at the hands of Sri Lanka and South Africa in the Super Eights pointed to the essential lack of all-round solidity in the side, dependent to the end on individual brilliance on the day rather than guaranteed, consistent, individual contributions from several players day after day. 
It is the lesson of the Champions Trophy win that we often choose to forget; we were dead and buried until the ninth wicket Bajan pair opted for an approach anchored in solid commonsense and eschewing all flamboyance.  Were I West Indies Coach John Dyson, I should have shown my troops the film of that game the night before every one of their matches in that tournament; I am willing to bet that the Australian did not. I think he shares the view that this is a team able to keep pace with the best in the world.
But the truth is that, able to match the best in the world or not on its day, a team conscious of its limitations and playing within them does not make 101 off 17-plus overs in the semi-final of a major world tournament when chasing a mere 158, not a team, at any rate that hopes to avoid the classification of “of lesser standing.” 
Maybe there is a hint of what the team thinks of itself to be seen in the selection policy. And there is something to be said about the batting order as well. One does not get the impression that much thought was given to either or that those in charge were in the habit of taking account of the conditions and the opposition and all the other factors that affect performance on the day. Why, for instance, was Xavier Marshall, doubtless very surprised to be selected against Sri Lanka in the semifinal given his earlier showings, asked to open the innings?  None can dispute that Andre Fletcher had finally prevailed on the selectors to omit him but Lendl Simmons and not the out-of-touch Jamaican seemed the obvious choice to partner skipper Chris Gayle – and that’s not just hindsight.

In the event, all three of Marshall, Simmons and Dwayne Bravo were called upon to open the innings and all three failed to get as far as the second over. Maybe things would have been different if Marshall had been moved down – and not up! – the order and Keiron Pollard promoted since he could hardly have done worse than he has been doing at number seven. Pollard by the way might consider himself lucky to have played in all six matches without having to bat against Australia and India since his scores when he did bat were 19 (11 balls), six (4b), nine (6b) and three (5b). Surely Darren Sammy must at least have been thought to be able to do at least as well as that.
On the topic of selection, one notes that Simmons was omitted from the squad that faced India and his place given to Darren Bravo. It is curious. Simmons may not have set the world alight in England but he did produce more than one very memorable innings.
And you can hardly fault him for the way he always seemed to be trying to deliver what the team situation required. Additionally, if the diving catch he took running back at cover point does not rate as the best catch of the tournament, it surely must be in the top three. So until we are told the reasons for Simmons’ omission, we can be forgiven for feeling that he was hard done by. And what are we to make of the inclusion of the younger Bravo (DM)? There is no doubt that he has done well at Under-19 level and in the regional tournament and deserves his chance.
But would it not have been better to let him cut his teeth against the weaker Bangladeshis rather than against the Irfan Pathans and the Harbajhan Singhs and others of that experience?  With two matches gone already as we write, he has batted only once and managed to score 19 off 16 balls. It was not quite enough to allow us to make any meaningful assessment of how well he is likely to cope at this level but it was better by some distance than his older sibling’s (DJ) eight off 21 in the same innings! And to give his West Indies Under-19 teammate Adrian Barath the confidence that, his achievements being on par with Darren’s, he too can cut it when - provided the selectors are consistent - before long his turn comes.
So what does all this mean? Well, for one thing, we can be sure that the result of the first two ODIs made for a sparkling second two in St Lucia. After Yuvraj Singh’s murderous 131 in the opening game, many felt that the series would be a one-sided affair with the Indians romping home to victory in at least three of the four games. Sure the West Indians contrived to get within 20 runs of their target but one felt that the marrow had been sucked out of them by the battering their bowlers had taken and then the failure to convert a surprisingly promising position in their innings into an outstanding victory.
The unexpected West Indian resurgence in the Sunday game was excellent therapy both for the team and the supporters. Were it not for a record ninth-wicket partnership between the skipper and RP Singh, the tourists who looked to be too good for the home side in the opener, would have been nothing short of humiliated. It ought to have made for a more compelling contest in St Lucia and one hopes that the crowds at those two matches reflected the enhanced interest in the still undecided series. And that the interest will spill over somehow into the series against Bangladesh who lack the big names that grace the Indian line-up. After all, the Board still has a bottom line to think about.  

Which brings me to the subject of disgraced former sponsor, Sir Allen Stanford. One notes that Vijay Singh, who was one of Stanford’s specially invited guests on the occasion of the inaugural Twenty/20 for twenty million in November, has offered to post bail for the beleaguered financier. It’s a splendid gesture even if it is just a gesture. It raises the question of whether the West Indies Board, indisputably a recipient of Stanford’s largesse, has in any way publicly commiserated with its erstwhile benefactor since his fall from grace. Maybe they have been advised to stay as far away as possible from him.
Given the huge bill that dropped on someone’s desk when the Board failed to heed advice about Stanford the last time around, one can be sure there will be no disobedience this time. But we should spare a thought for the Texan who has pleaded not guilty to the charge of what amounts to fraudulent conversion of his clients’ money.  That money has, after all, made more than a handful of West Indian cricketers more than comfortable. And it is not likely that the police or some other arm of officialdom will come knocking on their doors to recover it any time soon.
We have a lot to be grateful to Stanford for, whether or not the courts find him guilty as charged. And we should not turn our backs on him.  When the ICC adjudicates and consigns us to the second tier, we too will want our former friends to remember us as we were before our fall from grace.

Trinidad & Tobago

Anti-smelter activists celebrate the court’s

• High Court judge Mira Dean-Armorer quashed the Environment Management Authority’s (EMA) certificate of environmental clearance (CEC) for the Alutrint Smelter project in April last year. Prime Minister Patrick Manning and Energy Minister Conrad Enill said the government would  revisit the CEC application to see if there was room of improvement.

• British gas and electricity supplier Centrica agreed to pay $142.5 million in cash for a 45 percent stake in a gas development block in Trinidad to boost Liquefied Natural Gas (LNG) supplies.

• A preliminary review of the latest audit of gas reserves, conducted by Houston-based firm Ryder Scott, showed that there are additional supplies available due to the delay in the establishment of a US$1.2 billion hot briquette iron plant by India-based Essar Steel.

• The Government took full control of cash-strapped CL Financial and replaced Lawrence Duprey as chairman of the insurance and real estate conglomerate. Three more state directors were put on the board.

• State-owned Petrotrin confirmed the resignation of its first executive chairman Malcolm Jones. The resignation took effect on June 30. Kenneth Allum, who had acted in the position for the past five months, was confirmed as the new president of Petrotrin.
Despite debate about the validity of credit rating services, the Caribbean’s credit rating service, CariCRIS, received a major investment from the Multilateral Investment Fund (MIF), which is administered by the InterAmerican Development Bank (IDB). The investment amounted to US$300 000.

• ONGC Mittal Energy Ltd (OMEL) pulled out of an oil and gas production sharing contract with the Trinidad and Tobago government six months ago. Energy Minister Conrad Enill said the NCMA Block 2 would now be included in the country’s next oil bidding round, which is yet to be scheduled.

• One year after it was acquired by The Royal Bank of Canada, Port of Spain-based RBTT Bank Ltd posted after-tax profits of $346 million for the financial year ended March 31, 2009. This was an increase from the $326 million after tax profit recorded in 2008.

• State-owned Telecommunications Services of Trinidad and Tobago (TSTT) doubled its profits over last year’s performance. Chairman of the company Sam Martin, said the after-tax profits were recorded as $384.3 million for the 2008-2009 financial period, more than doubling its profits from 2007-2008.

GUYANA
• More than a dozen employees of Colonial Life Insurance Company (CLICO) were issued termination letters by Chief Executive Officer of CLICO, Geeta Singh-Knight.  Kaieteur News reported that the affected were from the Accounts, Customer Services and Pension Departments of the insurance company. The dismissals follow newspaper reports about the salaries of Singh-Knight and Finance Director Sharon Melville. There was no indication on whether dismissals were linked to the published reports.

• The  World  Bank Board of Directors approved the new Country Assistance Strategy (CAS)  for  Guyana for the period 2009 and 2012 in support of the country’s Development agenda  in  the  areas  of  improving  education,  social  safety  nets and strengthening  its ability to mitigate the effects of natural disasters and climate change.

• J.P. Santos and Company Ltd. a subsidiary of John Fernandes Ltd. reported $127.9M in after tax profits for 2008, an 8 per cent decline compared with the previous year.

JAMAICA
• The Gleaner Company posted its second consecutive quarter of losses at J$14.6 million for the three months ending March 31, 2009. This followed last year’s J$444-million loss due to its UK asset write-off.

• Jamaica Money Market Brokers Ltd (JMMB) posted a $668-million net loss for the three months ending March 31, 2009, after recording additional impairment losses.

• Michael Lee Chin failed to come up with the US$155 million (J$13.8 billion) that AIC Barbados, the holding company for his Caribbean investments, owes bond holders. About US$108 million of the debt is owed to Jamaican investors, of which US$47 million was initially due in March this year. Lee Chin who got an extension to June 11 to repay the bonds, again said he could not keep the deadline and asked investors to wait another five months to November to get paid.

• International finance magazines World Finance and Global Finance awarded Scotiabank Jamaica best bank awards. Global Finance also declared Scotia the best foreign exchange bank in Jamaica for 2009.
• The finance ministry floated a 30-year fixed rate bond to raise funds at an interest rate of 23.75 per cent. The rate was 1.5 percentage points higher than its latest one-year investment debenture.

CUBA
• In a move backed by Washington, The Organisation of American States lifted its 47-year suspension of Cuba. However the Cuban government declined to return to the OAS, insisting it wants nothing to do with the organisation

• According to a Foreign Trade Ministry report, oil exports are now Cuba’s second leading export, overtaking pharmaceuticals. Oil exports produced $880 million in revenues in 2008.

OTHER REGIONAL
• The World Bank approved a new four-year, $121 million lending strategy for Haiti.

• China, through a Memoranda of Understanding, agreed to provide Grenada with a multi-million dollar financial package and remove visa restrictions on diplomats travelling from Grenada to China.

• Venezuelan President Hugo Chávez unveiled a US$35 million oil-storage facility in Dominica. Chavez said the complex that Venezuela helped build will store 35,000 barrels of diesel, jet fuel and cooking gas.

• International ratings agency Standard & Poor’s lowered Barbados’ credit rating, in response to its forecast that the country’s economy will contract this year with a gradual recovery not expected until 2011. The island’s long-term foreign currency sovereign credit rating dropped to BBB from BBB+.

Little of direct use

A Review By KEVIN BALDEOSINGH

Caribbean Journal of Criminology and Public Safety
Ramesh Deosaran (ed.)
The University of Trinidad and Tobago, January & July 2008.

Ramesh Deosaran

In the context of T&T, a journal of criminology cannot be judged by purely academic standards. Since crime is the foremost concern of citizens, and has been for the past decade or more, such a journal must first be judged by its relevance and then secondarily by its intellectual rigor. Also, since the publication has been financed by the UTT - i.e. by taxpayers’ dollars - the first consideration has an added dimension.
This 13th special volume has two unique features. First, its six papers are focused exclusively on T&T; and, secondly, it is written entirely by teams of foreign academics (sociologist Derek Chadee being the lone exception, in a paper on fear of gang crime co-authored with American Jodi Lane). The other subjects covered are: crime hotspots; excessive use of force by police officers; youth perception of the police; treatment of mentally ill persons by police; and crimes against tourists. These, of course, are not the actual titles of the papers, nor the order in which they are presented in the journal.
The editorial written by Ramesh Deosaran is titled “The Enigma of a Caribbean Criminology”, and he notes that Caribbean criminological theory remains an open field. “Would the crime and violence data themselves be able to create theoretical perspectives far different from what is traditionally known in criminology as, for example, routine activities, differential association, anomie and strain, rational choice, containment or neutralisation, labelling or even conflict theory?” In the Introduction, written by Americans Edward R. Maguire and Richard R. Bennett, the assertion is made that “The failure to take advantage of existing scientific evidence is a major roadblock to implementing effective reform in criminal justice.”
Here, then, is the core question: does this journal provide data which can be used to reduce T&T’s runaway crime? The paper titled “Spatial Concentration of Violence”, which has four authors, would seem to have a useful focus. “The criminological literature on hot spots or spatial concentrations rests on an intellectual foundation that is comprised largely of three theories of crime: social disorganisation, collective efficacy, and routine activities,” the authors explain. The first hypothesis posits differing “zones” in urban centres, with the oldest areas typically having the most crime; the second is based on a correlation between high crime and sparse social capital (i.e. weak social networks in the community); and the third posits that crime is more likely when there are motivated offenders, vulnerable victims, and ineffectual guardians (of people and property). The authors examined hot spots in Trinidad to see if these ideas from metropolitan societies also applied here.
The hot spots identified will not be news to any concerned citizen: by police district, they were Besson Street, Morvant, West End, Belmont, Arima, St James, and Carenage. “Together these seven districts had about 60% of the homicides, though they constituted only 9.9% of the station districts in the nation, 39.7% of the population, and 6.1% of the land mass,” the authors write. They also found that nearly three-quarters of murder victims are Afro-Trinidadian, 18 percent Indo, 7.6 percent mixed, and 1.4% other. Then, in order to show off their expertise, the authors perform a statistical analysis using t-tests and z-tests, finding significance for victim demographics, motive, weapon type, and time of day. These findings, however, are entirely unnecessary to prove that “homicides occurring in areas where violence is spatially concentrated are qualitatively different than homicides occurring in areas where violence is less frequent” - especially to the victims.
The authors conclude that the metropolitan theories do not apply to Trinidad. However, they argue that their findings have policy implications, in that police and other agencies can implement “targeted interventions”. Although there is useful data in this study, this recommendation is a non sequitur since it assumes that the unidentified causal factors are hermetic and that the human agents of violence won’t have adaptive responses. In fact, the crime pattern of the past four months, in which murders have become more spatially wide-ranging, suggests that targeted interventions have had minimal impact.
Lane and Chadee’s paper on fear of gang crime suffers from a similar over-reliance on statistical equations. Addressing the questions as to which racial group felt more at risk, what precautions they took, and how people in high-crime areas compared to those in lower-crime areas, the authors present several pages of T-tests. Their paper is a textbook example of mistaking a mathematical result for a real-world one (or, economists Stephen T. Ziliak and Deirdre McCloskey put it in The Cult of Statistical Significance, “Fit is not the same as importance”.) And, though they are professional enough to admit that their sample was not representative (respondents being older and better-off than the general populace) Lane and Chadee did not think to adjust their equations even then. No wonder, then, they reach a paradoxical conclusion that “There were no significant differences across ethnic groups in perceived risk, but Indo-Trinidadians and Mixed Race respondents were significantly more afraid than Afro-Trinidadians of most of the gang crimes.” What could that mean, psychologically? Than although two persons judged a risk equally likely, one was more afraid than the other? And, if so, what is the significance of that to crime reduction? Where Lane’s and Chadee’s paper is useful is in revealing the differing value systems of Indos and Afros, but this is pertinent for cultural, not criminological, analyses.
Seemingly more relevant in light of recent events in Laventille are the papers on excessive use of force and of youth perception of the police. Readers will recall the case of a young man who was allegedly taken by police to another gang area and beaten up, and the stark visual images captured by reporter Marcia Henville and her Gayelle camera crew of policemen shooting blindly into the hillside and throwing tear-gas grenades into a crowd, as well as their armed presence when residents protested because of the lack of action on abducted10-year-old Tecia Henry, who was eventually found murdered.
The authors of the excessive force paper also indulge in empty statistical correlations, finding that informal methods of dealing with police deviance trump formal avenues; that the extent of the crime did not affect the use of force; that job satisfaction had no bearing on using excessive force. No wonder, then, that “The overall finding [is] that the model explained little of the variance in constables’ perceptions regarding the excessive use of force…” The recommendations thus end up being trite: “the rank and file must be persuaded to forego informal handling of infractions” and “the administration must take and handle such complaints about excessive force seriously”. Similarly, the youth perception paper is unnecessarily technical, using multiple regression for what is basically a simple opinion survey which found  that “young people in Trinidad have a relatively negative view of the police, regardless of whether they are asked about service quality, fairness of treatment, or police misconduct.”
Thus, there is little in this journal which is directly useful in the fight against crime in T&T. At the same time, much of the data can be utilised for a better understanding of the attitudes and social mores of the people and, if researchers meld this to social psychology, initiatives which would help lessen social disorder could well suggest themselves.