CARICOM leaders seem clueless on crime

THE EDITOR, Madam:

Everything discussed at the recent CARICOM crime talks was scrutinised by Professor Selwyn Ryan Committee 10 years ago.

The Ryan Committee made detailed recommendations, which were generally ignored by the authorities. It called for “integrated governance, a social contract that espouses poverty eradication, adequate housing, an improved education system, family support, health and wellness, and enriching leisure and creative activities”,

A decade and thousands of gruesome murders later, hapless regional leaders talked a lot and said little, scrambling to adopt an intelligent position on this epidemic of our times.

On the issue of gun-smuggling, the CARICOM bosses merely parroted the position of The United States.

On March 1, the US State Department said that “disrupting illicit firearm trafficking in the Caribbean is a shared priority... .”

Then, at the start of April, three US Congressmen called for a probe into American-sourced gun-running in Trinidad and Tobago (T&T) and other Caribbean countries. US lawmakers, Joaquin Castro, Richard Durbin and Gregory Meeks, want “legislative intervention” in their country.

The Congressmen expressed grave fears that the rest of the region could follow Haiti, with Port-au-Prince having descended into anarchy and gangs controlling 60 per cent of the capital city. In Haiti, more than 700 people have been murdered and 300 kidnapped since the beginning of this year, and yet – consider this – T&T is ranked, per capita, as more violent.

An international agency termed Haiti “a paradise of criminal gangs” and another group said the world is suffering from “compassion fatigue” in providing support without results. “Clashes between gangs are becoming more violent and more frequent,” the United Nations High Commissioner on Refugees said last month.

That could also be a real-life depiction of T&T, ranked by the World Population Review as the sixth most crime-riddled country.

The instability in Haiti has led to high prices and insufficient supplies of food, and “alarming levels” of hunger in some areas, according to the UN body. That could be the next stop for T&T, where one-third of the population is already suffering under the nominal poverty level and social welfare queues are getting longer.

It might be too much to ask regional bosses to solve crime when they can’t even sort out a common market or fix a rickety airline. But there have been several studied proposals, including that from the Ryan Committee, that warned a decade ago that armed criminals would swarm our land.

It would be “irresponsible and negligent” not to take decisive action “to silence the guns”, the committee cautioned. The incompetence of CARICOM’s leaders in dealing with crime reminds us of how vulnerable we are in these killing fields.

KEN ALI

Trinidad & Tobago