With crime and security seemingly spiralling out of control, the region’s leaders may want to explain why they themselves have scheduled no meetings for the remainder of the year to deal frontally with this most important societal concern.
We can only hope that crime will feature during the 7th United Kingdom Caribbean Forum to be held in Grenada later this month, but it is quite noteworthy that the official Caribbean Community (CARICOM) calendar of meetings for May-December 2011 makes no reference to any forum of any kind by heads of government or even their national ministers to deal with crime.
This coming weekend the focus will be on chronic diseases as CARICOM leaders gather at the United Nations headquarters in New York.
Yesterday, the Prime Ministerial Sub-Committee on cricket was also meeting in Port-of-Spain at the same time that the vice-premier of the People’s Republic of China, Wang Qishan was there for the two-day China-Caribbean Economic and Trade Cooperation Forum.
We are not by any stretch of the imagination suggesting that other matters need not grab the attention of heads or be taken forward, least of all cooperation with China, which has used the occasion to announce its offer of a billion US dollars in commercial loans to fund infrastructural development.
However, if ever there was a time when collaboration on security issues could be deemed as most pressing it would have to be now, given the pervasiveness of the problem and the obvious inability of governments to curb this scourge on their own.
To say that recent months have been difficult for CARICOM law enforcers is an understatement. From Belmopan to Bridgetown the challenges have indeed been growing.
In fact, the just-released draft UNDP Caribbean Human Development Report on Citizen Security puts the murder rate in the Trinidad capital Port-of-Spain on par with that of Baghdad.
So worried is the Kamla Persad-Bissessar administration that the situation is out of control that it has already declared a state of emergency and imposed a five-hour curfew.
As unpopular as the move may be in certain circles, it comes against the backdrop of a runaway murder rate (with some 270 murders so far this year), which in the eyes of the officials would, if left unchecked, have made the 1990 coup attempt by the radical Jamaat al Muslimeen group look like a Christmas party.
Yesterday, as the Sir David Simmons-led commission of inquiry resumed its hearings in Port of Spain, the man behind the bloody insurrection, Yasin Abu Bakr, was among persons down to testify.
The development came as the government of Nevis dismissed calls for a state of emergency there in the face of more than 25 murders in the federation of St Kitts and Nevis since the start of the year – including five within a seven-day period.
Certainly, this situation cries out for regional leadership.
