New threat to our society

As with that incident, fingers will immediately be pointed in the direction of a particular criminal organisation which masquerades as a religious body. After all, although Trinidad and Tobago now has one of the highest murder rates in the world, we have only ever had one instance of indiscriminate killings. This was on July 27, 1990, when the Jamaat al Muslimeen attacked the nation’s Parliament. They drove a car loaded with explosives into the Police Headquarters and invaded the Red House, killing in excess of 20 civilians along the way. So now, when an explosive device goes off in a rubbish bin on the public street, it is only natural for suspicion to fall on them.

We doubt, however, that anyone will claim responsibility for this incident, and we are even more doubtful that the police investigators will find any clues which will lead them to the perpetrators. We know that a Bomb Squad exists, but we suspect that their expertise is confined to locating and disarming explosives. Any further forensic skills are almost certainly lacking in the Police Service — though we would be happy to be proven wrong. However, the Police and the Fire Services must be praised for the promptness with which they responded to the incident, as well as the manner in which they kept order as Port-of-Spain businesses shut down and people made their way out of the capital city.

The timing of this incident may be also significant — or at least ironic — in relation to Prime Minister Patrick Manning, who just last Saturday was talking about throwing a security net around the country, "a net that is so significant that it is with difficulty that such a net can be penetrated," he boasted.

Mr Manning was referring to the specific containment of drug dealers and kidnappers, but even that promise sounded like more hollow rhetoric. And, though the net is not yet in place, this incident merely emphasises the PNM administration’s lack of political will to deal with known threats to the society. It was only a few months ago that Attorney General John Jeremie was making vague noises about collecting the $20 million owed to the State by the Jamaat — but since then he has apparently been devoting all his energies to legislation mostly designed, it seems, to limit citizens’ rights. And then last week, Energy Minister Eric Williams was saying that illegal quarrying in Valencia couldn’t be stopped because of loopholes in the law — which, even if true, doesn’t explain why the Government continues to buy aggregate from the Jamaat-run operation.

We bring up these matters because we see them as directly connected to the bombing incident yesterday. Even if the Jamaat is not responsible, the free rein they have been given by both the former UNC administration and the present PNM one has no doubt persuaded ordinary bandits and would-be terrorists that they can carry out their criminal acts with impunity. But, dark clouds rarely come without a silver lining; we hope that this unnerving development will finally persuade the people in charge — in Parliament, in the protective services, in the chambers of commerce, in the courts, in religious organisations — to take real action to stop our society’s inexorable descent into violence.