Scary scenario

FOR two days last week there was a conference organised by the Employers Consultative Association (ECA) the title of which was a mouthful: “International Crime and Terrorism; Implications for Business and Caribbean Economies.” There were many distinguished speakers including former President of TT, Mr Arthur N Robinson, the US Ambassador Mr Roy Austin and internationally famous forensic accountant Mr Robert Lindquist.

Mr Austin, as expected and following his country’s recent experiences with terrorists, chose to warn that Trinidad and Tobago might suffer a fallout from investors if the government continued to be tardy in passing anti-terrorism laws. On the other hand Mr Robinson, himself a survivor of terrorism, and as was also expected given his interest in the international court, stated that the answer to crime and terrorism is not in having more laws and mobilising more force but in the “rule of law.”

The featured speaker at Wednesday’s opening, also a survivor of terrorism, Frank Razzano was there when terrorists blew up the World Trade Centre in New York. His take on the subject was that Trinidad and Tobago could face a terrorist threat because of its long tradition of following the rule of law? So what do we make of it all?  Before all this could be absorbed, however, a speaker on Thursday captured the leadlines with an even more scary picture of the trouble that this country is in. The conference heard from Darius Figueira, author/academic/lecturer that not only is TT at the heart of the international trade in narcotics, but that local transhipments are being controlled by this society’s elites and are being used to fund a local cell of the al Qaeda terrorist network.

He had more to say — that the drug trade had influenced every institution of the State and was run by supposedly respectable businessmen. We could expect to see al Qaeda trying to ignite tanker ships transporting LNG to the USA, he warned. Now there’s a statement that even though it may be speculative, could indeed hurt the country's image as a place for investment, much more so than any failure to pass anti-terrorism legislation, as suggested by Mr Austin or adherence to the rule of law as promoted by Mr Robinson. We need no lecturer to tell us how bad the drug trade is affecting our country, both socially and economically and the extent to which this trade is at the heart of the high crime rate, now extended to include almost daily kidnappings for ransom. With respect to Mr Austin’s concerns, we should point out that the last time that foreign investments, for example, plant, machinery and products, were physically threatened was in a purely colonial environment in June 1937 in a social revolution led by Tubal Uriah Butler in the foreign-owned oil industry. This can be stretched perhaps to embrace the 1965 burning of canefields on sugar plantations owned by the UK Tate and Lyle company but as we said that would be stretching it a bit.

The question is what do we do about it? Who is to provide the answers, whether by passing new laws, insisting that the rule of law is observed or by any other means to deal with terrorists igniting gas tankers. No one at the conference, as far as has been reported, offered any solutions virtually confining themselves to individual points of view with regard to the problem while offering no real solutions for the salvation of a small island state under serious threat perhaps not so much from international terrorism — although that must remain a distinct possibility — but from its own homegrown criminals.