Headlines, Human Rights, Latin America & the Caribbean

TRINIDAD: Battle Over Chief Justice Highlights Racial Divide

Peter Richards

PORT OF SPAIN, Aug 15 2006 (IPS) - As the government’s bid to impeach the country’s incumbent chief justice, Satnarine Sharma, continues at the London-based Privy Council, for many people in Trinidad and Tobago, the conflict underscores the racial divide in this oil-rich twin island republic.

The Privy Council, Trinidad and Tobago’s highest court – at least for now – will soon decide whether there is any legal merit to moves by the state to lay a criminal charge of perverting the cause of public justice against Sharma.

The London-based court has already said it is prepared to hear arguments during the current August vacation.

Sharma, who faces the prospect of life imprisonment, has accused the Patrick Manning administration of political bias and has sought, so far unsuccessfully, in the courts here to have the matter dismissed.

The chief justice is alleged to have sought to influence the outcome of the trial of former prime minister Basdeo Panday, who had been charged with failing to declare to the Integrity Commission a London bank account he and his wife, Oma, held from 1997-1999 when he served as prime minister of this Caribbean state.

But while Sharma waits to argue his case at the Privy Council, the matter has also been playing out in the court of public opinion, highlighting the racial tensions between the Afro- and Indo-Trinidadian communities that Manning himself acknowledged could potentially explode into the sort of murderous infighting that has marked other countries with a similar mixed population.


“We must ensure that we do not endanger the future of this diverse society nor replicate the traumas of unmanaged plurality that have been experienced elsewhere. This beautiful, harmonious Trinidad and Tobago would then be no more. I am sure that no right-thinking citizen of this country would want that eventuality,” he said.

The prime minister’s remarks followed a high court ruling in May in favour of the largest Hindu organisation, the Sanatan Dharma Maha Sabha (SDMS), and the small Islamic Relief Centre, that the Trinity Cross, the highest national award, did not reflect the multiracial population of 1.3 million.

In an immediate response, Manning appointed a committee to examine the award that has been given out ever since the island attained political independence from Britain in 1962. The committee is expected to present its findings ahead of this year’s anniversary at the end of August.

The official 2004 publication of the Central Statistical Office (CSO) shows that the country’s 1.3 million population is made up almost equally of persons from the Indo and African community. According to the CSO, persons of East Indian descent total 40 percent compared to 37.5 percent of African descent.

That racial divide has cut across every aspect of life in Trinidad and Tobago, including politics.

Independent legislator and attorney Dana Seetahal wrote recently that the two main political parties here – the ruling People’s National Movement (PNM) and the United National Congress (UNC) – both have a support base determined along racial lines.

“So when the PNM government of the day seeks to initiate impeachment proceedings against an Indian CJ [chief justice], for allegedly attempting to assist high-profile UNC defendants, there is almost no question as to who will garner support from whom,” she said.

“Add to this dimension the fact that the current defendant that the CJ is said to have sought to assist was at the time the UNC chairman and opposition leader. It is no wonder the UNC will back the CJ, and so, too, will many Indians who may feel threatened by what seems to be the PNM hegemony over the entire country,” said Seetahal, who is also a newspaper columnist.

In April, Panday was sentenced to six years in prison by Chief Magistrate Sherman McNicolls, who made the allegation against the chief justice. The former prime minister has since appealed the conviction and is free on 50,000 dollars bail.

Panday himself has not shied away from using race to galvanise support for the chief justice, who is also the subject of another court battle for allegedly seeking to help another Indo-Trinidadian – in that case, Dr Vijay Narinesingh, a high-profile vascular surgeon who had been charged with murdering his wife. Narinesingh has since been freed by the courts.

Panday referred to the ongoing attempts at removing Sharma as “one of the worst things that has happened in this country”.

“This attack on the CJ reeks of racism,” he said, calling for marches and protest demonstrations against the Manning government until its stops its “spiteful and malicious” campaign.

“If the protests don’t work, the only other answer is violence,” he added.

But the chairman of the National Association for the Empowerment of African People (NAEAP), Selwyn Cudjoe, says the situation also highlights the thrust by the East Indian community for ethnic dominance regardless of the chaos or conflict that could ensue in the process.

“So that all the turmoil that we see in our society today not only represents on the part of the East Indians to dominate the society: it also suggests that the agents of their group are prepared to utilise any means – be they legal, political, academic or religious – to achieve ethnic dominance,” he argued.

He said that Panday did not even “rule out the possibility of violence to achieve that end that I have described”.

Cudjoe said that it was therefore imperative for Africans to acquire means to participate in the present national debate.

SDMS General Secretary Sat Maharaj dismissed the NAEAP chairman’s remarks, noting that Cudjoe does not see blacks as having dominance over other ethnic groups. “He sees them as people with the responsibility for ensuring ‘justice’ in the society and holding off the surging, battling win-at-all costs Indians,” Maharaj said.

“As a discourse, it is irretrievably flawed in that he provides not a scrap of supporting evidence for his viewpoint and, even more telling, he does not credit the Indians with having similar fears of Afrocentric domination in spite of there being a clear Afrocentric cultural and political domination in Trinidad and Tobago,” he said.

 
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