(Trinidad Express) Amid reports that Afro-Caribbean people are in the forefront of London riots, British High Commissioner to Trinidad and Tobago Arthur Snell says it does not mean judgment will be passed on the rest of the Caribbean population.
In a telephone interview with the Express yesterday, Snell said “there certainly have been or appears to be areas where you might find Afro-Caribbean, but equally you find there’s been acts perpetrated by other groups”. (See Page 25)
“No one is suggesting that this is unique to a particular ethnicity or group. Certainly we would never make any judgment on our relations with this region just because of what happens to take place in London by certain individuals. I would never want to tar Trinidad with the brush of some criminality that occurred thousands of miles away,” he said.
In a television interview yesterday, Trinidad and Tobago’s High Commissioner to London, Garvin Nicholas, said the riots are being controlled since the deployment of an additional 10,000 police officers to the streets of London. He added, however, that there is now a sense of calm in the capital, but there is still unrest in other cities.
Meanwhile, he said there are lessons for Trinidad and Tobago to learn from this.
“This is not the way in which one should protest. It is certainly something that was allowed to get out of hand. I think it is being arrested now and in terms of lessons. We ensured that sure behaviour must be met with the full extent of the law and that the police must indeed deal with any kind of unrest of this nature swiftly and decisively,” he said.
In a telephone interview with the Express on Tuesday, Foreign Affairs Minister Dr Surujrattan Rambachan said “according to the reports that we are getting, both from the local authorities in London and from the news, so far, there have been no reports about any Trinbagonian being hurt or anything like this”.
He added, “I have had no other reports about any danger at all, you know like what happened in Egypt or people requesting assistance. We have heard nothing like that.”
When asked if he feared what has happened in London could happen in Trinidad and Tobago, Rambachan said “the citizens are really people who adhere to law and order”.
“We are a country that has a high level of maturity when it comes to dealing with problems, and I don’t foresee that kind of thing occurring in this country at all.”
Franka Philip, a Trinidadian journalist living in Wembley, said things were quiet on her side of town, but she compared the incidents taking place in Tottenham, Ealing and Croydon to those of the 1990 attempted coup.
“I am glad that we are safe and have not been affected, but my stomach turns when you consider what has happened.”
“Some of the poorest areas have been hit by this… and it’s heartbreaking to see. You just did not expect this to happen, the way it escalated,” she said.
Philip, who lived in London for the past eight years, said the riots seemed more opportunistic rather than a genuine struggle for change.
“Personally, I think a lot of it boils down to opportunism.
“The original protest was about someone being shot and people not understanding why, what’s happening does not relate,” she said.
Regarding the claims of Afro-Caribbean youths being at the forefront of the London riots, former local journalist Neidi Lee-Sing said “there are others too, young Africans and poor European whites. But to me, it’s such a sad thing to know that young Afro-Caribbean males are being listed” according to police and media reports.
British Prime Minister David Cameron has said “those who’ve been caught, will feel the full force of the law on them”, and Lee-Sing believes this could have a negative impact on the youths themselves and especially people of Caribbean origin.
