TT: Panday wants more kidnappings

THE KIDNAPPING and murder of Ashmead Baksh, son of Naparima MP Nizam Baksh, has again produced an urgent and widespread call for the Opposition UNC to support the Government’s anti-crime bills languishing in Parliament for more than 15 months. The victim’s uncle, Shaheed Baksh made an impassioned plea for UNC cooperation during the funeral on Monday while residents of Barrackpore lined the road leading to the Baksh’s home bearing placards calling for peace and for the killings to stop. “I am making a special appeal for both sides of the House to put their differences aside and get together and solve the crime situation,” said Shaheed Baksh.

In expressing their condolences, the Chamber of Industry and Commerce renewed their call for both the Government and Opposition to come together to pass legislation to deal with criminal activity, saying, “Not one more life must be allowed to be lost to this type of barbarism and senseless violence.” We feel certain that these sentiments reflect the feeling of the vast majority of TT’s law abiding citizens who would also have been shocked by the abduction and apparently senseless killing of the 30-year-old mechanical engineer. It seems, however, that not even such a weight of public opinion is coercive enough to persuade the UNC into changing its obstructive stand on the revolutionary anti-crime bills. In our view, something must be seriously wrong with a political party which is prepared to ignore, indeed steadfastly defy, the wishes of a major proportion of the national population for either capricious reasons or in order to pursue its own partisan agenda. What, for example, is the response of the UNC to these appeals? Here is leader Basdeo Panday’s reply: “Cooperate with what? They want us to cooperate with the PNM and join with the criminals. I can’t do that.”

Panday's comment is ironical, especially in light of two UNC former government members having been amongst eight UNC-related officials arrested for the crime of fraud.