Panday slams Kamla over protest remarks

Jesse Ramdeo

Se­nior Re­porter

[email protected]

Pa­tri­ot­ic Front leader Mick­ela Pan­day has crit­i­cised Prime Min­is­ter Kam­la Per­sad-Bisses­sar for her com­ments re­gard­ing Wednes­day’s protest in Port-of-Spain, ac­cus­ing the Prime Min­is­ter of re­spond­ing with “con­tempt” in­stead of ad­dress­ing cit­i­zens’ con­cerns.

The protest was held to high­light the dis­con­tent over the po­lice’s de­ci­sion to is­sue war­rants for the ar­rest of Ka­ia Sealy in the death of her com­mon-law hus­band Joshua Sama­roo dur­ing a po­lice-in­volved shoot­ing in­ci­dent in Jan­u­ary.

In a state­ment yes­ter­day, Pan­day de­scribed the Prime Min­is­ter’s re­sponse as “ex­treme­ly dis­ap­point­ing,” say­ing calls for na­tion­al lead­ers to “low­er the tem­per­a­ture” had in­stead been met with in­sults di­rect­ed at pro­test­ers.

Pan­day took is­sue with re­marks in which the Prime Min­is­ter re­ferred to pro­test­ers as “grifters,” ac­cused some cit­i­zens of “pub­lic­i­ty farm­ing” and dis­missed pub­lic con­cerns as “vic­tim gim­mick­ry.”

Ac­cord­ing to Pan­day, such com­ments were “not lead­er­ship” but rather the lan­guage of a Prime Min­is­ter “who would rather in­sult cit­i­zens than an­swer se­ri­ous ques­tions.”

The Pa­tri­ot­ic Front leader al­so crit­i­cised the Prime Min­is­ter for ques­tion­ing where pro­test­ers had been dur­ing the more than 5,000 mur­ders record­ed over the last decade.

Pan­day ar­gued that many of the same cit­i­zens and groups had con­sis­tent­ly spo­ken out about crime over the years through march­es, protests and can­dle­light vig­ils, while urg­ing gov­ern­ments to take stronger ac­tion.

She fur­ther not­ed that Per­sad-Bisses­sar served as Leader of the Op­po­si­tion through­out that pe­ri­od and ques­tioned what sus­tained an­ti-crime ini­tia­tives or al­ter­na­tive poli­cies had been pre­sent­ed to the coun­try dur­ing that time.

Pan­day said Trinidad and To­ba­go was still wait­ing on a “re­al an­ti-crime plan” one year af­ter the Gov­ern­ment as­sumed of­fice, adding that the pos­si­ble ex­ten­sion of the State of Emer­gency for an­oth­er three months was “not a crime plan” but “fail­ure dressed up as tough­ness.”

She al­so warned that ac­cus­ing pro­test­ers of pro­vok­ing the po­lice risked cre­at­ing un­nec­es­sary di­vi­sion be­tween cit­i­zens and law en­force­ment of­fi­cers.

“This is not a choice be­tween sup­port­ing the po­lice and de­fend­ing cit­i­zens’ rights,” Pan­day stat­ed, adding that such a nar­ra­tive was “a false choice” that na­tion­al lead­ers should avoid cre­at­ing.

Pan­day con­tend­ed that “mock­ing cit­i­zens will not make Trinidad and To­ba­go safer.”