Caribbean Report 16-03-1993
Nine months after being freed on a charge of trying to violently overthrow the Trinidad and Tobago government – Muslimeen Leader Yasin Abu Bakr is complaining that the long delay by the government in filing the grounds of appeal against the High Court Order to compensate the insurgence amounts to oppression, and is threatening retaliation action. Justice Cupid Brooks ruled that the Muslimeen be compensated for wrongful imprisonment. Abu Bakr’s threatening remarks comes at a time when Trinidad and Tobago is considering updating its Sedition Laws. Keith Sobian, Attorney General Trinidad and Tobago urged against confrontation between the Government and the Jamaat al Muslimeen. There has been a mixed response to Barbados’s 1992/1993 budget, with its main elements being a two year wage freeze and indirect taxes to finance a budget deficit of just over 23 million dollars. Prime Minister Erskine Sandiford explained that the incomes policy was designed to deal with the country’s stable exchange rate issues, high labour costs and make Barbados more competitive in the export sector. Anthony Johnson – President of the Barbados economic Society believes that the budget could be mildly inflationary. Businessman Bobby Khan of the Manufacturing Society says that more jobs can be loosed as a result of this budget – correspondent Sandra Baptiste reports. A British business tycoon Spencer Trethewy says that he plans to set up an airline (Cunard Airways) to fly the Barbados to London route. However, both the Barbados and the UK Civil Aviation Authority says that it has received no application for licenses. Trethewy has also been named in a number of other shady business dealings, and there is much doubt over the legitimacy of his company Digital Development Corporation - correspondent Yvette Rowe reports. Trinidadian born writer V.S Naipaul has been awarded the first prestigious David Cohen British Literature Prize by the Arts Council of England in 1993 at a private ceremony- correspondent Andrew Burroughs reports from the award ceremony. Cuba has been careful not to editorialize on its coverage of the present Russian crisis. In Moscow, Russian, President Boris Nikolayevich Yeltsin has been fighting for his political life as the Russian Congress of People’s Deputies seek to overturn his reformist methods – correspondent Lionel Martin reports. Haiti’s exiled President Jean Bertrand Aristide wants US President Bill Clinton to use naval ships to cut off oil and weapons supply to his country, and calls for stronger US action in the New York Times. He was scheduled to have a late Tuesday meeting with President Clinton. A White House spokesman said that President Clinton will be sending an envoy to Port-au-Prince to tell that Haitian leaders that the US leader’s patience is running out. And, American civil rights leader Jessie Jackson and two other clergymen have been charged with civil disobedience and resisting arrest at a protest over the detention of HIV infected Haitians at Guantanamo Bay – Cuba.