In Trinidad and Tobago, has Truth become Trouble?

As many of you know, I work for Global Voices, so I have a vested interest in following the instructions that Solana posted here. But I also believe passionately in the work being done by Global Voices Advocacy (GVA), the section of our organisation that seeks to defend free speech online.

While Trinidad and Tobago’s press freedom record pales in comparison with that of many of the countries which feature regularly in GVA’s pages, recent events in this country suggest that we shouldn’t be taking this freedom for granted. In November of last year, the Hon. Patrick Manning, prime minister of this nation, paid a visit to a radio station that resulted in the suspension of two commentators who had said things on air he didn’t like. And yesterday the news broke that Kevin Baldeosingh, a columnist at the Newsday, one of the country’s three dailies, was dismissed from his job at the paper, allegedly on account of a letter, published in the Trinidad Express on May 7, in which he exposed a Catholic priest as a plagiarist. A Catholic priest, moreover, who had just been appointed by the President to lead the Trinidad and Tobago’s Integrity Commission.

That the priest in question admitted his sins and stepped down (recalling, in the process, that the church’s Canon Law would have prohibited him from accepting the position anyway) thereby validating Baldeosingh’s claims, appears to be immaterial to the powers (Newsday alone? Newsday egged on by other parties? Who?) who are now attempting to silence him. The more important point, however, is that Baldeosingh was dismissed from his job for doing—regardless of where he happened to be doing it—what journalists are supposed to do, i.e. investigate a matter of public interest and present the information to the public. I imagine that Baldeosingh would have preferred to publish the information in his own paper and earn money in the process, rather than in a rival publication’s Letters to the Editor section; I also imagine that there must be a good reason he did not do so.

There are numerous writings on freedom of expressions from which I could insert an excerpt here, but I’ll quote from the one I happen to be engaged with at the moment—Burn This Book: PEN Writers Speak Out on the Power of the Word, portions of which I’ve been receiving in installments from the ingenious DailyLit, yet another one of my daily obstacles to personal productivity that nevertheless enrich my life. This is from the essay by Toni Morrison, who is also the book’s editor, though the emphasis is mine:

We all know nations that can be identified by the flight of writers from their shores. These are regimes whose fear of unmonitored writing is justified because truth is trouble. It is trouble for the warmonger, the torturer, the corporate thief, the political hack, the corrupt justice system, and for a comatose public. Unpersecuted, unjailed, unharassed writers are trouble for the ignorant bully, the sly racist, and the predators feeding off the world’s resources. The alarm, the disquiet, writers raise is instructive because it is open and vulnerable, because if unpoliced it is threatening. Therefore the historical suppression of writers is the earliest harbinger of the steady peeling away of additional rights and liberties that will follow.

And now for the obligatory line, as per Solana’s post: I vote for Global Voices Advocacy, because freedom of expression, online and elsewhere, is a right that we often value insufficiently until it’s taken away from us.

Write your own post supporting Global Voices Advocacy (or your charity of choice) by following the instructions at http://www.zemanta.com/bloggingforacause/.

This blog post is part of Zemanta’s “Blogging For a Cause” (http://www.zemanta.com/bloggingforacause/) campaign to raise awareness and funds for worthy causes that bloggers care about. 
 

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