creole@wow.net

Averting eyes from reality’s hell-hole

With horror stories breaking like little volcanic eruptions across the face of the land, one thing Trinidad and Tobago no longer worries about is bad press.

It’s nearly three years since National Security Minister Martin Joseph shot off as rude a letter to the editor of the Los Angeles Times as he might address, say, to the editor of the Sunday Guardian here.

“Kidnappings send a chill through sunny Trinidad,” said the LA Times headline. California dreaming, Mr Joseph demanded “immediate retraction” and an apology.

In 2004-2005—before the dramas of Vindra Naipaul Coolman and Rebekah Sugrim, and Josanne Sammy and Dr Mavindra Maharaj—the minister resented the American newspaper’s reference to the fact that most kidnap victims were Indians who accused the T&T police of complicity or indifference.

Foreign ministries are warning, once again, of “violent crime, including shootings and kidnappings,” in Trinidad and Tobago.

And Martin Joseph looks and sounds as punch-drunk as the old loser staggering up to the microphone to sing: “I took the blows...I did it my way.”

Reporters were visiting last week. At the Cascadia, the Association of Caribbean Media Workers assembled journalists from 17 countries.

Following a programme on human rights and the rights of children, assisted by UN agencies and the Netherlands, the journalists didn’t appear to have much time for the stories bursting forth like geysers outside the bustling St Ann’s conference centre.

But the rights sessions were taking place at a time when front pages were crackling and popping with stories prompting a response, “What the hell is going on here?”

“Hell-hole” was how a high international public servant had described her native T&T to me some weeks before. She was waiting at Piarco for a flight to Tobago for more than two days.

The flight booked from Europe weeks before no longer existed. She was reduced to the hopelessness of waiting and waiting.

I had noticed reporting on flight disruptions. With so much going wrong at the same time, however, focus escaped.

The media have, somehow, lost adequate ways of representing people’s pain.

By the time I spoke at an ACM workshop exploring prospects for a human rights beat, I had become sure the media stand in danger of being overwhelmed.

Terrible things happen to people so regularly, in circumstances where people appear so helpless, that the media lack time to weigh exactly what took place, what did it signify, and in what larger context it might be seen.

I recalled the front-page photo of a young woman who had lost one leg on the spot in a San Juan car accident. The story said surgeons had amputated the other damaged leg.

“Lucky to be alive,” said the caption. The phrase read like a breezy summary of the heart-sinking prospect of a life sentence as permanently disabled, or “differently able.”

It turned out the other leg had not been amputated. Friends, relatives, the victim herself, might have read the same misreport. And lived the horror.

The living horror of blood and grief is today’s tabloid reality. In the report of 16-year-old Rebekah Sugrim’s funeral, I read that, after five days’ missing, her naked body had been found in a cocoa field, where it had been picked over by vultures. Her schoolbag and uniform were strewn nearby.

Bodies, live and dead, keep turning up and disappearing, or being found.

A tiny tot showed up outside Ward 13 of San Fernando General Hospital, with two bags containing clothes and toys.

Thought to be two years old, he answered to a name variously reported as Kaylem, Caleb and Kaleb.

He plays with child patients, eats his meals, sleeps well.

Unknown, unclaimed, without a consistent name: the child is still better off at that hospital, where his picture makes the front page, than wherever he is unwanted enough to be abandoned.

The media have become too desensitised from seeing too much to be moved to raise questions arising about human and children’s rights.

I had kept a file on the spectacular August, 2006, robbery of two banks in Berbice, Guyana. The news said 15 gunmen had made the heist.

Then in Guyana and following the coverage, I noted Home Affairs Minister Gail Teixeira announcing a “sustained manhunt” by police and soldiers.

“If they encounter them they will kill them,” the minister was reported saying. By the tenth day, the mud-caked bodies of eight suspected bank robbers had been brought out of the “backlands” with bags of wet cash.

All of the gang had been accounted for, the police said, claiming they were eight in number, not 15 as first reported. Case closed.

The media are overwhelmed by such stories. Maybe, I suggest, they lack time to think about them, to assign them to some file of attention called “human rights.”

What is a human-rights story anyway? Stories called “human interest” receive enthusiastic coverage and attention, because of their essential elements—people living, dying, loving, hurting, crying...

Might some such also qualify as “human rights” stories?

The legal experts on the panel didn’t think so.

I had been more moved by many testimonies from the journalists about the implications of working in “small newsrooms.”

Media workers referred to limited capacity for getting things done, for taking a sophisticated approach.

The media, then, may be too poor to care about “human rights,” such as the rights to life and to a fair trial, even of AK 47-armed bank robbers.

Poverty of resources and the overload of wrenching detail may overwhelm both feeling and thought.

Certainly, we become blase. An internal media socio-psychology eventually operates to repress a sense of wonder.

Detail gets slurred over.

A “that again!” syndrome defines attitudes: a sense that some stories are covered and covered, over and over; and we must move on.

Blase comes to define a disease, an occupational hazard.

To redouble coverage of human rights is to redouble effort of investigation of looking with fresh eyes at stories, of seeing angles, below the surface, asking questions, getting answers.

A virtual beat may be feasible. Human rights sensibility will show as a state of mind, something everybody shares, rather than a department of the newsroom reserved for bleeding hearts.