PORT OF SPAIN, Trinidad– Prime Minister Dr. Keith Rowley Monday publicly called on the police to “take immediate steps” to find a report into children’s homes and institutions in 1997 that the Trinidad Express newspaper said contained “dynamite findings.”
Rowley said that the police should seek to recover the Sabga Task Force report “and the evidence of all those who were aware of this frightening situation and take all necessary action against all who have been implicated in or with these very shocking revelations published.
“The national population is understandably angered by what appears to be facts where persons could have been identified as mistreating minors in their care, even committing heinous crimes against these unfortunate children, and such persons instead of being prosecuted to the full extent of the law have enjoyed secrecy and protection of others,” he said.
His statement follows an editorial published on Sunday in the Sunday Express newspaper that the then social development minister Manohar Ramsaran and the (Basdeo) Panday administration failed to act on the report.
“Had the Panday administration acted on the Sabga report with the urgency required, the scourge of physical and sexual abuse existing in children’s homes today would have been eradicated, if not entirely, then substantially.
“Instead, the government buried it in a massive State cover-up for which Ramsaran, then-PM Basdeo Panday, then-attorney general Ramesh Lawrence Maharaj and the rest of the cabinet, including current Opposition Leader Kamla Persad-Bissessar, the then-legal affairs minister, must now account.
“According to the Sunday Express exclusive report, when the Panday government was faced with the explosive findings of the Sabga report, it opted against laying the report in Parliament and instructed all Task Force members to destroy their copies, effectively shutting down the investigative initiative,” according to the editorial.
In his statement, Prime Minister Rowley said that when his administration came to office in 2015, he established the Ministry of Gender and Child Affairs in the Office of the Prime Minister and operationalized the Children’s Authority, expanding its scope.
“All this time, my Government and I were unaware of the contents of a Sabga Report which is now being serialized in the media,” Rowley said, adding that he had recently indicated to Parliament that this government had established a Committee “to enquire into our concerns about reports of abuses and other shortcomings in this national effort of caring for these children.”
Rowley said that the expert committee did its work with dispatch and submitted its findings to the government in late December. By April this year, the complete report of this exercise was laid in Parliament for public information.
“I am now advised that this Committee diligently sought access to a Sabga Report, but even their best effort could not provide them with a copy from any source.
“Through the local media, I am now discovering that there was/is a Sabga Report produced by investigators who inspected and collected information from nine children’s homes and described some of the awful conditions and treatment meted out by person/s associated with child care and custody at the nation’s care centers.
“I am shocked, scandalized, and angry due to what I have read in the local media. Some of our worst suspicions have been long confirmed, and known perpetrators have been protected and aided by persons and institutions known and unknown,” Rowley added.
The Express newspaper said that until the present Opposition Leader, Persad-Bissessar, “explained her inaction in 1997,” she will “lack the moral authority to castigate the Rowley government for its handling of the recent Justice Judith Jones report into children’s homes while her demand for justice for today’s abused children will ring hollow and reek of political opportunism.”
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