Chadee routinely bought judges, juries, political parties, captains, cooks .. anybody and everybody Those whom he could not buy, he murdered. I once heard a fairly prominent member of society dismiss him as “a little coolie boy” – Chadee was an Indian – but nobody would insult him to his face.He ran the cocaine trade on Trinidad for the Lebanese. The government has turned a blind eye to the trade because it brings in foreign exchange on a huge scale. I have good reason to believe that Chadee had discussions with members of the government about using his funds to develop agriculture.But his behaviour finally became unacceptable even by the corrupt standards of the Caribbean: in the past 10 years he and his gang were implicated in 30 murders.Chadee was the first criminal to be executed for five years. The last victim of the rope was little Glen Ashley, another murderer, whom I’d known as a boy. He went screaming to the gallows while the Privy Council was hearing the case.Once Trinidad took its traditions from Britain Now it is following those of Latin America. The whole of the Caribbean seems to have been convinced by OK Corral justice.That’s their lookout, but let’s not have the Privy Council involved in the circus.

If they want to retain capital punishment, they should be left entirely to their own legal devices. Our slogan should be: “Farewell, my friends”.n Darcus Howe is a writer and broadcaster currently working on ‘The White Tribe’, a documentary about England, for Channel 4.. IN ONE of the Indian artillery encampments littering the roadside near Drass in northern Kashmir, a soldier pointed to a snow-capped mountain peak where Pakistani sharp-shooters hide. “That’s where they fired the Stinger that brought down our helicopter gunship,” he said “But the highway is the most vulnerable. They always target it.”

Thirteen months ago, India’s Hindu Nationalist Party, the BJP, celebrated its election victory by staging five nuclear tests and declaring India a nuclear power.

One year on, it is reaping the whirlwind.
With three months to go before a general election, the caretaker government, still headed by the nationalists, finds itself in the middle of India’s worst military fiasco since the Chinese sent its army packing in 1962. A party whose touchstone is national pride and self-assertion is presiding over a humiliation which in the worst case could lead to the nation’s dismemberment.This is not Indo-Pak-Kashmir business as usual. Attacks across the “line of control” (LoC), Kashmir’s de facto border, during the past 10 years have been like gnat bites, lightning attacks by Kashmiris or Afghans who set off explosions or attack army positions and rapidly withdraw. The two countries’ armies have also routinely exchanged artillery fire.But the war that began on 6 May, when intruders wearing “black dress” were spotted north-east of Kargil, several miles inside the Indian side of the LoC, is much more serious. The infiltrators, who may number 1,000, including several hundred Pakistani Army regulars, have been setting themselves up in this bleak, rugged, snowbound terrain for months – possibly since January.India’s fragmented intelligence agencies failed to detect them.

By the time they were discovered, they were masters of the game, kings of the castle, installed in cement bunkers on the peaks overlooking the national highway that is northern Kashmir’s lifeline. They are equipped with sophisticated military radios, mortars, radar, snowmobiles and Stinger missiles. They have good lines of supply back into the Pakistani side, with helipads at 16,000ft.For those with long memories, the echoes are sinister. “Wasn’t this how it all began 52 years ago?” wrote Dinesh Kumar in Delhi’s Sunday Times, referring to Pakistan’s invasion of Kashmir in 1947, which cut the state in two. “Then a second time in 1965″ – Pakistan’s Operation Gibraltar, which led to the second Indo-Pakistan war.The national highway that links Srinagar with Leh, capital of the Ladakh region, has been intermittently shelled from the Pakistani side of the LoC for two years, but now guerrillas perched above it can direct the fire, the impact is devastating.Towns in the line of fire have been abandoned.