“I do not trust y’all.” Those words reverberated across the Arthur Chung Conference Centre as families stood, one at a time, to address the Commission of Inquiry into the MV Barima tragedy, Those words exposed the distance between the CoI, offering to establish the truth, and bereaved families struggling to believe another official promise. Their loved ones remain missing and for them all, the promised assistance never did materialise including those whose households are struggling after losing their breadwinner. For each family, distrust was built upon these concrete foundations: absence, hardship and unanswered appeals.
The commission must understand the significance of that statement. Families arrive carrying their experience of the state before they encountered the commissioners as individuals. Where promises have allegedly gone unfulfilled, another assurance of diligence may sound painfully familiar. The inquiry therefore begins with an inherited credibility problem. Its members may have done nothing to create that problem, but their work will be judged against it.
Beneath the tension these families are asking troubling questions of the commissioners: can a government-appointed inquiry convincingly examine failures involving government institutions? While the commissioners deserve the opportunity to demonstrate their independence the families’ concern cannot reasonably be dismissed as ignorance or hostility. The state’s proximity to both the disaster, its failure to deliver on its many promises and the machinery investigating it makes visible independence essential
Yes, the CoI’s Chairman Justice Godfrey P. Smith did pledge an impartial investigation inclusive of its announced scope: seaworthiness, loading, crew conduct, regulatory oversight and search, rescue and recovery and the ambiguous “wherever the evidence leads”. That matters. First, it creates an opportunity to examine the chain of decisions surrounding the tragedy, rather than allowing scrutiny to end with those who happened to be aboard the vessel. Second, there is the opportunity to examine the political chain of command and this obviously depends on whether the CoI has the resolve to demand same. The CoI’s Chairman’s response to a Kiskadee Watch’s question on the very question elicited a rather tame: ‘We haven’t reached that stage of the investigation yet.’
There is a deeper undertone and it is a struggle over who controls the meaning of what happened. Survivors possess knowledge acquired through terror; relatives carry the consequences into their daily lives. Officials possess records, procedures and the authority to explain. This inquiry must therefore test every account fairly while recognising this imbalance.
Some other undertones confronting the families are the deleterious performance of the government in fulfilling its commitments which has already drawn significant amounts of distrust; the paucity of top-down information to the families must have left many feeling abandoned by the government. Those families had to wait until Wednesday to hear from one of the commissioners that there was a preferred bidder to salvage the MV Barima. There is also a painful mismatch between the commission’s powers and the families’ needs. The chairman has explained that the inquiry cannot determine criminal guilt or award compensation. Those limits were stated honestly. But what those families confronting lost income, disrupted schooling and unresolved bereavement heard were boundaries as another division of responsibility through which their needs and expectations disappeared.
Political undertones further complicate this relationship. The Department of Public Information characterised opposition parliamentarians’ participation in the October 7 gathering as an attempt to hijack the meeting. That is the government’s framing, and the Opposition countered that its presence was at the request of the families. The families were reminded painfully just how deep political undertones run as they digested the news even before the CoI engagement concluded that the process to determine the eventual bidder to salvage the MV Barima was none other that which President Irfaan Ali sought to distance himself from.
In the aftermath of the CoI’s engagement, it could be established explicitly that distrust from most of the bereaved relatives carries an enormous risk even if the commissioners do not reciprocate. For one, the danger is that the CoI’s institutional defensiveness could turn the families’ scepticism into an adversarial relationship. If witnesses determine that searching questions during the hearings are perceived as attacks, they may conclude that the process is more concerned with protecting its standing than confronting their doubts. And then these doubts will filter down to other stakeholders whose participation will then become a matter of uncertainty. Were these the intended end goals, one might be tempted to ask, and who benefits the most should the CoI falter?
For now, both the commissioners and families will have to ask of themselves if this trust is redeemable. Kiskadee Watch had asked, in one of its earlier editorials, for an inclusive approach to the structure of the Commission and its Terms of Reference. These included representation from the survivors, families of the deceased and or their preferred representatives. The editorial had also asked that since the MV Barima was considered by all across the political spectrum as a national tragedy that the opposition political parliamentary parties be invited to sit on the deliberations of the commission’s construction and TOR. The petulance of the President to ignore these pieces of advice is where the rot started.
Which brings us to the commissioners themselves who must now salvage a situation which might be even more cumbersome than raising the MV Barima. How they manage the redemption of trust in the CoI will be very interesting as they would have by now acknowledged that the commencement of hearings will be starting with a deficit.
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