Trinidad hunger striker returns to prime minister’s office to protest highway

By Jabari Fraser

THE ASSOCIATED PRESS

PORT-OF-SPAIN — An increasingly frail activist who has been on hunger strike for nearly two weeks returned Monday to the office of the prime minister of Trinidad & Tobago to protest a highway extension project in the Caribbean country.

Activist Wayne Kublalsingh was joined by a small group of supporters as the protest returned to the public eye for the first time since he was briefly hospitalized and treated with intravenous fluids because of his hunger strike.

Police kept the protesters away from the sidewalk outside the office of Prime Minister Kamla Persad-Bissessar but the group spent much of the day in the street.

Kublalsingh said he will continue his fast until Persad-Bissessar either halts the highway extension or agrees to a review of the project that includes the effects on the environment and several rural communities, something he says she agreed to do earlier this year.

“Unless she undertakes to keep that promise, to do a serious technical review with a cost-benefit analysis, a social impact analysis, hydrological studies, I will not put any food or drink into my mouth,” he said.

He started the hunger strike Nov. 16. He grew increasingly weak before he was taken to the hospital, where he said he was given intravenous fluids. The government, showing apparent concern for his health, stationed an ambulance near the protest Monday. He went home in another ambulance hired by his family.

The highway project, which will cost more than $800 million and will connect the southern city of San Fernando to one of the country’s energy-producing towns, Point Fortin, the location of a major liquefied natural gas refinery at the southwestern tip of Trinidad. Opponents want the project rerouted because they say it will damage wetlands and destroy about 350 homes in rural communities.

The prime minister has expressed concern for Kublalsingh, and her government’s health minister met with him, but she opposes any halt to the project. “I cannot choose to deprive generations of our nation’s citizens of the development which the extension of the highway would bring,” Persad-Bissessar said in a speech.

Kublalsingh traces his ancestors to India, as do many of those in the path of the highway project, but he does not live in any of the affected communities. He is a lecturer at the University of the West Indies who has long been an environmental activist in the twin-island nation, most prominently in a campaign against an aluminum smelter project that was eventually cancelled after extensive protests.

19:23ET 26-11-12