Sama­ki Fe­li­cian

Free­lance Cor­re­spon­dent

The Ch­aguara­mas Mil­i­tary His­to­ry and Aero­space Mu­se­um (CMHAM) has been grant­ed an in­junc­tion al­low­ing its op­er­a­tors to re­turn to the premis­es, fol­low­ing their lock­out by the Ch­aguara­mas De­vel­op­ment Au­thor­i­ty (CDA) on Car­ni­val Mon­day morn­ing.

The in­junc­tion, se­cured yes­ter­day, marks a sig­nif­i­cant le­gal vic­to­ry for the mu­se­um, which had been fight­ing to re­main on the site it has oc­cu­pied for over 30 years.

Among those sup­port­ing the mu­se­um’s case were CMHAM pres­i­dent Lin­da Kelshall, vice pres­i­dent Bri­an Mitchell and deputy po­lit­i­cal leader of the Na­tion­al Trans­for­ma­tion Al­liance Lor­raine Pouchet, rep­re­sent­ing Gary Grif­fith.

Yes­ter­day, Pouchet ex­plained what the rul­ing meant to them.

“What this means is a vic­to­ry for the cit­i­zens of Trinidad and To­ba­go, be­cause for far too long the Gov­ern­ment has been run­ning ruc­tion over all our in­sti­tu­tions and all the im­por­tant things that can car­ry us for­ward. This is a his­tor­i­cal site; this is a site that is not on­ly his­tor­i­cal be­cause of the mil­i­tary in­flu­ence that we have had, not on­ly in T&T but with­in the Caribbean,” she said.

She out­lined what she be­lieved were the ide­al next steps in the mat­ter.

“I think the next step would be to en­sure that we win in court, and I would like to ad­vise the mem­ber­ship of the mu­se­um that they need to form a friends of the mu­se­um sort of or­gan­i­sa­tion, where we have peo­ple who want to pro­tect this in­ter­est who are able and who are qual­i­fied and who are con­nect­ed to get the re­quired help that we need,” she said.

The mu­se­um’s re­turn came af­ter the CDA took pos­ses­sion of the prop­er­ty, stat­ing that it had failed to reg­u­larise its oc­cu­pa­tion de­spite mul­ti­ple op­por­tu­ni­ties. The CDA claimed as a re­sult of this, the mu­se­um had no for­mal lease de­spite oc­cu­py­ing the land for over 30 years.

The CDA main­tained that its ac­tions were law­ful and nec­es­sary to man­age state re­sources ef­fec­tive­ly.

How­ev­er, mu­se­um of­fi­cials have ar­gued that they were grant­ed per­mis­sion to op­er­ate on the site by gov­ern­ment of­fi­cials in 1992 but were nev­er giv­en the promised lease.

The dis­pute es­ca­lat­ed ear­li­er last month, when the mu­se­um re­ceived a for­mal evic­tion no­tice re­quir­ing them to va­cate by Feb­ru­ary 28.

The in­junc­tion now al­lows the mu­se­um’s op­er­a­tors to con­tin­ue their work while le­gal pro­ceed­ings un­fold. Guardian Me­dia reached out to the CDA for a com­ment and was told a press re­lease would be is­sued over the week­end. The next court hear­ing is ex­pect­ed on March 10.