1990...30 Years On: A Damning Remembrance

When I think of that time thirty years ago, after that bloody July, I remember it like shuffling of cards, the numbers: 27th day of the month. 112 insurgents. 24 dead. 200 injured. 46 hostages.

Town looted and ablaze and the command during the state of emergency 'shoot to kill.' An Express journalist and I were walking towards the police escort bus along an empty hot road in Port of Spain where bubbling potholes looked like festering wounds, the army trained their guns at us as we waved our passes, shouted: "Media Don't shoot." We crawled in while insurgents trained their guns at us from the roof of the red house.

After the TTT broadcast signal was cut NBS Radio 610 and 100FM on Abercrombie street was the only conduit of public communication. Dennis McComie led us after he told Abu Bakr off as if he were a recalcitrant boy in a classroom. We played music and took calls continuously for six days. It was my first job.

Apart from one BBC interview that I did on the roof of the station where I said inflammatory things prompting a call from the Jamaat saying I needed to shut up, I did what we all did, play music to keep the station going, follow the courage of the technical staff and announcers many who were there for the entire six days eating stale pizza, sleeping on damp floors of cockroach infested studios. When I see a 1990 flame, I remember the late herculean Prime Minister ANR Robinson who, wounded, tortured, shot called his army to 'attack with full force'.

I get flashes of my (now dead) friend Raoul Pantin: journalist, playwright, and poet, mid-week in Maracas bay barefoot on scalding sand, a bottle of Carib in his hand, his heart hammering with PTSD, raging in the blazing sun at the gratuitous destructive violence of 1990, reliving the trauma of it, furious at the freed dissidents, the justice denied to a nation. ‘Don't f..k with me, don't f..k with me.’ Sorry, Raoul too late. You died.Your heart failed, but we know it was already crushed. This country broke you.

"Talking heads", he had roared as my editor when I had an interview lined up, sending me instead to speak to the prostitutes in Curepe holding children with distended bellies; to the coastguard to see where drugs infiltrate, to Morvant to interview the third generation of URP workers, the forgotten people inside sheds and latrines.

As a newsroom editor, he taught his reporters the responsibility of the fourth estate – to be mirrors of society, expose the truth, be vigilant watchdogs of democracy, advocate for the voiceless, frame political issues. He showed us that being a patriot and journalist, are not mutually exclusive. 

Raoul, who introduced me to Derek Walcott and CLR James, taught me even after 1990 about loving this country; its Edenlike landscape, phosphorane sunlight filtering through palm leaves, to notice the arcs of the Northern Range. This place where continents mingle in the faces of people -like so many Gaugin paintings.

There was no African or Indian. French Creole blood had long mixed with African he said. 'We are not 'Indian and 'African' terms used by fascists to divide us, but a new world people. He was coming for the fascists he said, but died before he could, ill, crushed, humiliated, in penury but not before he went on reporter to the last, to record on 1990 with 'Days of Wrath', a reporter in his blood and bones. His and Dennis McOmies 'Personal Account’ should be required reading in schools.

I looked for the list of the names of the dozens of journalists and media workers keeping the flame of democracy alive during 1990. No list. They are the erased people of our history.

I spoke) to highly respected veteran journalist Dominic Kallipersad a hostage at TTT in 1990 who is known to have refused the offer to be singled out for release in an exchange negotiated between the then NAR government and the Jamaat. ("I am not leaving unless everyone (his fellow hostages) else leaves!)

Later Kallipersad learned if he had agreed, the Jamaat planned to shoot him. A reluctant interviewee, silently heroic, Kallipersad says on reflection, he feels the anger echoed by every single hostage.

"We blame the attempted coup for the rise in homicidal crime, for gangs, but how do we know the causes of crime for sure? Thirty years on and a Commission of Inquiry later I'm angry there hasn't there been official psychoanalysis of the 1990 coup attempt. Did it mature us to the realisation that like our brothers of 1970 ordinary people do stand up and rail against injustice -not by overthrowing the democracy as Abu Bakr did - but that vulnerable misguided young men were made to carry guns against the state?

“Angry that both politicians and the protective services of the time either ignored or were oblivious to the signs that some action was imminent. Angry that we botched up the legal process against the insurrectionists. Angry that no government thought it their responsibility to take care of the hostages, after the unprecedented trauma. Sorry, Raoul Pantin who died traumatised. Sorry, Emmet Hennessy who has never recovered. 

“Angry that no government has ever commemorated the day and let 1990’s history to be lost to generations. When I went to Japan, each town had its own museum, its history. I want to weep when I see a culture that respects its history

“Jones P Madeira only got an award last year, but he saved this nation. He was the conduit between Abu Bakr and the army. None of the hostages has been compensated for anything. We have all been left rudderless.”

A damning remembrance from a stalwart journalist.

Tomorrows 30th anniversary of the attempted coup comes at a time of another kind of war - community spread of COVID-19 and elections 2020.

It's convinced me that we will only heal if the country remembers journalists like Kallipersad who carried on writing his story in a foetal position with AK47's pointed at him are on the right side of democracy.

We can learn from them all to be bravest of soldiers, in the memory of all we've failed, the dispossessed, and the victims of crime who die every day and may die if COVID-!9 is not kept at bay. Learn if we don't share the power, the wealth and the knowledge, if we don’t support journalists to be ever vigilant, it will be wrested from us.

Originally Published in The Trinidad Guardian