Not for the first time, Yasin Abu Bakr is emerg­ing as some­one of and with in­flu­ence and a leader of note in this so­ci­ety, rather than as no­to­ri­ous in­sur­gent who at­tempt­ed a vi­o­lent coup, took over the na­tion­al par­lia­ment and sev­er­al me­dia hous­es, shot the Prime Min­is­ter and threat­ened se­ri­ous vi­o­lence on the body politic of the coun­try.

Frankly, it's per­verse that Abu Bakr should be recog­nised as a me­di­a­tor in the vi­o­lent up­surge in Cen­tral Trinidad, ap­pear­ing in court as a de­fend­er and moral/spir­i­tu­al leader of the 11 men charged with the mur­der of Dana See­ta­hal, and eu­lo­gis­ing a crim­i­nal sus­pect at his fu­ner­al.

Abu Bakr has nev­er once ex­pressed con­tri­tion for the pil­lage of 1990, for the death of more than two dozen peo­ple, or for the hun­dreds of mil­lions of dol­lars in dam­age done to the cap­i­tal city. Every time there is some­thing out of the or­di­nary on a Fri­day af­ter­noon, the city goes in­to pan­ic fear­ing a re­turn to that dread­ful day in Ju­ly 1990.

In­stead of con­dem­na­tion and rel­e­ga­tion to a place suit­ed to his deeds, Abu Bakr has had an au­di­ence with Prime Min­is­ters Bas­deo Pan­day and Patrick Man­ning. He and his men have com­mand­ed hun­dreds of mil­lions in state funds by con­trol­ling so­cial wel­fare pro­grammes, he has re­ceived mil­lions in awards from the courts for dam­age to the mosque at Mu­cu­rapo, and has a pres­ence in the so­ci­ety that is com­plete­ly at odds with his de­struc­tive lega­cy.

In­deed, when he was Prime Min­is­ter, Patrick Man­ning was on the brink of giv­ing con­trol of the whole par­cel of lands at Mu­cu­rapo to Abu Bakr, and he sub­se­quent­ly got part of it from the Pan­day ad­min­is­tra­tion. On­ly re­cent­ly, Abu Bakr de­fied the Sim­mons com­mis­sion of in­quiry in­to the events of 1990 by re­fus­ing to ap­pear, and to rub salt in­to the wound he open­ly de­mand­ed to be paid to ap­pear.

And in all this, the afore­men­tioned po­lit­i­cal lead­ers and their par­ties, the Unit­ed Na­tion­al Con­gress gov­ern­ment and the Peo­ple's Na­tion­al Move­ment, ad­mit­ted that Abu Bakr and his group played a part in their elec­tion cam­paigns and have nev­er de­nied his boast that they had helped to put them in of­fice by cam­paign­ing in mar­gin­al seats such as St Joseph and Ma­yaro in elec­tions in the 1990s.

The po­lit­i­cal lead­ers, their par­ties, the se­cu­ri­ty ser­vices and yes, we the me­dia, de­vote too much time to cov­er­ing what Abu Bakr says and does. We can't, and can't af­ford, to look away. It is not as if starv­ing vil­lains of "the oxy­gen of pub­lic­i­ty"–a phrase that Mar­garet Thatch­er used to de­cry me­dia cov­er­age of the Irish Re­pub­li­can Army, the IRA–can re­al­ly be ac­com­plished if he re­mains at the cen­tre of ma­jor news events.

Af­ter all, the po­lice did de­tain him for ques­tion­ing in con­nec­tion with the Dana See­ta­hal SC mur­der, and ig­nor­ing that was not an op­tion.

There are hun­dreds of thou­sands of peo­ple who Abu Bakr, his men and their ac­tions have of­fend­ed, have ter­rorised and dis­placed di­rect­ly or in­di­rect­ly be­cause of their ac­tions of Ju­ly 1990 and af­ter. We, the me­dia, have not giv­en suf­fi­cient time to tell how these peo­ple feel about Abu Bakr. This is not a sug­ges­tion that he should be de­prived of his rights as a cit­i­zen or mis­treat­ed. Far from it. It is sim­ply a sug­ges­tion that we should stop abet­ting him in his dis­plays of faux re­spectabil­i­ty.