The first official commission of enquiry into the 1990 attempted coup began this week, only 21 years after the event; by Trinidadian standards, that qualifies as an instant replay. Luckily for T&T, one of the main figures actively involved in the events, former Prime Minister/President ANR Robinson, is still alive and, on the evidence of his evidence this week, very much mentally alert; unluckily for ANR Robinson and his passionate, vivid recollection of all that unfolded, if there was no reason to take him on 21 years ago, there's even less reason to take him on today.
It's marginally less embarrassing, in the eyes of the outside world, that an enquiry should take place far too long after it should have been done than not at all. In a real country, the entire population would not have simply buried their heads in the sand and pretended not to care (and there were many in Trinidad who weren't pretending). It's the right thing to do, to have a proper look at everything connected to a failed, bloody coup attempt; but it won't make a difference. Trinidadians voted with their souls on this issue a long time ago.
Pull an average Trinidadian at geographical-racial-ethnic random and he will effortlessly dismiss 1990 in one way or another. Down South, discounting the curfews, most people were unaffected by the coup; for people from Couva and beyond, the coup might even have been a net positive: everybody "got holidays" at the same time, there was no work pressure and everybody was still drawing a salary, a happy state of affairs that could have continued until "whenever them Creole in town finish shooting up one another," as one San Fernando friend observed; Basdeo Panday, then the leader of the United Labour Front, which had effectively fallen or been kicked out of the National Alliance for Reconstruction government, even made his famous joke, when told, in bed, that there had been a violent overthrow of the government: "Wake me when it's over."
Indeed, even while it was actually happening, if you went beyond the northwestern peninsula and those parts-Woodbrook, Belmont, St Augustine, Tunapuna, Marabella and so on-that went to panyards to listen or gave money to the Little Carib/Tent Theatres/Naparima Bowl or gave a firetruck if the Queen's Royal College hall roof was collapsing or surgery was being done by torchlight at the General Hospital or the Nariva Swamp was being used to grow rice, pesticide-spraying and all, if you forsook entirely the red-skinned and Tagore- and Walcott-reading, tassa-playing (and piano-recognising) people, those one or two in 50 households in which you might find dictionaries instead of Bibles-you might have found few who would positively condemn the coup.
And, if you asked in many other places, you'd find many more who were actually happy it happened. Your average east-west corridor/ Laventille sufferer was glad "the imam" put some blows on Robbie and Sello for visiting them with VAT and the loss of "10 days" and the 10 per cent pay cut in state salaries.
In a shamefully short time, the bulk of Trinidadians found ways of dismissing the coup as not mattering to them. By Christmas that same year, you could have found yourself, not just in an argument, but in isolation, for suggesting that the Muslimeen should be punished.
The latest date at which the majority of Trinidadians agreed the coup was a bad thing and its perpetrators, bad men, was June 30, 1992, the day their writ of habeas corpus was granted by the good Justice Clebert Brooks and 114 men who had deliberately killed an unknown number of their fellow citizens strolled out of jail, scot-free. At that moment, watching the insurrectionists they had watched shoot up the country walking 'round town, grinning, the Trinidadian, perhaps to keep his sanity, ruled the coup a private matter between the Muslimeen, on the one hand, and the NAR, on the other. Every year since 1990, more people went to the Toco RC Primary bazaar than the coup memorial service.
It may not always have remained so, but, at its best, the NAR embodied the best of T&T. The 1986 general election victory represented the culmination of the only true political activity (directed by my political mentor, the late Lloyd Best) the country ever witnessed. For the short time it stood intact, the NAR stood for every good thing about T&T: self-denial; self-reliance; self-determination; self-discipline; genuine care for and commitment to the whole, not to the main chance; and the willing assumption of personal responsibility and simultaneous foregoing of personal advantage.
What could be wrong with that?
But Trinidadians have turned their backs on precisely that notion over and over again, whether it has been presented to them as the very early People's National Movement, the Tapia House Movement, the NAR at its best or -in, I stress, a very limited way-the Congress of the People. At the core of all those bodies, there has been a group of people who remain convinced of the beauty and hope of T&T and their West Indian brothers and sisters, and are willing to sacrifice themselves in working for that notion; and they have been continually slapped down and given their comeuppance by the majority. To be a Ta-pia, or an NAR, or a CoP is/was to be laughed at and taken advantage of; never to be taken seriously. Trinidadians already know what is best about themselves; and they resolutely reject it repeatedly.
In South Africa, Rwanda, Northern Ireland and other places where insanity took root and the open murder of innocents became "normal" for a little while, as soon as the smoke cleared, people tried to come to terms with what had happened. In South Africa, where the vast majority of the population had every justification to trample the minority into extinction, Nelson Mandela, one of humanity's great heroes, pushed, not for vengeance, but for justice within a framework that would give his beloved country its best chance: the South African enquiry into apartheid was deliberately named the Truth and Reconciliation Commission; in Trinidad, truth be told, it would be called an Obfuscation and Mamaguy Commission.
n BC Pires is obviously a PNM. Read more of his writing at www.BCraw.com