What amazing stories about the Muslimeen insurrection are being reported in the press. There is that of the young woman, Afeisha Caballero, whose mother was killed by the Muslimeen on July 27, 1990, a day of infamy that we are just beginning to deal with.
One wonders what those apologists for the Jamaat al Muslimeen now think. You know, those who believe it wasn't really a bad thing they did, they were just defending poor people a la Robin Hood. Afeisha is the daughter of Lorraine Caballero, a clerk at the Red House who was murdered in cold blood when the Red House was attacked. An ordinary simple little clerk, no danger to anyone. Afeisha was 19 months old and was sent to live with her grandmother, a pensioner. Life was hard because there was little money. At school, friends helped by asking their parents for extra allowance and would give it to her to buy lunch. At age eight, she found out by accident how her mother died. She has not recovered from that. Her dad struggled to come to terms with the murder of his wife and found relief in drugs. Two brothers have also suffered the consequences of their mom's murder. One joined the Muslimeen. One wonders why. He was killed by the police in 2009. Another brother has become an alcoholic. Not a single government official has ever spoken to this family. No assistance, whether financial or psychological or social, has ever been offered. So much for government help.
Where are the leaders of the Musilmeen after hearing all this? Will they suddenly appear and attempt to make amends? Say sorry? We didn't mean for this to happen? Or will they continue to claim it was their divine right to attempt to overthrow the government when and if they want, and to kill children's mothers? Then there was the policeman, Raymond Julian, who was on duty at the Red House. When the Muslimeen showed up, he ran and hid in a bathroom, found his way onto the roof, got shot at by the military, was discovered by the Muslimeen, tortured, denied food and drink. Released after six days, he found his wife preparing a wake because she thought he was dead. He ended up at St Ann's, was never able to work again and was forced to end his career in the Police Service. He has never fully recovered from his mental breakdown and has been generally unemployed since, living off a reduced early pension and gratuity and National Insurance. He also was never visited by any official and has never received any assistance from any government. Raoul Pantin may well be one of the few men in the country willing to call a spade a spade. He believes the leaders of the 1990 attempted overthrow are guilty of some form of insanity and although that is stretching it, there is no doubt that Mr Baksh and those surrounding him display some very weird tendencies in public and are wont to make rather amazing sorts of statements like when he invited the former hostages to dinner at the Jamaat's mosque. But this is par for the course in T&T where people expect to get away with cursing policemen at Panorama and get vex when they get beat; governments allow the destruction of the Valencia forest by quarrying; politicians are bold enough to claim publicly that "T&T offers the best healthcare in the world at the public institution" and nobody laughs; women think they can go on a "milk diet" and lose weight for Carnival, and the Minister of Arts and Multiculturalism comes up with the brilliant idea of setting up a Chinese factory here to make Carnival costumes for the natives.
Mr Pantin's story is instructive of the harm that the 1990 insurrection caused to ordinary people caught up in the insurrection carnage. A story of personal depression; fight against alcoholism; difficulty in controlling emo-tions; inability to work; poor social relations; anxiety in certain situations; fear of being attacked again. These are all symptoms of post traumatic stress disorder (PSTD), an emotional illness that usually develops as a result of a terribly frightening, life-threatening, or otherwise highly unsafe experience.
PTSD sufferers continually re-experience the traumatic event, tend to avoid places, people, or other things that remind them of the event and are exquisitely sensitive to normal life experiences including having sleep problems, trouble concentrating, irritability, volatile anger, poor concentration, blackouts or difficulty remembering things, increased tendency to being startled, and excessive watchfulness to threats. This goes on for years. Like the rest of us law-abiding, tax-paying, stopping-at-red-light citizens, Mr Pantin cannot understand how the local judiciary could uphold the amnesty granting the Muslimeen pardon and is aghast that Bakr was awarded $3.4 million by the courts for damage to his property during the insurrection. Trust in a country's institutions is the glue that binds civil society together. That trust disappeared in 1990. Perhaps this commission of enquiry will begin the long process of enabling trust. Somehow I doubt it.
