Yvonne Ba­boolal

Com­mis­sion Chair­man Sir David Sim­mons said, at this stage of the com­mis­sion of en­quiry in­to the Ju­ly 1990 up­ris­ing, there is no cred­i­ble ev­i­dence to sug­gest there were plans for a counter-coup. So far, there have been 85 hear­ings and 66 wit­ness­es in the en­quiry. The com­mis­sion an­tic­i­pates two more sit­tings be­fore the con­clu­sion of the en­quiry.

One of the ru­mours aris­ing out of the at­tempt­ed over­throw of the Na­tion­al Al­liance for Re­con­struc­tion (NAR) gov­ern­ment by Ja­maat al Mus­limeen in­sur­gents was that some of the gov­ern­ment min­is­ters were plan­ning a counter-coup to get rid of prime min­is­ter Arthur NR Robin­son and set up a new po­lit­i­cal ad­min­is­tra­tion.

Re­tired head of the pub­lic ser­vice, Regi­nald Du­mas, said dur­ing the cri­sis a gov­ern­ment min­is­ter tele­phoned him and told him to stand by for po­lit­i­cal of­fice. For­mer gov­ern­ment min­is­ter, Mervyn As­sam, al­so tes­ti­fied that some­one called him and asked him to be a sen­a­tor.

Sim­mons said yes­ter­day that un­less in the last two up­com­ing sit­tings of the en­quiry there is hard ev­i­dence to sug­gest there were plans for a counter-coup, the find­ings thus far is that there was no such in­ten­tion. "We hear phone calls were made but there was no fol­low up to that.

"It could have been idle talk. If the ev­i­dence comes in the next two ses­sions we may have to al­ter our find­ings," he not­ed. Sim­mons was moved to make the pro­nounce­ment af­ter lead coun­sel, Avory Sinanan, asked yes­ter­day's wit­ness, Bernard Pan­tin, whether he was aware of a counter-coup.

Pan­tin, pro­gramme man­ag­er of Trinidad & To­ba­go Tele­vi­sion which the Mus­limeen had seized, spent five days of the up­ris­ing at Camp Og­den with gov­ern­ment min­is­ters and mil­i­tary per­son­nel. "You can't have a counter-coup when less than one-third of the gov­ern­ment min­is­ters were on the out­side," he replied. "It's just not log­i­cal."

Pan­tin dis­closed, how­ev­er, that Ja­maat head, Yasin Abu Bakr, leader of the in­sur­rec­tion, cre­at­ed doubt in the minds of cit­i­zens by im­ply­ing that there was some sort of counter-coup. He said Bakr, blocked from broad­cast­ing at TTT by the dis­abling of the trans­mis­sion sta­tion, was al­lowed to speak to the na­tion on the Na­tion­al Broad­cast­ing Ser­vice's 610 ra­dio by an­nounc­er Den­nis Mc Comie.

He said Bakr im­plied that the Ja­maat had made some sort of deal and that there were peo­ple who were try­ing to pre­vent Robin­son, who was shot, from be­ing re­leased from the Red House. "It was a good strat­e­gy by Bakr. He was able to put in the pub­lic do­main that there were peo­ple who didn't want Robin­son re­leased and for the cri­sis to end." Pan­tin said in his five days at Camp Og­den he nev­er saw any­thing re­sem­bling a counter-coup.