The Red House is beginning to strand out in its full glory as a distinct landmark symbolizing the readiness of Trinidad and Tobago to provide a Parliament building that will accommodate all constitutional shades of public opinion at the national level with this edifice occupying a pre-eminent and pivotal position in our country’s constitutional set-up.
Coming on the heels of independence were the incessant nationalist demands for representative institutions via halting constitutional reforms.
In 1990 when this country was on the verge of introducing a new thinking and re-invigorating approach to the structure and spirit of governance, the madness of mayhem and disorder visited us. The sacred seat of the peoples’ choice of a constitution and a system of parliamentary democracy came under the most violent attack.
Innocent people lost their lives. The entire country was under siege. The stench from rotting corpses in the Red House remains plastered to our memories.
We wearily picked up the pieces and proceeded to slowly limp along. Trinidad and Tobago has never been the same. Lawlessness, indiscipline and intolerance continue to blight us with impunity to a point of hopelessness even to this day.
In the midst of it all, as dim hopes keep flickering sometimes threatening to extinguish itself, we hang on, just hoping against hope sometimes.
In the aftermath of that bloody experience the House Committee of the Lower House of Parliament under the chairmanship of yours truly made proposals for the restoration of a ravaged Red House.
We rallied the public for its support for cleaning and funding. The peoples’ response demonstrated their unwavering commitment to the restoration of our democratic way of life.
The recommendations of the House Committee were accepted by the Lower House. The entire Parliament indorsed the restoration effort. Amongst those recommendations was one for the erection of a monument in honour and memory of the innocent fallen victims of the failed coup detat.
The idea was that of Theodore Guerra SC (deceased) and Morris Marshall (deceased) in canvassing same. It was described by both of them as “An Eternal Flame” symbolsing our peoples’ firm resolve to uphold democracy until eternity. Their stated dream was that “the flame must never go out”!
Alas the shocking reality is that it has been demolished. The question is who have taken upon themselves to erase the peoples’ history. And if permission was given who gave such for it was erected by the peoples’ representative.
This insult to the population is unpardonable not to mention the personal hurt and pain to the relatives of those whose names were inscribed on the monument.
This atrocity must be accounted for. It is the peoples’ property that we have callously ruined and reduced to rubble.
The names of the deceased have been smashed to smithereens and dumped in a garbage heap in the Beetham.
We have invited their spirits to blight and haunt us by such heinous behaviour while we mockingly invite the First Peoples to sacredly relocate the bones of their ancestors near to where the monument once stood.