Keeping a nation calm

Newsday's editorial consultant Jones P Madeira shares with MICHELLE A ENG LEANG his experience of the 1990 coup attempt, when he was head of news at TTT – where the Jamaat al Muslimeen held media practitioners hostage.

It was July 27, 1990. Jones P Madeira was the head of news and current affairs at Trinidad and Tobago Television. He sat editing a programme for an upcoming segment on the channel. His concentration was intermittently interrupted by noises here and there and he remembers musing that the room needed to better soundproofed.

What he didn’t know was that there was a man waiting outside his door with a large automatic weapon and that the Jamaat al Muslimeen were trying to take over the government.

In the middle of that thought, Madeira heard a tap on the glass, the only way to see into or out of the room. He then saw a gun barrel, which he said looked like a cannon, being pushed against the glass.

“The first thing I did was to scream. Because I could see the barrel of the gun close to the window and I could see the eyes of the person who is holding it, and he could have – I don’t know if he would have – but he could have fired it at any moment.”
Thousands of thoughts came to Madeira at the same. He admitted to never thinking of an attempted coup, but rather a lone gunman who had taken over TTT. And as he jumped off his seat, he could hear the voices on the other side of the door saying, “Get that man out of there.” He ducked under the window, and his life flashed before him.

“As I was going down to the floor, I remembered myself as a child, I remembered my mother, I remembered my father, brothers and sisters, friends – all of these thoughts going through my mind – asking myself, will I ever see them again?”

Madeira decided to get up and face it. He opened the door slowly and the men pulled him forward. He saw his colleague Raoul Pantin, who was also being pushed about with his hands in the air. Everyone was ordered to go to the reception area.

He remembers two German cameramen who had been brought in to help with training ; they were the first hostages. He also remembers one of them as everyone lay on the floor, hands on their heads, told by the gunmen to keep their heads down or they would be blown off.
“I remember his blue eyes, very piercing and filled with fear. And in very hushed tones he told me, ‘Jones, they’ve taken over the country.’”

Soon it was about 6 pm and Madeira remembers seeing Hazel Ward-Redman coming out of the studio with Yasin Abu Bakr.

“His hands were on her shoulders. She was white. And I remember the fear in the face.”

He thought Bakr might have been reassuring Redman that everything would be okay, from the way Bakr was positioning himself, talking to her.
Then something odd happened.

“There was a strange connection between Yasin and myself. He started when he saw me, as when you’ve seen something that made you jump."

Bakr then walked towards Madeira and told him the Muslimeen had taken action against the government.
“He then said, ‘You must keep people calm here, because we don’t want to hurt anybody.’
“So right away I was being thrust in another mode and which I had to deliver, and I thought was quite important. I accepted the offer, if that is what you want to call it.”

Bakr  told Madeira the women and children should be sent home.

Madeira recalls being in many-near death situations, along with his colleagues, during the five days until they were released on August 1. He described a general concern amongst the hostages that they might not make it through the ordeal.

“It’s not every day in TT that you get up and listen to more than a dozen men storming into your space, guns in the air in some instances, shots going off. Bedlam in the rest of the building. No warning of anything – and you’re living through the chaos, and the explosions and the uncertainties, asking, ‘What is this that’s happening?’”

Having to deliver broadcasts was also extremely challenging for Madeira, who remembers using his words very carefully. He wanted to be as calm as possible so as to keep everyone else calm as well.
He also didn’t want to be seen as supporting the Muslimeen, even though what he was doing was essentially delivering their message through the television station.

Madeira saw his role as being an intermediary between those who were confused on the outside and those who were traumatised on the inside.

At this point, the Muslimeen thought they had been victorious in bringing the country to its knees.

As for what was going on outside the TTT building, Madeira says CNN was reporting on the situation, and specifically the fire at police headquarters on St Vincent Street, which had been carbombed. It’s important to look at all of the dynamics of the situation, he says.

“They were going to strike at 4 o’clock, we found out subsequently, but they wanted the Prime Minister, ANR Robinson, and the attorney general, Selwyn Richardson, which together comprised the government, to be together. They did not want to strike and one of those persons out of the room, so they wanted the two together.
“And the only time that happened was half-past five in the parliamentary sitting  – and boom! That is what happened.”

Madeira also recalls the role he and Pantin played during those five days.

“We knew it was bad. We knew that any sound we heard could be our last. I saw among the hostages – I saw despair. There was one hostage who always asked me the impossible questions: ‘Are we going home tonight?’ or, ‘When will we eat?’

“Raoul and I had to work very hard in containing the insurrectionists, if that’s the word I could use to describe them, from doing anything that would cause serious harm to any of us. We engaged them in conversation and we joked sometimes. They invited us to pray with them, and we did that.

“I was a kind of intermediary between conversations that were taking place between the Red House and the leadership of Jamaat al Muslimeen at TTT for an amnesty of some sort.”

What the Jamaat wanted was essentially to meet with the government and become part of it, with Yasin Abu Bakr as minister of national security. Madeira acted as a liaison, handing over phone calls to the Jamaat leadership from senior officials such as Richardson who were negotiating from the Red House. He got the impression the Jamaat felt that the people of TT weren’t getting their fair due and the coup attempt was a result of that.

The uncertainty over whether he and the other hostages would make it out alive was highand the sounds that could be heard from outside the building didn’t help.

“They poured bullets into that building, and it turned out to be a strainer afterwards.

“A gun is a violent piece of machinery. When it goes off it explodes, and with the explosion comes a prayer for a miracle that this thing is not pointed at me. We had to endure that.”

Madeira remembers trying to get hold of president Noor Hassanali to speed up the process of arranging an amnesty so the hostages could be released. But Richardson called him and said there would be no amnesty and the Jamaat would have to surrender to the State.
“He told me they would have to pack up their things and come out one by one, when the time comes, with their hands in the air.”

When it was over, Madeira too walked out of TTT with his hands in the air. There was a rumour that he was wired with explosives.

“I walked out and stood up by a regiment bus and saw every hostage that was taken inside of TTT marching to the bus to enjoy freedom on Emancipation Day.

“It was a great feeling. I can’t describe it. It was elation. I felt like crying. I felt like laughing.

“We went to Camp Ogden and had perhaps the first good meal in six days. The regiment fellas can cook.”

Madeira believes there will be no repeat of the coup attempt.

“TT will never, never descend to being ruled under the gun. That’s one of the things I took away from 1990.

“It was a journalist’s dream and a nightmare. That’s what happened in 1990.”