- NEWSDAY.CO.TT - A la Une - 27/Jul 06:25

Journalists on the front line

Today marks 35 years since the Jamaat al Muslimeen, led by Yasin Abu Bakr, attempted to stage a coup d’etat against the government of TT. It is a dark moment in our history, perhaps the most dramatic and unforgettable for those who lived through it and have been unable to overcome the experience. Of the four media people I know who lived through it, two have passed on; all of them were scarred by the episode. Two published their accounts. Raoul Pantin’s Days of Wrath is a nervous, passionate telling of the experience of being held hostage in the Trinidad & Tobago Television (TTT) studio for six days by insurgents who had no game plan or exit strategy. It is debatable whether Abu Bakr desired the establishment of a Muslim state. Apparently, he did not express it, but his young followers certainly did. The consensus, right or wrong, is that the Muslimeen sought a fairer, more equal society. Pantin, who thought the Muslimeen leader was a dangerous buffoon, describes how on one of his captor’s written list of personal wants were a video, television set and a fridge. It certainly shows the ragtag army of disaffected who comprised the rebel movement. Pantin suffered post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) and by his own admission became an alcoholic, using drink “as a sort of suppressant.” Dennis McComie’s 1990: The Personal Account of a Journalist Under Siege recalls the days in which he and a skeleton team, sequestered in the besieged NBS studios and broadcasting on Radio 610AM and 100FM, kept TT informed once the authorities cut TTT’s broadcast signal. Bakr himself called the station and was interviewed on air by McComie. Reports of an amnesty, an order by then attorney general Anthony Smart for NBS to cease broadcasting news and interviews, the eventual release of the hostages from TTT and the Parliament, and the surrender and detention of Bakr and his followers on August 1 are relived in McComie’s vivid account. In it he also described my sister fleeing like “a bat out of hell” as she came off air on 610, where she was a well-known announcer. Privately, she spoke of the deep fear she felt. Intense trauma can have delayed physical reactions, as is probably her case. McComie continues to suffer from PTSD. None of them could understand how, after the Cabinet and parliamentarians had been taken hostage by 42 insurgents for six days while 72 rebels attacked media outlets, when arson and looting spread across downtown Port of Spain causing millions in property damage, when an estimated 24 people had died and PM Robinson himself had been shot when he refused to take commands from the rebels and ordered the army to “attack with full force” – the local judiciary could uphold the amnesty granting the Muslimeen pardon and that the courts awarded Bakr $3.4 million for damage to his Mucurapo Road property during the coup d’etat. Jones P Madeira (recently deceased), then head of TTT, who famously broadcast to the nation for days and nights at gunpoint, must have suffered great stress, but he ate it up. I spent two weeks working with him on a BBC project and everywhere we went throughout the region he was hailed a hero. He always spoke about the extraordinary experience in very level tones. An exemplary, courageous journalist and former secretary-general of the Caribbean Broadcasting Union, Madeira displayed remarkable composure and integrity, announcing the coup attempt on live television while mediating between insurgents and the TT Defence Force, always conscious of needing to look after both his terrified team and viewers. He gave the military, at least in my hearing, full marks for its staunchness and resoluteness in commanding the superior force that eventually ended the coup. Journalism can be a dangerous profession; it can put media workers on the firing line. In 2024, the worst year in three decades, 124 journalists and media workers died, 70 per cent of them by the hands of the Israeli military in Gaza and Lebanon, 82 of them Palestinians, according to the Committee to Protect Journalists. Journalists die in conflict, but they also have to contend with online and offline intimidation, torture and kidnap, and limits placed on them by media owners and politicians, affecting their ability to report. Journalists often suffer the same fate as those whose stories they tell, as in Gaza where starvation has been weaponised. Last week the BBC, Associated Press, Reuters and Agence France Presse (AFP) called upon Israel to allow local journalists (foreign journalists are banned from Gaza), living on one meal every three days, to leave and return so that they can feed themselves and their families and regain their strength. On this day of reflection, let us think about all those who risk their lives to keep us informed and free. Raoul Pantin’s Days of Wrath, Dennis McComie’s 1990: The Personal Account of a Journalist Under Siege and Ancil Antonie’s Attack With Full Force are available at Paper Based bookshop in Port of Spain. 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