The country marked the 34th anniversary of the attempted coup by the Jamaat-al-Muslimeen on Saturday.
Regardless of how one chooses to define a generation, two eras of newborns have come of age, or close to it, since that overcast Friday evening, on July 27, 1990, when two teams of insurrectionists took control of TTT and the Red House by force of arms and held hostages at both locations for six days.
Since then, at least three documentaries have been made about the coup attempt and five books written by participants and social commentators published, yet there is a pervasive ignorance regarding what happened on July 27 among these young people.
After years of demands for a formal enquiry into the events of those six days, a commission of enquiry was convened, chaired by Sir David Simmons, KC , to explore the incident and a report delivered to then president, Anthony Carmona.
The commission's final report, weighing in at 1,590 pages, was submitted to president Carmona in March 2014.
Despite efforts to gather first-hand testimony from all surviving participants, two key leaders, Bilaal Abdullah and Imam Yasin Abu Bakr did not testify.
Abu Bakr passed away at his home in October 2021, forever ending any possibility of a definitive statement from the insurrectionists’ perspective.
Before their surrender, the leaders of the insurrection managed to secure an amnesty that was first upheld by the Court of Appeal and then invalidated by the Privy Council. No member of the group was arrested after the Privy Council decision.
In 2010, the courts suggested that properties owned by the Jamaat be sold to cover damages, arising from the attempted coup, estimated then to be around half-a-billion dollars. Nothing came of that either.
Former senior magistrate George Hislop told the commission that the character of crime changed fundamentally after the coup attempt as accused criminals became bolder, even belligerent in the courtroom.
Did gang leaders take a cue from the imam's courting of impressionable young boys to create their own soldiers?
TT society did not change immediately after the coup attempt.
According to CSO statistics, in 1990, narcotics-related crime became a new category with a count of 1,214 offences.
In 1992, robberies were separated from larceny and burglary into its own category with a count of 3,786. Larceny and burglary incidents did not drop appreciably.
Murders drifted permanently into triple figures in 2000 with a count of 120 killings. They would never be that low again. By 2005, murders had tripled to 386 and peaked at 605 in 2022. Robberies peaked at 6,107 and burglaries hit a new century peak of 5,765 in 2009.
The call by retired commander Ellis Robinson, nephew of the late ANR Robinson, the prime minister at the time, for the Government to reflect on the events of July 27, 1990 is timely and sensible.
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