Establishing an Islamic state in Trinidad and Tobago doesn't seem likely. This is the land of Carnival, steel drum bands and calypso and the birthplace of V.S. Naipaul. Muslims make up only about 7 percent of the population and are mostly of Indian descent. Most observers assumed the wealthy Muslims Bakr was threatening were Indo-Trinidadians. The Afro-Caribbean Muslims in Jamaat are relatively new converts and are inspired by the black nationalist movement. Bakr, who began life as Lennox Phillip and was once a Trinidadian policeman, himself converted to Islam after studying in Canada.
What was meant to be Bakr's sedition trial has for the time being devolved into a series of hearings about the press and its behavior. Bakr puts the blame for his bad publicity on the government. "It's not the press," Bakr says almost apologetically during a lunch break. It's the Trinidadian officials who talk to the press, he says. "The attorney general [John Jeremie] said some very wrong things about me." A scowl flickers across his face. A woman in a head scarf comes over and whispers in his ear. "Really, they don't want me to talk right now." He smiles graciously and steps away.
On Park Street, around the corner from the Hall of Justice, is the four-story building where Jones P. Madeira, the advisor/manager of communications for Trinidad's Ministry of Health, has his office. There was a time when Madeira, a former member of the media, talked to the imam often.
"Oh yes, I've seen Bakr quite a few times," Madeira says. "He's always very cordial when he greets me. He's even invited me to have dinner with him." So far, Madeira, a former broadcast journalist with neatly trimmed white hair, has politely declined. He has no desire to catch up on old times.
Madeira was working at the national television station TTTV in 1990. On the afternoon of July 27 he had holed up in an editing suite to work on a couple of reports when he heard a commotion, what sounded like a gunshot, then a tap on the door's glass window. "I turned around and saw a gun pointed straight at my head," Madeira recounts. "I saw the guy's eyes because he was staring right down the barrel at me, and he was screaming." Madeira eventually summoned the courage to open the door.
What he stepped into was a nightmare world of men shouldering automatic rifles, shooting into the air and marching his staff around. But he didn't fully comprehend what was going on until he heard the shouts of 'Allahu Akhbar!' "That's when it hit me," Madeira recalls. "'Jesus, it's the Jamaat.'"
Bakr's attack was motivated by a land dispute, according to "Society Under Siege," a book by Ramesh Deosaran, a sociology professor in Trinidad. In 1978, as Deosaran tells it, Bakr's group had taken over an eight-acre parcel that had been given to the island's Islamic Missionary Guild in 1969 by the government but never developed. The Jamaat built several buildings, including a mosque and school, without permits. Then it tried to expand to outlying acreage. The government pushed it back and put up a fence. This was, apparently, an unpardonable affront to Bakr.
As gunmen marched Madeira down the hallway, Bakr emerged in a "flowing white robe" from the main studio, where a children's show had been taping. "Abu Bakr's eyes catch mine and he comes up to me: 'Mr. Madeira, you know I don't want to hurt anybody. You must take over and get everybody calm.'" Madeira took his new role to heart. His first act was to ask Bakr to release two German visitors and any women and children in the building. Bakr agreed.
At that point Madeira had no idea of the scope of Bakr's plan. One hundred and fourteen of Bakr's followers had launched a coordinated attack aimed at paralyzing the country. The Jamaat guerrillas stormed the ornate Parliament building on St. Vincent Street, known as the Red House, shooting the then prime minister of Trinidad, Arthur Robinson, in the leg before taking him hostage. Across the street a Jamaat member used a tactic then unheard of in the Western Hemisphere -- suicide bombing. He drove a car laden with explosives up to the police station, shot the guard at the gate, then rammed the building. The ensuing explosion nearly leveled the structure.
Two miles away at the TV station, on-air and at gunpoint, Bakr ordered Madeira to announce to the nation that the government had fallen. Later Bakr made his own on-air proclamation, telling viewers that Prime Minister Robinson had been arrested and he, Bakr, was now in charge. He warned against looting, appealed for calm, then added a bit of prosaic populism for good measure. The value-added tax, 15 percent added to the sale of goods, was abolished.
Then a tape of the animated Disney film "The Little Mermaid" played over and over.
A weeklong ordeal ensued, in which the Trinidadian army surrounded both buildings. Madeira says he saw a mostly unarmed Bakr in complete control. "I think I saw him with a revolver maybe once," he says. "He has a very commanding voice, and was very authoritative without having to shout or be belligerent."
Hours after a second broadcast, the imam grew impatient and told Madeira the army must have blocked the signal. "He told me, 'Mr. Madeira, they're trying to prevent me from making my transmission. The people need to hear me because by now they should be at the station lifting me on their shoulders."
And that is when Madeira realized that Bakr probably didn't have a plan or exit strategy beyond the attack. "I really think he thought the people would rise up and support him."
The people didn't rise up. Before it was over, the seven-day siege was punctuated by two intense shootouts at the TV station. Bakr finally made some demands, among them that he be proclaimed minister of national defense and that Prime Minister Robinson resign. Both demands were rejected. Finally, on Aug. 2, the interim prime minister agreed to sign a pardon for the Jamaat if the group would release the hostages and surrender its arms. Bakr accepted the deal, and the ordeal was over. Afterward, the army held the Jamaat guerrillas prisoner while the government tried to renege on its bargain, but Trinidad's highest court sustained the pardon. Twenty-four people had died in the coup and the siege that followed, but the Jamaat went free.
Next page: "He told me he was going to sell some [of the guns] and keep some for the group"