Documentary : Trinidad Preferred Cricket to a Coup : Despite the looting, the uprising ultimately failed because Trinidadians played the game of democracy as they do their national game--by the rules.

By DON A. SCHANCHE

Aug. 7, 1990 12 AM PT

TIMES STAFF WRITER

PORT OF SPAIN, Trinidad — Linda Nunes smiled approvingly as a clutch of agitated soldiers grasped their automatic rifles and bolted past the front porch of her small clapboard house near the Trinidad and Tobago Television (TTT) station where radical Muslim rebels were holding 29 hostages behind a barricade of booby-trapped vehicles.

The middle-aged government worker seemed unperturbed by the occasional bursts of small-arms fire just a block away.

“Come in and wash your face and have a glass of rum,” she called out in a traditional gesture of Trinidadian hospitality to a group of harried foreign journalists who had paused to take cover.

Sitting placidly in her porch rocker with a half-emptied glass in her hand, Nunes said she would be happy if the soldiers stormed the station and the Red House Parliament building where 42 more members of the radical Jamaat al Muslimeen rebel group were holding Prime Minister A. N. R. Robinson and 17 other senior government officials captive.

But even though she shared widespread feelings against the unpopular prime minister for austerity policies that have pinched the incomes of most Trinidadians, she hoped he would not be killed or forcibly ousted from power during the hostage ordeal.

“I don’t like the sonuvabitch either,” she said, her rocker thumping emphatically on the porch floorboards. “But we’ll vote him out our own way, not by hostage takin’. Don’t be takin’ the choice out of my hands!”

Her implacably democratic feelings were shared by many in the devastated capital city, even among those who virtually wiped out Trinidadian commerce and industry with five days of rampant pillaging when law and order broke down on the first night of the hostage crisis. The rebel leader, Yasin abu Bakr, had counted on such disaffected people to join his aborted revolution.

Why he did not succeed in turning the violent seizure of Parliament and the broadcast center into a full-scale revolution was clear as the waters of the Caribbean to the country’s leading sociologist, Dr. Selwyn Ryan of the University of the West Indies.

“Trinidadians play cricket, and cricket is a game of rules that must be respected,” he said as if that explained the matter. “People who play cricket don’t make revolutions. It isn’t cricket.”

As for the lawlessness and looting that left Port of Spain’s once sparkling Independence Square commercial center looking as burned out as downtown West Beirut, the editor of a leading local newspaper had an equally benign and probably correct explanation.

“It was not complicated by racial hostilities or an uprising of the dispossessed or that sort of thing, because all races and classes appeared to take part,” he said. “It was simply people taking something for nothing in the absence of visible law and order. That’s not peculiar to Trinidadians.”

Aside from the Muslimeen rebels themselves, hardly anyone in Port of Spain thought the seizure of the hostages was a revolutionary act. Most of those interviewed on the streets agreed with Col. Joseph Theodore, the armed forces chief, when he called it a simple act of terrorism, nothing more.

“(Abu) Bakr expected the people to rise up like revolutionaries and help him,” said a businessman who declined to give his name. “Instead they rose up and helped themselves.”

The wild carnival atmosphere of the looting during the first three days of the hostage crisis already has provided the material for legend. Lennox Murray, a local devotee of traditional Caribbean calypso music, said he knows several calypso composers and singers who are already at work immortalizing some of the Herculean looting feats they witnessed on the flame-lit streets.

“Think of it, Mon! ,” Murray exulted. “Usually take six Trinidadians to move a refrigerator 10 feet. Now we see one man take a fridge six blocks on his head. What a song!”

The question of why the looters burned down so many buildings, including some of the city’s most modern office structures, remains a puzzle, but like everything else that happened here last week, there were many uninformed rumors. A cab driver named Joe Winter said he knew for a fact that Libyan arson squads had come ashore from ships to accompany the looters.

Winter also claimed positive knowledge that a U.S. Navy task force lurking just offshore “blew them Libyan boats sky-high right out of the water.” When challenged with the obvious fact that no warships were in sight, Winter blandly amended his report. “They were submarines,” he said.

Although Winter’s rumors were wholly fabricated, talk of a Libyan connection had a basis in fact. Abu Bakr is known to have visited Libya and received financial support from its radical leader Col. Moammar Kadafi, according to Trinidad and Tobago police who have had him under surveillance for six years. Some of his men received military training in Libya as well, the police said. But they said that they have found no evidence that Libya had anything to do with Abu Bakr’s violent takeover of the Parliament and broadcast center.

Before founding the radical Muslim sect and turning to violence, Abu Bakr was a respected, law-and-order mounted policeman. For lack of a better explanation of Abu Bakr’s recent behavior, The Guardian, a local newspaper, reported that he underwent an abrupt change of personality after being medically discharged from the police. The medical reason for the discharge, the newspaper said, was that Abu Bakr had become addled after his horse kicked him in the head.

Whatever the final outcome for Abu Bakr and his 111 fellow hostage takers, now in military custody and likely facing charges of treason and murder, they will not have a home to return to if their freedom ever is restored.

Buildings of the nine-acre religious commune that the sect built on squatter land north of Port of Spain burst mysteriously into flames two days after the crisis ended on Wednesday. No one seemed to know who started the fires, but they centered on the plush four-bedroom apartment of Abu Bakr in a building that contained the commune’s shops.

Before the fire, journalists were taken on an army-sponsored tour of the commune and found it totally, and apparently hurriedly, abandoned by the wives and children of the insurgents. Discarded clothing and other possessions of the radical Muslims littered the buildings and grounds.

“It looked like Jonestown without the bodies,” said Bernard Diederich of Time magazine, who covered the 1979 mass suicide in Guyana of the followers of the Rev. Jim Jones, another rebel who claimed a religious mission to purify a corrupt world.