Jihad in Trinidad and Tobago, July 27, 1990

By Daurius Figueira

On July 27, 1990 a miltant Islamic organization launched an attempted coup d' etat premised upon a hostage situation to remove a democratically elected government from power in Trinidad and Tobago West Indies. This work focuses on the central issue of a Muslim minority in the West and its varied attempts to interact with a non-Muslim society on a daily basis.

The work would present the ravages of black on black racism upon the Muslim communities of Trinidad and Tobago resulting in a divided community on the basis of race. Secondly, the work examines the influence of various discourses on the Muslim community of Trinidad and Tobago, especially the return to Islam by the Afro-Trinidadians and the development of a militant Islamic discourse which insisted that liberation for especially Afro-Trinidadians and Tobagonians was only found within the ambit of Islam. Finally, the work examines the impact of the illicit drug trade upon the relations between the then government and the Jamaat al Muslimmeen given the Muslimeen's assault upon the illicit drug trade in Trinidad immediately preceding July 27, 1990.

• Language: English
• Publisher: iUniverse
• Release date: May 16, 2002
• ISBN: 9781469704296

Daurius Figueira

Daurius Figueira is a social researcher and is presently a lecturer at the University of the West Indies. He has previously published 11 books with the most recent being "Cocaine Trafficking in the Caribbean and West Africa in the Era of the Mexican cartels".

Book preview

Contents

Dedication

Epigraph

Preface

Acknowledgements

Introduction

INDIAN ISLAM IN TRINIDAD STATEMENT OF INTENT

THE STRUGGLES FOR HEGEMONY WLTHLN INDIAN LSLAM

THE CHALLENGE OF ISLAMIC DISCOURSE TO INDIAN ISLAM

THE ISLAMIC MISSIONARIES GUILD AND THE ISSUE OF THE ISLAMIC CULTURAL CENTER

THE ISLAMIC PARTY OF TRINIDAD AND TOBAGO

THE IMG, THE LAND AT MUCURAPO AND THE JAMAAT AL MUSLIMEEN 1969-1985

THE DISCURSIVE FLOW OF THE JAMAAT AL MUSLIMEEN;1985 TO 1990

THE JIHAD REVEALED; July 27th 1990

GLOSSARY

Bibliography

Dedication

THIS BOOK IS DEDICATED TO MY WIFE AND SON

Anguish relentlessly threatens to overwhelm my person when I reflect upon the burdens placed upon my wife and child, burdens which involve concerns over their safety to walk the streets, to enjoy our simple life style as part of the working poor. For it is with powerlessness and material deprivation that the tyrants of the world assail us seeking our submission on this plane of existence.

It is therefore a simple legacy that I leave to my son, a legacy he can reject, he can embrace or be ambivalent about, but I have sent no mixed signals. I have not lived lies, a talking head, a face without eyes. All I have is my praxis, nothing else. The question is: do we as humans need more?

Epigraph

Say: Surely my prayer and my sacrifice and my life and my death are (all) for Allah, the Lord of the worlds;

No associate has He; and this am I commanded, and I am the first of those who submit.

Say: What! Shall I seek a lord other than Allah? And He is the Lord of all things; and no soul earns (evil) but against itself, and no bearer of burden shall bear the burden of another; then to your Lord is your return, so He will inform you of that in which you differed.

And He it is Who has made you successors in the land and raised some of you above others by (various) grades, that He might try you by what He has given you; surely your Lord is quick to requite (evil), and He is most surely the Forgiving, the Merciful.

(Holy Quran Surah vi The Cattle 162-165)

Preface

The events of September 11,2001 in Manhattan, New York city have rendered the attempted coup d’ etat of the 27 July 1990 in Trinidad and Tobago by the Jamaat al Muslimeen eminently important.

The need to come to grips with the specificities of the Islamic worldview in a globalized world capitalist order is a pressing reality. Moreso in a world political order in which Islam refuses to abide by the myopic discourses of truth through which the dinosaurs of the globalized world order seek to interpret and constrain Islam it is now necessary to listen to the very discourses by which Muslims who engaged with the West articulate their engagement.

The Shahids who carried out the attack on the World Trade Centre are all dead but the Mujahidun of the Jamaat al Muslimeen who stormed the Trinidad and Tobago Houses of Parliament on July 27, 1990 precipitating a hostage crisis survived the attempted coup d’ etat and the discourses through which they articulated their positions are deconstructed in the work that follows.

The challenge facing the West is to understand that no simplistic duality can sum up the complexity of contact between Islam and the West. Islam is rooted in rules of engagement that govern interaction with the West. It is now the time for the West to understand the nature of Islamic discourse and the Muslim that is constituted by it.

The salient indication of the potency of Islamic discourse in the West is the reality that the Mujahidun of the Jamaat al Muslimeen in 1990 was made up of Muslims born and raised in the West. They were not the privileged sons of Middle-Eastern Muslims who travelled to the West to acquire the street smarts and know how necessary to carry out the attacks of September 11,1990.

The lessons and warnings of the text are then the basis of a call for the West to understand that a new paradigm to govern engagement with Islam must now be cobbled together by the West.

For it is not a clash of civilizations but a challenge to the hegemony of the West that is mandatory to all Muslims, some may shirk that duty but others accept the said duty as a liberating praxis. Some may resist only in their minds others may resist with their entire being.

The challenge is then to develop rules of engagement that promote peace.

Acknowledgements

I wish to express my gratitude to the following persons:

Dr. Hamid Ghany, the staff at the UWI Computer Center who gave of their knowledge, experience and support, the staff of the Main Library especially the staff of the West Indiana collection, the staff of Student Advisory Services and the Halls of Residence. The solidarity of workers is a reality.

Special thanks to my brothers and sisters of the Ummah, especially Imam Yasin Abu Bakr, Bilaal Abdullah, Ansar and Hisham. All praises are due to Allah. To all other persons who have in any way contributed to this work who are too numerous to name, my sincere gratitude. Daurius Figueira

Introduction

The text that follows attempts to answer salient questions on the events of Friday 27th July 1990 to Wednesday 1st August 1990 by first deconstructing the events that culminated in the armed insurgency by the Jamaat al Muslimeen on the 27th July 1990. Questions that then encapsulate the whole flow and fabric of instances and events that first placed the Jamaat al Muslimeen on a self-defense footing which moved for culmination in Jihad on 27th July 1990. These questions are:

1. Why did the Port-of-Spain City Corporation under the control of the PNM move in December 1984 to obtain the legal instruments necessary to destroy a masjid then under construction and to scatter the Jamaat al Muslimeen from swampland at No.1 Mucurapo Road, Port-of-Spain? Why did the Port-of-Spain City Corporation strenuously exert itself, to obtain the ex parte interlocutory injunction empowering the corporation to scatter the Jamaat al Muslimeen asunder, to the point where the then Chief Clerk of the Corporation swore to an affidavit in support of the application for an injunction which was in fact a tissue of lies?

2. Why was the Ummah in Trinidad and Tobago divided on the issue of the Jamaat al Muslimeen’s right to occupy the land at No.1 Mucurapo Road, Port-of-Spain? Why did sections of the leadership of the three associations to which a significant proportion of the Muslim’s of Trinbago belonged were either hostile to the continued occupation of the land at Mucurapo Road by the Jamaat al Muslimeen or simply silent and noncommittal?

3. What was the role of Kamaluddin Mohammed in branding the Jamaat al Muslimeen as an extremist black Muslim grouping outside of the boundaries of Islam as the Islamic Missionaries Guild (IMG) was branded a branch of the Islamic Brotherhood of Egypt? What was the role of Kamaluddin Mohammed in influencing the City Corporation headed by Mayor Stephenson Sarjeant to pursue the eviction of the Jamaat al Muslimeen and the destruction of all illegal structures from No.1 Mucurapo Road in 1985?

4. What was the reasoning behind the assassination of Abdul Kareem of the Jamaat al Muslimeen in 1985?

5. Why was Imam Yasin Abu Bakr after being a contributor of strategic inputs into the campaign of the NAR in December 1986, by the first quarter of 1987 now in public opposition to the policies of the NAR government?

6. Why was the Jamaat al Muslimeen under the leadership of Imam Yasin Abu Bakr locked into an upwardly spiraling assault on the legitimacy of the NAR that culminated in the assault on the Red House on the 27th July 1990?

7. Why in 1988 did the Jamaat al Muslimeen choose to unleash a military assault on primarily the drug blocks of the crack retailing system of the East/ West corridor? Why did the Jamaat al Muslimeen target pushers under the control of the Syrian-Lebanese cartel? Did the Jamaat al Muslimeen primarily Imam Yasin Abu Bakr have ties to the Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA) of the United States, and was the assault on the drug trade part of this partnership with the DEA?

8. Why did the NAR government respond as they did to the assault on the drug blocks by the Jamaat al Muslimeen? Was the palpable increase in the intensity of engagement between the police and army and the Jamaat al Muslimeen the direct result of the assault of the Jamaat al Muslimeen on drug blocks under

the control of the Syrian-Lebanese cartel of illicit drug traffickers?

9. Did the drug traffickers and the minions of the illicit drug traffickers who sat in the then NAR cabinet call for a military solution to the Jamaat al Muslimeen’s assault on the drug blocks? Did the financiers and power brokers of the NAR who were involved in the illicit drug trade demand that a final solution be devised an applied to the problem of the Jamaat al Muslimeen? Was there then a clear and present danger to the lives of the leadership of the Jamaat al Muslimeen as constituted by the state? Was then the NAR government of 1986-1991 a government of drug traffickers or at minimum a government in complicity with illicit drug traffickers? Was this the primary reason for the NAR government’s unforgivable failure even refusal to deal with the substantive issues raised by the Scott Drug Report? Was there then a fundamental contradiction between the then NAR government and the Federal Government of the US over the nature and effectiveness of the NAR’s commitment to the war on the illicit drug trade?

10. At minimum the Alcohol Tobacco and Firearms Agency of the US Federal government constantly surveilled the movements of primarily Bilaal Abdullah in and out of Miami. Why did the ATF fail to stop the export of the materiel purchased in the US necessary to the insurgency? Why was there catastrophic failure on the part of Customs and Excise, Special Branch, the Police and Army to interdict the shipments of materiel and to expose and pre-empt the insurgency? Was it a case of blatant and gross incompetence, complicity or simply acting on orders given by superior officers?

These are the questions that have arisen out of my research on the events that culminated in the military strike on the Red House on Friday July 27th 1990. It is now close to 12 years ago that the insurgency occurred and telling questions remain unanswered even unrecognized by the political system and the politicians that animate it. It is not my duty to infer why but to press on with my limited resources to seek out answers to the questions posed. For it is apparent that close to 12 years after the nation digs deeper into the denial that guides our actions on a daily basis. Moreso there is a conspiracy of denial aided and abetted by the discursive elements that filters what is made public via the electronic and print media in Trinbago.

The most potent example of this is the sanitized discourse of the media and the political talking heads over the breaking of the tie/ the hung parliament as a result of the choices exercised and not exercised by the electorate on the 10th December 2001. There is a flurry of causal analysis emanating from the talking heads of the media and the political tribes as to why President Arthur Robinson chose Patrick Manning for the post of Prime Minister as was announced on Christmas eve December 24th 2001. And in all the causal analysis, the filtered discourse of truth being fed to the nation the geo-political realities that impact upon such decision-making is not addressed. The talking heads of all persuasions want the consuming public to believe that in a small, miniscule country that stands as the lynchpin of the gas/ energy strategy of the Eastern seaboard of the United States of America for at minimum the next 17 years. A small twin island state with billions of US dollars in investment controlled by an energy titan, BP and an upcoming energy titan BG, can make decisions of immense importance, that impact upon the energy strategy of the North Atlantic and not have the process influenced by the political directorate of the US and Britain. The supporters of the UNC must face the reality that maybe the political directorates of the USA and Britain do not want Basdeo Panday back as Prime Minister and allegedly the President caved in under the immense pressure that these behemoths exert on nations as Trinbago.

The very same questions have to be asked concerning the insurgency of 1990, for without the failure of US agencies, who had members of the Jamaat al Muslimeen under constant surveillance as they moved in and out of the US, to pre-empt the shipments of materiel necessary to launching the insurgency there would have been no military strike on the Red House on the 27th July 1990. Were then the US agencies negligent in their duties in 1990? Was it a case of complicity that was covered up by plausible denial or simply allowing the operation to continue knowing fully well that the materiel would form the basis of insurgency, but insurgency against a regime that was considered a maverick by the US government of the day?

Answers to these questions may never be forthcoming especially as time passes; memories become riven with dementia and persons involved die. But the people of Trinbago must know of the early involvement of the covert agencies of the US and Britain in the formation of the NAR, and the satchel cases of information on the corrupt practices of the PNM that were passed on to the NAR during the 1986 December election campaign by foot soldiers and go fors of the US covert agencies in Trinbago. Maybe the fundamental question to be answered is why and when did the NAR government part company with their external benefactors?

It is the central tenet of the text that follows is that you could never understand the actions of the Jamaat al Muslimeen from December 1984 to Wednesday 1st August 1990 without delving into Islamic discourse and the praxis of Allah (swt) as revealed in the Holy Quran. For it was a Muslim insurgency, a Jihad that was unleashed on the evening of July 27th 1990.

Attempting to explain the actions of Imam Yasin Abu Bakr and the Jamaat al Muslimeen outside of the Islamic worldview in which they situate themselves is ludicrous at best but hinged on the racist, Orientalist worldview of the North Atlantic. To dismiss the influence Islamic discourse had and has on the daily actions of Imam Yasin Abu

Bakr and the members of the Jamaat al Muslimeen is to dismiss the potency of Islamic discourse as a tool of liberation revealed by Allah (swt) to the Prophet Muhammad (uwbp). It is then a discourse that is the spawn of jahiliyyah and any Muslim who allies themselves with the proponents of this discourse to make war on the Jamaat al Muslimeen is in fact of the munafiqun. The reader would then be offered a journey through the discursive history of Islam in Trinidad and Tobago, which would indicate the discursive complexity even heterogeneity amongst the Ummah of Trinbago. But most of all, this journey that you are invited to embark upon in the text would indicate the crass, primordial, blatant racism that has engulfed the Ummah in Trinbago threatening to destroy the very potency of Islam as indicated in the heterogeneity of the Hajj. It is the racism, basic and primordial of Indian Islam that drove the urban, Afro-Trinbagonian Muslim to form Jamaats on their own, divorced from the Muslims who are Indo-Trinbagonians. It is this relentless racism that drove leaders of the ASJA to lobby the PNM and NAR to block all attempts to grant a deed of lease for the said lands at No.1 Mucurapo Road to the IMG and subsequently the Jamaat al Muslimeen. It is racism that divides the Ummah to this day as we become caught up in kuffir politics as Muslims of Indo-Trinbagonian descent vote for the UNC and Muslims of Afro-Trinbagonian descent vote for the PNM. It is Muslims of Indo-Trinbagonian descent who for two Eid Gars have invited the kuffir member for parliament for the area to stand and address the congregation within the confines of the masjid, whilst Muslims of Afro-Trinbagonian descent campaigned for the PNM, recruited Muslims for the PNM, even as candidates and as ministers.

An executive member of ASJA is a member for parliament for the UNC openly associating with an executive member of the Ahmadiya shirk who is also a member of parliament for the UNC. And both political parties in their drive to herd Muslim support behind their kuffir banners openly consort with the taliban fifth columnists’ in

Trinbago. The Ummah in Trinbago exists in name only as it is deeply divided on the basis of the nigger/ coolie syndrome. It must never be forgotten that approximately one week before the events of September 11th 2001, ASJA issued a press release in support of the taliban policies in Afghanistan. What is then apparent is as especially the associations to which the majority of Muslims of Indo-Trinbagonian descent belong, sink into the mire of racist Jahiliyya politics. They are articulating the extreme so-called Islam of Deoband, which in itself is the spawn of Jahiliyya.

The issue of the Jamaat al Muslimeen and terror must be grappled with but the population of Trinbago must understand that since the early 1980’s at its very inception the Jamaat al Muslimeen was branded a Muslim extremist, terrorist organization without any proof being proffered to substantiate this position. In August 1983 three of four bombs placed at the meeting place of the Ahmadiyya Ishat International Conference in Chaguanas exploded injuring 14 persons. The Jamaat al Muslimeen was on more than one occasion raided by the police with no charges ever being placed on members of the Jamaat al Muslimeen for the bombing. Thereafter articles would appear in the press naming the Jamaat al Muslimeen as a black Muslim extremist grouping with ties to Libya. And by December 1984 the City Corporation moved to demolish the buildings, including the incomplete Masjid erected on No.1 Mucurapo Road and prevent the members of the Jamaat al Muslimeen from re-entering the said land. This was then the move to scatter asunder the Jamaat al Muslimeen from No.1 Mucurapo Road. In 1985 Abdul Kareem was stabbed repeatedly to death whilst in police custody in St. James, and throughout the series of police raids and arrests of members of the Jamaat al Muslimeen no evidence was forthcoming as to their links with international terror and that they were in fact terrorists. From the evidence available to-date the materiel purchased by the Jamaat al Muslimeen necessary