Jihad from the Caribbean
In Trinidad, Salon meets longtime Muslim agitator Yasin Abu Bakr, who is allegedly linked to the plot to blow up JFK airport.
By Tristram Korten
Photo: AP/Shirley Bahadur
Yasin Abu Bakr, right, leader of radical Muslim group Jamaat al Muslimeen, arrives for a pretrial hearing in Port-of-Spain, Trinidad, June 11, 2007.
June 27, 2007 | PORT-OF-SPAIN, Trinidad and Tobago -- For Yasin Abu Bakr, the 65-year-old leader of the Muslim sect Jamaat al Muslimeen in Trinidad and Tobago, the timing couldn't have been worse. On Monday, June 11, Bakr headed to the Hall of Justice in Port-of-Spain, the capital of the Caribbean island nation, to start his trial on sedition charges stemming from a sermon he gave in 2005. That same day three men accused of plotting to sabotage New York's JFK International Airport and arrested in Trinidad appeared at an extradition hearing a block away from the Hall of Justice in Magistrate's Court. Ever since the U.S. indictment of the three alleged JFK plotters mentioned that one of the accused had met with Bakr to discuss the plan, the imam hasn't been able to shake the association. In print, on TV, in sidewalk conversations spanning the Caribbean, Bakr and the plotters were linked. And now their court dates were shadowing each other. Bakr's lawyers were left to fulminate in open court that the media circus had made a fair trial impossible.
Even the black-robed presiding judge at Bakr's trial, Justice Mark Mohammad, a round-faced man with a close-shaven head, was sympathetic. From his perch at the front of the wood-and-cloth-paneled courtroom, Mohammad chastised the media. He warned the scrum of print and electronic reporters in attendance that they could be held in contempt of court for linking the two cases in their stories, a crime under Trinidad's British-based code of law. Yet the next day defense lawyers in very British black robes and stiff white collars with ribbons contemplated whether Mohammad himself should be removed for penning a prior legal opinion regarding yet another Bakr matter.
Mohammad remained, and the trial was delayed. Everyone in this country of 1.3 million has an opinion about Bakr, the man who once launched the only violent Muslim uprising in the history of the Western Hemisphere. So does America's Federal Bureau of Investigation, which has been monitoring him at least since 2001. No court order can change that.
Trinidad and its much smaller sister island of Tobago, which lie just off the coast of Venezuela, comprise the second-largest (and southernmost) of the English-speaking Caribbean nations. Thanks to oil and gas revenues from wells and refineries, the predominantly black and Indian population enjoys a better standard of living than most of their neighbors. Port-of-Spain, on the northwest coast of Trinidad, is a slightly grittier version of Miami, a bustling, low-rise tropical metropolis of 130,000, teeming with cars and people rushing to office buildings and Indian restaurants. Construction cranes dot the horizon. Three daily newspapers make for a well-informed public. And nobody has dominated the headlines of those papers more than Yasin Abu Bakr.
It's not just his reputation that stands out. Bakr cuts a striking figure as he strides to the Hall of Justice every morning. Most days he's dressed in a vest, white ankle-length jilab (or gown) and white pleated kofi hat. At well over 6 feet tall with café-au-lait skin, he looms above the Jamaat bodyguards in fatigues, combat boots and knit caps who surround him. He has long limbs, elegant fingers and a trim mustache, and he carries himself with a regal calm, which both belies and augments his image as the feared leader of a violent group. During pretrial hearings he sits in the wooden defendant's box alone, alert and upright, sometimes rubbing his furrowed brow as if the barrister's arguments tired him. Three women in head scarves, identified by a local reporter as three of his four wives, sit in the courtroom to his right.
"Maybe when all this is over, we can talk," Bakr explains apologetically outside the courtroom after his guards, standing stiffly and wearing sunglasses even though they're inside, reluctantly permit access to him during the break in the proceedings. He is seated on a bench in the polished stone rotunda of the courthouse, considering whether to give his side of the story to the American public. "But I can't necessarily trust what you say," he says. He pauses a beat, smiles and adds, "It's not personal. Things get taken out of context all the time."
His reticence is understandable given the judge's harangue to the press, and the fact that Bakr's own words are what landed him in court. He is charged with sedition, terrorism and incitement, for threatening violence against rich Trinidadian Muslims who wouldn't pay him zakaat, religious contributions to help the poor. He faces up to 25 years in prison for warning, according to the indictment, of "a war in which lives may be lost." Yet the Jamaat's fiery leader and orator has never been known for keeping his mouth shut. Now, though, it's not just Trinis who can hear him. To the north the U.S. government is paying close attention. Bakr may sense his ability to bully local authorities has reached its limits.
From a U.S. perspective Jamaat's potential role in global terrorism has been a concern for nearly 20 years -- ever since Bakr and his followers tried to take over Trinidad. In 1990, it attacked government and media buildings and took hostages in a failed coup attempt. (It subsequently negotiated a pardon.) Its members are widely reported to have received some military training in Libya.
The group took on greater significance after Sept. 11, 2001. In 2002 Maj. Gen. Gary Speer, acting commander of the U.S. Southern Command, listed Jamaat al Muslimeen alongside Peru's Sendero Luminoso terrorist group as regional threats, capable of striking U.S. interests in their respective countries, during testimony before the House Appropriations Committee. In 2004 the Institute for Analysis of Global Security focused on Jamaat in a report pointing out that Trinidad and Tobago supply the U.S. with up to 80 percent of our natural gas, much of it shipped on tankers in liquid form, which are vulnerable to terrorist attacks. But the consensus had been that Jamaat's reach was limited, and Bakr's ambitions parochial.
The group officially graduated to the level of international problem on June 1, the day of the U.S. indictment in the JFK plot. It stated that in May, a Guyanese citizen named Abdel Nur visited Bakr at his mosque and briefed the imam about the plot to blow up the airport's fuel lines, and that Bakr instructed him to come back in a few days to go over the details.
"I know nothing of these matters," Bakr told Trinidadian journalist Tony Fraser, writing for the Associated Press. It was Bakr's sole public comment on the matter.
Jamaat officials acknowledge that two of those accused in the JFK plot visited their mosque, but they have tried to distance themselves from the group's past reputation for violence. Kala Akii-Bua told reporters gathered at the compound for a June 9 press conference that the group had evolved over the years and "turned not one, but many corners."
Most Trinidadians still scoff at the idea of Bakr as a jihadist willing to wage war on the U.S., largely because they don't see how he would profit from it. To them, he is a gang leader out for money and power. They see him as too comfortable in his white mansion perched in the hills above Port-of-Spain. And he is too public a figure, always in the headlines. In 2005 alone, he was tried and acquitted for conspiracy to murder two ex-Jamaat members, he was detained for questioning after a series of bombings in Port-of-Spain, and he gave the controversial zakaat sermon.
Then again, that same year a Jamaat member was convicted of trying to buy crates of rifles and machine guns in Florida for shipment to Trinidad. Although Jamaat denied the guns were meant for the group, it was a reminder that just 17 years ago, Yasin Abu Bakr had tried to take over a country.