Tuesday, June 5, 2007

New York Times: Terror Arrests Puzzle Many in Guyanese Enclave in Queens by By Ellen Barry and Ethan Wilensky-Lanford...

Over the course of 30 years, the sober-sided houses of Richmond Hill, Queens, have been transformed into an echo of the Caribbean, with candy-colored paint jobs, fanciful ironwork and beds of vivid flowers. Immigrants in this neighborhood care passionately about their houses, as well as their cricket teams and Bollywood musicals. Terrorism does not seem to fit here.

Robert Stolarik for The New York Times

Kamrul Khan, president of the Masjid Al Abidin mosque, said several of his relatives worked in the World Trade Center.

Andres Leighton/Associated Press

Kareem Ibrahim, left, and Abdul Kadir before an extradition hearing in Port of Spain, Trinidad and Tobago.

Robert Stolarik for The New York Times

Dolly Z. Hassan, an immigration lawyer, called the idea that the Guyanese population could produce terrorists “bizarre.”

Trinidad and Tobago Police, via Associated Press

Abdel Nur, now a fugitive, in a police photograph.

News that three Guyanese and one Trinidadian man were accused of plotting to attack Kennedy Airport has met with bafflement in Richmond Hill, home to some 25,000 Guyanese immigrants.

Waves of Guyanese have fled violence and political upheaval in their home country, lured to the United States by the promise of a quiet, prosperous life. The notion that this apolitical community could produce Islamic extremists, said Dolly Z. Hassan, is “very bizarre — very, very bizarre.”

“Nine out of 10 Guyanese don’t understand the conflict in the Middle East and they are not concerned,” said Ms. Hassan, a Muslim who moved to the United States in 1968. Religious terrorism, she added, “is not in the Guyanese blood. I have never heard of it even existing in Guyana.”

Russell M. Defreitas, who, according to a federal complaint, planned to bomb the airport’s fuel pipeline, remained in custody in New York yesterday, awaiting a bail hearing tomorrow. Two other suspects — Abdul Kadir, a former Guyanese member of Parliament, and Kareem Ibrahim, a Trinidadian — will fight extradition from Trinidad and Tobago to the United States, their lawyer told a court in Port of Spain yesterday. The authorities were still looking for a fourth man, Abdel Nur.

A surveillance video released yesterday showed Mr. Defreitas meeting a government informant at the Lindenwood Diner in Brooklyn just before his arrest. Two of the four suspects had made visits to leaders of Jamaat al-Muslimeen, a Trinidadian radical Muslim group, according to a federal complaint. The group’s leader, Abu Bakr, yesterday denied assisting the men in any way, according to The Associated Press.

While New Yorkers talked about the arrests over the weekend, business continued on Liberty Avenue, where shopkeepers stock sugar cane and machetes. Cars cruised by playing chutney soca, a mixture of Indian and Caribbean music, and even the curry had a West Indian flavor.

Guyana is a study in ethnic fusion. More than a third of its people are descendants of African slaves brought to pick sugar cane and cotton; nearly half are the descendants of Indians imported as contract laborers in the 19th century, according to the State Department. Fifty-seven percent are Christian, 28 percent are Hindu and 7 percent are Muslim.

Most were driven to leave by crime and political turbulence. Ms. Hassan, an immigration lawyer, recalls émigrés weeping at the airport in 1968, when she left, but now, she said, “they just want to get out.” In 2005, 143,476 Guyanese lived in New York City, 73,316 of them black and 31,342 of them of Indian descent, according to data gathered by Social Explorer, Queens College’s demographic research group.

Newer arrivals speak without nostalgia of the country they left behind.

“Too much crime,” said Zahir Singh, a construction worker who has lived here for six years. “Racism, and all that. I spent 30 hard years there, and then my family brought me here. I make decent dollars, and I’m happy.”

One impulse has united successive waves of Guyanese immigrants, said Latchman Budhai, a former president of Maha Lakshmi Mandir, a Hindu temple on 101st Avenue — the desire to make money. Women worked multiple shifts as home health aides, and men went into construction. Families bought properties in decaying neighborhoods and did their own renovations, sometimes running afoul of the city’s Department of Buildings. Those properties have soared in value.

“What these people care about is money,” said Mr. Budhai, 59. “Everything they do is business, business, business.”

This quality, many immigrants said, makes the notion of a Guyanese terror cell particularly strange. Kamrul Khan, who was praying at the Masjid Al Abidin mosque on Liberty Avenue yesterday afternoon, said he was repelled by religious violence. Mr. Khan, 56, a taxi driver who is also the mosque’s president, said several of his relatives worked in the World Trade Center.

“Politics, I have no politics,” Mr. Khan said. “I’m not involved in politics.”

A similar response came from Max Rahman, who opened a halal butcher shop on Liberty Avenue five years ago. He long ago tuned out the politics of his home country, and had little regard for the strict form of Islam practiced in Pakistan and Saudi Arabia. His goal, he said, was to own a home.

“Just get a better life,” he said. “It’s not about religion. The stuff that’s going on is back in Iraq and stuff. Not Guyanese.”

Still, several Muslim men interviewed said they had been stereotyped since 9/11, and Mr. Khan described a humiliating search at Charles De Gaulle Airport in Paris as he, his wife and two relatives were returning from a pilgrimage to Mecca.

The history of racism in Guyana is painful and unsettling for Indo-Guyanese and Afro-Guyanese alike, said Madhulika S. Khandelwal, director of the Asian/American Center at Queens College.

“They do share this frustration: They feel like they have been dominated and colonized,” she said. “There are people who are frustrated or they are unhappy or angry about things. It does come out in very strange ways.”

Several Guyanese said they worry that the plot will result in a reaction against their community. Albert Baldeo, a Guyanese lawyer who is planning to run for the State Senate next year, appeared at a press conference over the weekend to denounce the plot that the suspects are accused of.

But others, like Ms. Hassan, are more incredulous than alarmed. All weekend, friends and acquaintances were chattering about the plotters; in the end, they agreed that the case was a peculiar aberration.

“They think it’s silly. Very, very silly,” she said. “This is like the Three Stooges. People come in and ask, ‘Did you hear?’ Everybody is there laughing.”

Alan Feuer and Jonathan P. Hicks contributed reporting.