Trinidadian Family Scans Airwaves for News of Relative Held Hostage

For the last four days, Juliet Zaidi, a geography lecturer at Cal State Fullerton, has lived the life of a news junkie.

A native of Trinidad and Tobago, Zaidi tunes in to virtually every news broadcast she can find about the unrest in that country, and the telephone in her Placentia home has been ringing off the hook with information since last Friday, when Moslem rebels stormed the nation’s parliament building and took at least 39 hostages.

Zaidi and her family are among a handful of Trinidadians who live in Orange County and who have formed an informal network to exchange the latest news on the upheaval in the two-island Caribbean republic.

But Zaidi, 51, is not just an expatriate interested in the political drama. Among the hostages is her brother, Trinidadian health minister Emanuel Hosein, a medical doctor and noted Caribbean advocate for the disabled. Hosein battled polio as a youth.

The attempted coup d’etat has traumatized the Zaidis, who live in fear that the next telephone call could bring dreadful news.

“He’s a very nice and sweet person,” said Zaidi’s 84-year-old father, Yusuf Hosein, who is visiting from Canada with his wife, Sybil Hosein. “But when rebels are desperate, it doesn’t matter whether you’re nice or not.”

Zaidi, who moved to Placentia nine years ago with her Pakistani husband, first learned about the trouble in Trinidad when another brother in Jamaica relayed the news Friday afternoon.

“I was shocked,” she said. “Even the newscasters are saying that this kind of violence was not likely to happen in such a peaceful country.”

Her reaction was similar to that of other Trinidadian expatriates who live in Orange County.

“I still cannot understand the real purpose of the uprising . . . from these few dissatisfied people,” said Kamaldin Rajab, a machinist who now lives in Buena Park. “I think the politicians are guilty of not keeping their promises . . . but this is no way to solve the islands’ problems.”

When Zaidi first heard about the attempted coup, she thought that her brother would be safe because he was scheduled to be attending a conference in Barbados on issues affecting disabled people.

But when news accounts stated that Hosein was among the hostages holed up in the parliament building, Zaidi got on the telephone, desperately seeking information.

Getting through to Trinidad has been virtually impossible since Friday, and Zaidi has had no direct contact with her brother’s wife or four children.

She called local newspapers, pleading with reporters to read her the wire service reports of the violence. She persuaded employees at Cable News Network’s headquarters in Atlanta to replay their news stories over the phone, and then called Trinidad’s ambassador to Washington to inquire whether he had any more news about the condition of the hostages.

“He just told me to keep looking at CNN and hope that everything works out all right,” Zaidi said.

Since she does not have cable television, Zaidi shuttles over to a neighbor’s house to watch CNN’s accounts a few times a day. Several news reports have stated that the 39-year-old Emanuel Hosein, who walks with a distinct limp and wears a leg brace, was not wired to explosives as were the other government ministers and legislators. The rebels have allowed him to treat Prime Minister A.N.R. Robinson, who was shot in the leg, and the other wounded in the ornate Red House, the country’s parliament building.

The information Zaidi gets from the news organizations is supplemented by reports from friends and relatives across the country. On Monday, the telephone seemed to be ringing constantly.

Ring! A call from Zaidi’s daughter in Wichita, Kan., who relayed a piece of news that she had just received from the Kansas City Star newspaper.

Ring! Another brother in Canada called to report that an agreement between the rebels and the government might soon be reached.

Ring! A friend from Riverside, calling to express concern about the situation.

Ring! The daughter in Kansas called with another snippet: Three bomb blasts were heard outside the television station controlled by the rebels. Yusuf and Sybil Hosein place their hands over their hearts.

“God, this talk about bomb blasts gets me sick,” Yusuf Hosein said.

Emanuel Hosein’s rise in politics is considered a Caribbean success story. Doctors gave him little or no chance of surviving the crippling attack of polio that struck him at the age of 8.

The disease temporarily robbed him of the ability to walk and write, but after spending more than a year in a home for handicapped children, Hosein returned to school and graduated from both elementary school and high school at the top of his class. He went on to study medicine at the University of the West Indies in Jamaica, but he never lost his passion for politics.

“We tried to discourage him by telling him that politics is dirty,” his mother, Sybil Hosein, recalled Monday. “But he would insist that it doesn’t have to be dirty. He believed in total honesty.”