At the recent trial of six Pakistani men in Dundee, the focal colonial sheriff praised the Asian community in Dundee for their ‘peacefulness’ but went on J to find four of the accused guilty of assault charges.
The well-tried racist manoeuvre of arrest and fitting-up of Asian and black people for defending themselves from racist attack, in this case 100 white youths shouting NF slogans and throwing stones and bottles, was used. Mohammed Zulfquar Khan and Mohammed Aslam junior were acquitted because of the ludicrously exaggerated police ‘evidence’ against them. The police had obviously forgotten to tell their more enthusiastic officers that to claim to have been repeatedly assaulted by a metal bar, as Constable Pallister did, would require evidence of serious medical injury.
Mohammed Aslam senior told the court of arriving at Beechwood for a religious festival. Ironically the despicably racist D C Thomson’s local paper accurately described the scene by writing:
‘When he arrived outside his brother’s house a large gang of white youths and the police were already there.’
Predictably the cowardly Dundee police had refrained from dispersing the racist mob on that particular weekend despite its usual harassment of local youth.
Equally predictably the sheriff found four of the men – Mohammed Aslam, Mohammed Ramzan Rassul, Mohammed Arshad Rasul and Mohammed Afzad – guilty of various charges of assault and brandishing weapons and fined them £250 in total.
The local Asian community, of 3000 people, is very angry at the outcome of the trial and it has aroused considerable interest throughout Scotland. However, the failure of the local Race Relations Committee to take up the case and campaign publicly gives the Dundee police more confidence to repeat their tactics and more than ever shows the necessity of building an active campaign amongst working people which asserts the right of the Asian community to defend itself from racist attack.
MT
FRFI 16 February 1982
