A climate of racist hysteria is being engendered by the government, police and media. Repeated mass raids under anti-terrorist laws are widely publicised and arrests given a high media profile. When those arrested are later released the story is barely reported. Thousands of people are being subject to police stop and searches under the guise of anti-terrorism. The real purpose is intimidation.
Raids
On 19 April ten people were arrested in Manchester amidst a blaze of publicity, when 400 police officers from four forces raided premises in Greater Manchester, Staffordshire, South Yorkshire and the West Midlands. Intense speculation followed about threats to local shopping centres and possible plots to bomb a Manchester United football match, causing unprecedented carnage. When the eight men, one woman and one boy were released ten days later having been charged with nothing related to any terrorist activity, there was hardly a murmur. The Iraqi Kurds at the centre of this furore were neither political nor religious. One of them had been a professional footballer in Iraq and a Manchester United supporter for ten years. The tickets for Old Trafford found in his possession were not a clue to a target but a souvenir.
A month earlier on 30 March, in another massive operation, more than 700 police officers had raided 24 addresses across the south of England. Eight British Asian men were detained for questioning. Five of them have subsequently been charged in relation to a quantity of ammonium nitrate fertiliser found at a warehouse in west London. They are being detained in Belmarsh maximum-security prison, awaiting trial on charges of conspiracy to cause explosions and possession of the fertiliser ‘in circumstances which gave rise to reasonable suspicion it was for a purpose connected with the commission, preparation of an act of terrorism’. Their names have been widely publicised, and an injunction originally taken out against tabloid newspapers preventing their printing the men’s pictures has now been lifted. What chance is there of a fair trial?
Arrests
Between 11 September 2001 and the end of March 2004 there were 561 arrests under the Terrorism Act (TA) 2000. But by the end of January 2004 only 100 people had been charged and there had been just six convictions for offences actually related to terrorism (including two for membership of the previously entirely legal International Sikh Youth Federation). Two hundred and thirty people arrested under the pretext of prevention of terrorism were subsequently charged with other offences, mainly deception or violations of immigration legislation. The supposed anti-terrorist provisions are being used as a dragnet to pick up and criminalise failed asylum seekers, or foreign students or workers whose visas have expired.
Indefinite detention
Sixteen foreign nationals have been detained without charge under the draconian Anti-Terrorism, Crime and Security Act (ATCSA) introduced by Labour Home Secretary David Blunkett after 11 September 2001. Twelve of them remain imprisoned in appalling conditions in Belmarsh maximum-security prison. ‘M’, the only detainee to win an appeal against such detention, was released after 16 months of such incarceration. He told The Guardian of the horrific physical and mental state he had found acquaintances in when he arrived at the prison: ‘I knew some of them outside the prison. Their behaviour…when I saw them inside was completely different. They had lost weight and three or four of them had gone crazy’. Blunkett continues to defend the ATCSA provisions, despite their being counter to the European Convention on Human Rights, and despite judges having ordered the release both of M and of another detainee, who was considered to have become so mentally ill that imprisonment was no longer possible, and who is now under house arrest.
Stop and search
At the end of last year Statewatch magazine reported that the number of stop-and-searches carried out under anti-terrorist operations during the year was more than double the figure being officially given out by the Home Office, and stood at 71,100 instead of the claimed 32,100; some police forces having counted their anti-terrorist stop-and-searches under the 1994 Criminal Justice and Public Order Act, rather than under the TA.
The percentage of arrests resulting from TA stop-and-searches was just 1.18%, compared to 13% for the ordinary criminal stop-and-searches made under the Police and Criminal Evidence Act 1984.
No one is safe
In the 1970s and 1980s thousands of innocent Irish men and women were arrested under the Prevention of Terrorism Act (PTA) expressly to scare them out of showing support for the struggle against British occupation. In 1974, the PTA, like the ACTSA, was rushed through parliament in days on the crest of a wave of outrage at the IRA’s bombing targets in Britain. By 1982 there had been 5,500 arrests but only 7% of those arrested were charged. Today, as Britain’s vicious war against the people of Iraq intensifies and its support for Israel continues, Asian, North African and Middle Eastern communities are being similarly terrorised.
Nicki Jameson
FRFI 179 June / July 2004
