London has long been a magnet for foreign agitators and conspirators. Before World War I, Lenin and Trotsky and the well-born Russian anarchist, Prince Kropotkin, were among the peripatetic firebrands who found refuge in the British capital. So long as they caused no trouble in Britain itself, the British authorities let them plot in peace.
Over the past few years, there has been a certain sense of history repeating itself — save that the subversives in question are no longer Slavic revolutionaries but Islamic “zealots”. Anxious to apprehend Algerian terrorists who have gone to ground in London, the French Intelligence Services have been aghast at the indifference of the British authorities, at their torpid attitude towards the Islamic militants said to be operating under their very noses.
The London weekly, the New Statesman, recently publicized French suspicions that Britain has entered into an informal “non-aggression pact” with its resident cells of Muslim extremists. In France and elsewhere, the impression has formed that when it comes to fighting terrorism, London is the “soft underbelly of Europe”, a city that really ought to be called “Londonistan”.
Yet if there was ever anything in all this, events of the past two weeks indicate that the British authorities are now taking the threat of terrorism very seriously indeed. Prompted by French “intelligence”, the police made two pre-emptive strikes this January, arresting north Africans (some of them asylum-seekers) in London and Manchester on suspicion of manufacturing the deadly poison, ricin, for terrorist purposes.
The arrests made in London generated enormous public alarm; the subsequent arrests in Manchester — in which a senior detective was stabbed to death — have provoked not so much alarm as sheer horror. There is growing anxiety in Britain that the country is at the mercy of “enemies within”. Many are much exercised over the extent to which the chronically overburdened and chaotic British immigration service is to blame for offering hospitality to undesirable aliens. Sardonic jokes are circulating about the emergence not just of “Londonistan” but of “Britistan”.
The great difficulty for anyone attempting to write honestly and responsibly about the issue of terrorism is that it is more or less impossible to avoid employing defensive expressions: “it seems”, “allegedly”, “by all accounts” etc. In large measure reliant on “official” information, obliged to take a great deal on trust, journalists and commentators are inevitably groping in the dark. Yet, this said, the presence of potentially destructive fanatics in Britain can hardly be doubted; one of Britain’s more prominent Muslim personalities has made no secret of his hostile intent. Not a few of these individuals are refugees from Algeria, enragés spawned by the bloody conflict that has been raging in that country between the state and its Islamic opponents.
For Britain’s law-abiding Muslim majority, this is a tense time; it is a tense time, too, for the many thousands of people seeking asylum in Britain. The danger that Muslims and asylum seekers alike could become objects of general public revulsion, if not of an actual witch hunt, needs no underlining.
Needless to say, the problem of ascertaining the truth about what is going on has not deterred Britain’s rabid tabloid “newspapers” from identifying the present Algerian suspects as acolytes of Osama Bin Laden, blood-lusting psychopaths whose guilt is beyond dispute. In the eyes of much of the British media — as indeed in the eyes of many ordinary people — the men in custody already stand condemned. Upholders of civil liberties have been swift to deplore this grossly irresponsible behavior, rightly insisting that such coverage is gravely jeopardizing the suspects’ chances of receiving a fair trial. The human rights organization Liberty has even alleged that the British government is cynically conniving at what amounts to “contempt of court” on the media’s part.
Yet the mass hysteria that is being fomented by journalistic demagogues could ultimately prove self-defeating. Not long ago, a highly publicized trial in Britain concerning alleged racism had to be aborted on account of willfully prejudicial press comment. In the current paranoid, inflamed, accusatory British climate, a trial involving defendants charged with terrorism could be similarly undermined.
Persons of good will are bound to pray fervently that the British Security Services and the police are capable of keeping the threat of terrorism at bay. Were there to be a major terrorist outrage in Britain, it might well, apart from anything else, boost public support for attacking Iraq — even if there was no evidence that the perpetrators of the outrage had Iraqi connections.
The worry is that, in some respects, the authorities are in as great a state of ignorance about that threat as the general public. For we have entered a murky new era, in which the defined terrorist groups of the past have given way to anonymous freelance operators — so-called “clean skins” who have no pedigree as public enemies and who could strike out of the blue without any warning whatsoever. Combating such individuals is plainly going to be a monumentally challenging undertaking.
Last week the policeman who lost his life in Manchester, Detective Constable Stephen Oake, was being described as the “first casualty on British soil of the war against terrorism”. There is no mistaking the fatalism of such talk, the appalling implication that he will not be the last.
(Neil Berry, a London-based freelance journalist since 1980, is the author of Articles of Faith: The Story of British Intellectual Journalism.)
Arab News Opinion 20 January 2003
