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Assalamu'alaikum,
War on the third world
An insidious result of September 11 is that the US treats many non-whites
as terrorists
George Monbiot
Guardian
Tuesday March 5, 2002
http://www.guardian.co.uk/Archive/Article/0,4273,4367836,00.html
Those of us who opposed the bombing of Afghanistan warned that the war
between nations would not stop there. Now, as Tony Blair prepares the
British people for an attack on Iraq, the conflict seems to be
proliferating faster than most of us predicted. But there is another
danger, which we have tended to neglect: that of escalating hostilities
within the nations waging this war. The racial profiling which has become
the unacknowledged focus of America's new security policy is in danger of
provoking the very clash of cultures its authors appear to perceive.
Yesterday's Guardian told the story of Adeel Akhtar, a British Asian man
who flew to the United States for an acting audition. When his plane
arrived at JFK airport in New York, he and his female friend were
handcuffed. He was taken to a room and questioned for several hours. The
officials asked him whether he had friends in the Middle East, or knew
anyone who approved of the attacks on September 11. His story will be
familiar to hundreds of people of Asian or Middle Eastern origin.
I have just obtained a copy of a letter sent last week by a 50-year-old
British Asian woman (who doesn't want to be named) to the US immigration
service. At the end of January, she flew to JFK to visit her sister, who
is suffering from cancer. At the airport, immigration officials found that
on a previous visit she had overstayed her visa. She explained that she
had been helping her sister, who was very ill, and had applied for an
extension. When the officers told her she would have to return to Britain,
she accepted their decision but asked to speak to the British consul.
They refused her request, but told her she could ring the Pakistani
consulate if she wished. She explained that she was British, not
Pakistani, as her passport showed. The guards then started to interrogate
her. How many languages did she speak? How long had she lived in Britain?
They smashed the locks on her suitcases and took her fingerprints. Then
she was handcuffed and chained and marched through the departure lounge.
"I felt like the guards were parading me in front of the passengers like
their prize catch. Why was I put in handcuffs? I am a 50-year-old
housewife from the suburbs of London. What threat did I pose to the safety
of the other passengers?"
Last week, a correspondent for the Times found 30 men and a woman camped
in a squalid hotel in Mogadishu, in Somalia. They were all
African-Americans of Somali origin, who had arrived in the US as babies or
children. Most were professionals with secure jobs and stable lives. In
January, just after the release of Black Hawk Down (the film about the
failed US military mission in Somalia), they were rounded up. They were
beaten, threatened with injections and refused phone calls and access to
lawyers. Then, a fortnight ago, with no charges made or reasons given,
they were summarily deported to Somalia. Now, without passports, papers or
money, in an alien and frightening country, they are wondering whether
they will ever see their homes again.
All these people are victims of a new kind of racial profiling which the
US government applies but denies. The US attorney general has called for
some 5,000 men of Arab origin to be questioned by federal investigators.
Since September 11, more than 1,000 people who were born in the Middle
East have been detained indefinitely for "immigration infractions".
The Council on American-Islamic Relations has recorded hundreds of recent
instances of alleged official discrimination in the US. Muslim women have
been strip-searched at airports, men have been dragged out of bed at
gunpoint in the middle of the night. It reports that evidence which
remains shielded from the suspect, of the kind permitted by the recent US
Patriot Act, "has been used almost exclusively against Muslims and Arabs
in America". In the US, people of Middle Eastern and Asian origin are now
terrorist suspects. Some officials appear to regard them as guilty until
proven otherwise.
Similar policies appear to govern the judicial treatment of detainees.
During his press conference on December 28, President Bush initially
misunderestimated a question, and provided a revealing answer. "Have you
decided," he was asked, "that anybody should be subjected to a military
tribunal?" Bush replied, "I excluded any Americans." The questioner
pointed out that he meant to ask whether Bush had made any decisions about
the captives in Guantanamo Bay. But what the president had revealed was
that the differential treatment of those foreign fighters and John Walker
Lindh, the "American Talib" currently being tried in a federal court in
Virginia, is not an accident of process, but policy. He couldn't treat a
white American like the captives in Camp X-ray and expect to get away with
it.
These attitudes pre-date the attack on New York. Patterns of Global
Terrorism, a document published by the US counter-terrorism coordinator in
April, appears to define international terror as violence directed at US
citizens, US commercial interests or white citizens of other nations.
Non-whites are the perpetrators of terror, but not its victims.
In Angola, for example, the "most significant incident" in the year 2000
was the kidnapping of three Portuguese construction workers by rebels. The
murder of hundreds of Angolan civilians is unrecorded. In Sierra Leone,
terrorism, the report suggests, has afflicted only foreign journalists,
aid workers and peacekeepers. In Uganda, the Lord's Resistance Army's
appears to have done nothing but kidnap and murder Italian missionaries.
The Democratic Republic of Congo, where terror sponsored by six African
states has led to the deaths of some 3m people, isn't mentioned. Yet
domestic terrorism in the United Kingdom and Spain is covered at length.
There is, of course, vicious racism on other sides as well. Bin Laden
threatened a holy war against Jews. The men who kidnapped the journalist
Daniel Pearl forced him to announce that he was a Jew before cutting his
throat. I have lost count of the emails I've received from Pakistan and
the Middle East, claiming that 4,000 Jews were evacuated from the World
Trade Centre before the attacks.
This makes security policies based on racial discrimination even more
dangerous. By treating non-white people as if they are the natural enemies
of the US, the government could generate conflict where there was none
before. At the same time this policy establishes splendid opportunities
for terrorists with white skins, as they become, to the eyes of officials,
all but invisible.
This is the morass into which Tony Blair is stepping. "These are not
people like us," he said of the Iraqi leadership on Sunday. "They are not
people who abide by the normal rules of human behaviour." Some would argue
that this quality establishes their kinship with British ministers. But to
persuade us that we should go to war with Iraq, Blair must first make its
leaders appear as remote from ourselves as possible.
The attack on Iraq, when it comes, could in a sense be the beginning of a
third world war. It may, as hints dropped by the US defence secretary,
Donald Rumsfeld, suggest, turn out to be the first phase of a war
involving many nations. It may also become a war against the third world,
and its diaspora in the nations of the first.
www.monbiot.com
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