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December 2000: A suicide bomb attack in Srinagar, allegedly by a youth who travelled half-way round the world to his death from Birmingham, England.
December 1999: The Indian government agrees to release a British citizen of Kashmiri origin from jail in exchange for passengers aboard the hijacked Indian Airlines plane at Kandahar, Afghanistan.
LONDON: Ugly year-enders twice in a row and India might well hope 2001 will end very differently and on a less threatening note. After all, Britain is barely six weeks away from enforcing new legislation, which makes terrorism anywhere in the world - and not just in the UK - an offence under British law if the plot is proved to have been hatched here. The new Terrorism Act is not quite a look-alike version of India's draconian TADA, but it does have aspects that might have pleased Isabella and Ferdinand, not to mention their lieutenants who actually conducted the Spanish Inquisition. Technically, the new law should enable London to rid itself of an image threatening to cling to it - the terror capital of the world; almost a credible rival to Muammar Gaddafis Tripoli of the 80s.
But can the impossible really come to pass? Can Britain, the traditional home of political dissidents, ideological rebels, those fleeing state repression and distant wars, really decide to turn its back on conspicuous libertarianism? This enabled it to offer sanctuary in turn to Ho Chi Minh, Marx, the Huguenots, endangered species of French aristocrat, sundry exiled royals, former African dictators, the banned African National Congress and now, the LTTE, exiled Pakistani politicians, Afghan warlords, and shoals of angry jihadis bursting to fight the Kashmiri cause alongside Chechnya and Kosovo.
The question is urgent, not least for India. London, Birmingham and Bradford are almost, but not quite, the terror triangle, where born-again Muslims are coaxed into a dangerous commitment to perceived ideological duty in far-flung lands. That is why Srinagar's alleged Christmas Day suicide bomber, is assured a place in the legend of contemporary Birmingham. The boy, whose nom de guerre was Abdullah Bai, is described as a "nightclub-going lad" until his frightening metamorphosis into someone who could casually blow himself up one fine day for a cause he did not really know and a patch of land he would never live in.
There are thousands of Abdullah Bais in Birmingham and Bradford. They follow a generally accepted path of punk haircuts and parties till they reach university, where, as in Hanif Kureishis finely-crafted play, My Son the Fanatic, they are ready to embrace the unbending puritanism of the young and the death-wish of the wild-eyed jihadi. Britain, with its 400,000-strong population of dispossessed Mirpuris, is a particularly happy hunting ground for the `rabid stereotypical mullah' so demonised by the Christian West and Hindu India. The routine, as Sheikh Omar Bakri-Mohammed, the ranting founder of London's Al-Muhajiroun, puts it, is simple: stoke the youths' identity crisis; enable them to rediscover their parents' lost faith and send them out to battle the occupying forces in Bosnia, Kashmir, Chechnya, Kosovo and the Palestinian territories.
The returns on Al-Muhajiroun's investment seem to be astonishingly immediate and sizeable. Sheikh Omar claims 1,800 Muslim youths leave Britain every year to do-or-die. There is no independent verification of the numbers, but it says something about the extent of recruitment and training that Birmingham's bravest, for instance, are now known publicly to figure in at least three recent terrorist attacks. Three Birmingham boys were jailed in Yemen in 1998 over a terrorist bomb plot, a 24-year-old Muslim convert from Britain's second city was reportedly killed in a US missile attack on Osama Bin Laden's Afghanistan base, and then, of course, there was Abdullah Bai in Srinagar.
In forceful, if delayed reaction, Britain now accepts moral responsibility for being the home and training ground of Abdullah Bai and others who went before him and shall surely come after him. The Terrorism Act is Britain's answer to Hosni Mubarak's pained question after attacks on foreign tourists in Luxor in 1997, "I cannot understand, why are people on whose hands there is blood granted asylum in England"?
The new legislation is meant to be a fitting response. Its main provisions are permanent and it broadens terrorism to acts committed anywhere in the world. It seeks to proscribe terrorist organisations, beggar them by hacking at the fund-raising network and money laundering and bring to trial anyone accused of committing a terrorist act. In court, the new law allows adverse inferences to be drawn from the silence of a suspected terrorist and also enables a policeman above the rank of a superintendent to offer an opinion about the guilt of the accused. But for all its hard edge, it is unlikely to frighten potential Abdullah Bais and their mentors into leading more conventional lives.
Paradoxically, the seeds of the new law's impotence lie in another piece of legislation. Two recent test cases exemplify Britain's inability to do much more than just wring its hands:
First, Britain was unable to deport Shafiq-ur Rehman, a 29-year-old Muslim cleric from Manchester, who was accused by the government of recruiting and funding British volunteers to fight in Kashmir, particularly for the Lashkar-e-Taiba. Soon after, two Sikhs, Mukhtar and Paramjit Singh, won the right to stay on in Britain despite India urging their extradition and the British government accepting they were terrorists and a threat to national security.
The argument advanced by the British court was an interesting model of British fair play and even-handedness, otherwise called the King Charles-Cromwell syndrome and mocked by an eminent British scientist in an age before the Lonely Planet travel series. Offering foreign colleagues a potted guide to tourist London, he urged, "You must not miss Whitehall. At one end you will find a statue of one of our kings who was beheaded; at the other the monument to the man who did it. This is just an example of our attempts to be fair to everybody". So also the court, which accepted that the men were "international terrorists", but found itself unable to deport them on account of the European Convention on Human Rights, which forbids repatriation of those at risk of torture.
The argument preserves Britain the
way it wants to be seen: Offering sanctuary to the oppressed; saviour of
the weary and friendless. It does not, of course, address Hosni Mubarak's
question.
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