COMMUNITIES AGAINST CAPITALISM
 

War on the third world

An insidious result of September 11 is that the US treats many non-whites as terrorists

George Monbiot
Tuesday March 5, 2002
The Guardian

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.