Police in Paris. Demotix/ Cesar Dezfuli. All rights reserved.
Rosemary Bechler(RB): Francesco, you have analysed in
some detail the relatively recent French plan to ‘combat radicalization’,
following a path previously trodden in the UK and the Netherlands. Could you
explain how, in your view, this approach to counter-terrorism influenced the
nature of the French response to the Paris attacks last November?
Francesco Ragazzi (FR): What is interesting is that the first attacks
in January 2015, on the Charlie Hebdo office, came not much more than six
months after the first counter-radicalisation programme ever was announced in
France, in April 2014.
They paved the way for this strategy with a ministerial report which was
kept secret, in fact until a few weeks ago when it was made public by the
French media outlet, Mediapart.
The report was headed up by Prefect Jounot who was mandated by the prime
minister at that time, in 2012-2013, to try to get to grips with what was best
practise in the Netherlands and the UK, as well as what was going on at the EU
level. This attempt to revise policy was in turn a response to a series of
developments including the Mohammed
Merah killings in 2012. France had been spared terrorist attacks over a
long period from 1996 to 2012, during which time it had relied primarily on a
law enforcement strategy, the work of intelligence services and the police and
no or very little involvement of civil society or any other groups in the
counter-terrorism apparatus. Intelligence services, specialised departments of
counterterrorism in the police, and anti-terrorism judges – this was the way
counter-terrorism had been structured and organised in France. It is not really a response to a changing threat, or to an analysis of what
the response should be.
And suddenly in 2012 it appeared that the system had not only failed to
prevent these killings, but that the list of people regarded as dangerous for a
large number of reasons by the intelligence services kept on growing. More or
less at the same time there was a new concern about the number of individuals
going to fight in Syria. Intelligence services and anti-terrorist judges were
in particular worried about the possible dangers of returnees. Add to this
pressures at the European level to be seen to be doing something in relation to
counter-radicalisation, and there is this decision by the French government to
change course.
It is not really a response to a changing threat, or to an analysis of what
the response should be, but a response to what was considered to be a failure
in the Mohammed Merah attacks, and the pressures of the European Union.
RB: To carry on retracing our steps a little, you refer to the
speech delivered by the British Prime Minister David Cameron, in February 2011,
in which he talked about ‘different cultures’ living ‘separate lives apart from
each other and apart from the mainstream’ and denounced ‘multiculturalism’,
echoing remarks about its ‘failure’ made by Angela Merkel in 2010, as an
important contributory moment, having its roots in changing models of
integration resulting from the July 2005 attacks in London.
One had the sense at the time that this seemingly coordinated drawing of
the line by several European leaders was an important moment, but what was that
actually about? Multiculturalism was the target of all the rising populisms from
Pim Fortuyn onwards.
FG: Two things happened in parallel that can only be explained if you
consider the political sphere and the sphere of what Didier Bigo refers to as
the ‘professionals of security’ as relatively autonomous spheres.
What was happening on the one hand was the public renunciation of
multiculturalism as a particular way of managing diversity – as a failure. But
this process in itself had a long history. If you look at the Netherlands it
started in the mid 1990’s and was the target of all the rising populisms from
Pim Fortuyn onwards. In the UK, it took off not really with the 7/7 bombings,
but with the riots of 2001: that was probably the moment when the idea of “parallel
lives” entered the public debate with the suggestion that multiculturalism had
encouraged the development of “separate communities” which did not think of
themselves as British, and so forth.
Stand-off between rioters and police in Croydon, London 2011. Flickr/ Raymond Yau. Some rights reserved.But then it was very quickly re-appropriated in the language of
counter-terrorism, with the idea that home-grown terrorism, emerging from the
suburbs of British, Dutch and other big European cities was in fact the product
of multiculturalism. This reached the point where even Nicolas Sarkozy,
strangely enough, though multiculturalism had never been on the agenda in
France, thought fit to denounce it as well, as a failed system.
So, if the idea that separate communities within a country need to be
recognised as such and that the polity at large should accommodate for
difference – if this idea of multiculturalism is to be discarded, in the name
not only of fending off possible riots but in tackling terrorism – then you
might expect the policies of homogenizing citizenship and playing down
differences, trying to get the entire population at least organised or
functioning around a single set of values, you would expect that to be
more or less the backbone of the new guidelines for counter-terrorism. This is
the message that we hear now in the Netherlands, that has been somewhat vaguely
outlined in policies in the UK, but has been very much state policy in France
for a while now.
In fact, however, when you look closer at what ‘professionals of security’
have been doing in the Netherlands since 2003/4, in the UK very much after the
London bombings of 2005, and at what had been going on in France for a while –
it is exactly the opposite! The idea is that to tackle radicalisation as a
particular social problem, you have to deal with it differentially as if it was
primarily a Muslim problem. So if you are to deal with it as a Muslim problem
you end up targetting specifically Muslim populations. If you are to deal with it as a Muslim problem
you end up targetting specifically Muslim populations.
So, when Prevent
was rolled out in the UK, it targeted particular areas where there was a
determinate percentage of the population that was Muslim. It was pursued through
the idea of promoting moderate voices within Islam, reforming the governance of
mosques. So it was very much targeted at a community and the same happened here
in the Netherlands. France, interestingly, which for a long time you could have
expected to pursue a non-identity based, or non-community based way of tackling
radicalisation, in fact in 2014-2015 really adopted a similar model. What I
show in the
study of France in this period therefore is this discrepancy between deeds
and rhetoric.
There is the political discourse questioning management through difference –
the policies of multiculturalism – on the one hand, and on the other, in fact,
the managing of security issues through a differential approach based on the
different treatment of communities. This was a paradox only at the level
of appearances, and only if you believe that security professionals do what
politicians say. In fact they don’t. Whatever is said, what
counter-radicalisation began to do as a set of security practises was very much
to reinforce a division between a Muslim community and the rest of society.
RB: This is where your concept of ‘ policed multiculturalism’
comes in, an account of a system for managing religious and ethnic diversity
even in a laicist society like France, where this is not what their culture is
meant to be about. So let’s come back to the impact of ‘policed multiculturalism’
on the response to the Paris attacks.
FR: ‘Policed multiculturalism’ is an idea that I have been playing
around with to think about this particular set of security practises, not so
much in terms of whether it is efficient counter-terrorism or not, but really
in terms of what it does to citizenship.
When you do this, what immediately becomes very clear is that within this
whole overarching discourse of questioning multiculturalism – both in the UK
and the Netherlands that had, explicitly or implicitly, operated by the
multicultural principles of governing through diversity, and in a France that
hadn’t – what was really happening was the management of diversity without any
open political discussions about them.
Instead of saying, we need to pay due
recognition to this community because this is the right thing to do, or because
this is the way that we want to organise our society, now it became a question
of, “We need to govern in particular these Muslim communities in such and such
a way, because otherwise it will create a terrorist problem.” Instead of open
discussions about how and what should be the model of citizenship in our
contemporary European societies, all the talk instead was of what kind of
welfare we should provide, what kind of recognition, what kind of place we
should give to religion in society, so that we don’t provoke an attack on our
way of life by “angry Muslims”, and so that we can prevent people from becoming
radicals, going to Syria and so forth.
Gare de Lyon. Flickr/Jon Siegel. Some rights reserved.Therefore the politics around these issues are gradually reduced to a
bureaucratic decision regarding the most efficient choice to be made for
tackling this threat. And in France, when you ask how this has influenced the
response to the Paris attacks, of course institutions don’t change overnight,
but it has had some impact.
For the first time you had a directive from the minister to the prefects who
are in charge of administering the counter-radicalisation strategy, telling
them to set up dialogues with the religious representatives! This is entirely
unheard of in France. This recognition that religious representatives could be
part of social policy, and that the French would recognise or deal with an
organised form of Islam, such as the official representative body of Muslims in
France, the Conseil Francais du Culte Musulman (CFCM), was resisted by many as
quite contrary to the principles of laïcité. In fact if you dig into how
laïcité is supposed to work, it’s not that clear cut, there were always debates
between accommodating and maximalist positions. But this was the first time
that there was an acknowledgement of Islam, and the place of religious
representatives, in the management of the terrorism question, branded as
“radicalisation”. So implicitly it made the recognition of the Muslim community
as a community by the state something of a reality, which it had not been
hitherto. And the driver for that was the fear of terrorism. Underpinning all of it is always this idea that
it is a Muslim problem.
There are many reasons why Nicolas Sarkozy built on the initiatives of the
previous ministers before him and created the CFCM. Not all of them had to do
with security. Some of them were to do also with short-term electoral
expectations that he would get something of a Muslim vote, and that didn’t
really work out for him, so he abandoned the idea. But the institution stayed.
And so progressively the French state started changing in its approach to Islam
and to Muslim communities.
Now, many of the initiatives that are taken by the
French state are done under the rubric of a partial recognition of communities.
There is a hotline that can be called if you think somebody is at risk of
radicalisation. Various local schemes will be based on religious cults, so
Salafism and violent Salafism can be treated like sects, like scientology or
something that you should be protected from, or that can be observed under the
heading of youth violence. But underpinning all of it is always this idea that
it is a Muslim problem. The minute you ask a French official about this they
will say, “Of course we don’t recognise communities.” But this is how it
actually works on the ground. It always ends up being about Imams, communities,
what does the Muslim community want, how is the Muslim community making an
effort to tackle radicalisation and so forth. So I think it has had quite a
strong impact.
RB: I was interested in your comments about the contestation over
the nature of radicalisation that took place in Europe as this set of security
practises, with these similar identifiable features in different
countries, emerged… and the jettisoning of the ‘expert’ view.
FR: Yes, you are referring to a particular episode that I looked at
in 2008 when the discourse around ‘radicalisation’ was not yet fully formed. A
few scholars working on terrorism and on Islam in Europe saw the opportunity to
query the term and in particular the simplistic description of radicalisation
as a predictable linear process along which intelligence services, police or
social workers could intervene in order to prevent the next step from being
taken, as if this was inevitable.
An expert group had been set up in 2006 by the European Commission which was
meant to be supplied with the findings of four smaller groups who were writing
more grassroots-based or more technical short reports. The expert group would
draw up the final report. I spoke to some of the people who participated in
these various groups and interestingly the expert group, which contained the
most highly recognised scholars, thought that the whole idea of radicalisation
was a little bit silly and didn’t in fact make sense in the way that it was
being interpreted by the Commission and by the emerging ‘common sense’ on this
subject.
They were particularly dismissive of the four reports that were meant to
feed into their reflections because they saw them as narrow, poorly documented,
and in fact heading in the wrong direction. Essentially, they were giving a
picture of radicalisation as a process in which any kind of politicised Islam
was a conveyor belt to violence, or where radicalisation was seen essentially as
an individual process regardless of the wider group dynamics, and in particular
the escalating dynamic in the relations between individuals, groups and state practices.
This they thought was pretty poor and not particularly helpful.
But in the end what happened was that the short reports got published, but
not the overview of the expert group, which was questioning the entire
enterprise around radicalisation. What became very clear was that the discourse
of the ‘professionals of security’, essentially the discourse reproduced in the
four smaller reports, was the dominant one for the institutions, and not to be
questioned. So where did the notion of radicalisation come from? Essentially
from those security circles before they turned to the academic world in order
to find out more about these contemporary problems.
At that time it might still have seemed possible to challenge and even
dethrone the notion of radicalisation. But right now, seven years later,
maybe twelve years after it was first introduced into the European Union in
various public documents, we have to concede that this attempt was a failure.
‘Radicalisation’ is here to stay and if we want to produce interesting
knowledge about what is going on, I think we have to deal with the term in another
way. Maybe we have to show that the process so identified doesn’t work at all
in the way that has been theorised by government, by the intelligence services
and some of the scholars who reproduce this rhetoric.
RB: Would you say that this is the value of Arun Kundnani’s
concept of ‘radicalisation as a relational process’ ? Is this where such a
concept fits in?
FR: Yes absolutely. One of the characteristics of the way
radicalisation is conceived is almost teleological, an inevitable set of steps
in which people are first attracted to religion, either by going back to their
traditional faith or as converts, and are put in touch with preachers who bring
them to a more fervent way of practising their religion. There are a few more
steps and then basically they commit an act of terror.
What we know from the
work of John Horgan, an original member
of the expert group, is that it is actually much more complicated than that. It
has a lot to do with individual trajectories and choices, as opposed to people
being a product of what an ideology or a group would like them to do. In the
dominant discourse there is always this passive idea that you are radicalised,
but never a political actor or the driver of your own radicalisation, right?
You are at risk, a victim. This is to do away with the free will.
Scene from Pontecorvo’s 1966 masterpiece, The Battle of Algiers, a film about the Algerian War of Independence.The ideas of escalation that Arun
Kundnani has developed with others, alongside the earlier work of Didier
Bigo on the ‘terrorist relation’, that of Martha Crenshaw
and also Donatella
della Porta from a social movements theory perspective – all of these help
us to see that in fact if you don’t take the state into account, whether it is
the state of origin, as in Egypt, Syria, or Algeria where we think about the GIA
and the civil war that happened there – but also the state over here in our
liberal democracies, you are ignoring an essential component in the escalation
of violence. So if you don’t include the state, the foreign policy of the UK or
other countries, the sense of discrimination created by law enforcement and
other agencies, if you don’t factor in all of these elements you have a very
very partial account of why at any given stage people decide to engage in
political violence. So if you don’t include the state, the foreign policy of the UK or
other countries.. you have a very very partial account.
These are some of the ideas that we have been including in our recent
reports and others have argued this as well. And the reason why it is important
to insist on this is that recently the French Prime Minister has come out and
said that, “to explain is already to justify the attacks”. This was a heavy
anti-intellectual attack that must be challenged. Actually the exact opposite
is the case. We need to understand why some individuals decide to carry out
this kind of violence and this will give us insight into how we can prevent it.
RB: As you put it rather well in the
Sciences Po study, “The Egyptian military government’s brutal
crackdown on the Muslim Brotherhood or the Syrian government’s slaughter of
civilian populations can of course not be compared with practices in European
countries. It would be just as mistaken, however, to disregard the significant
role of the “illiberal” practices of western democracies, particularly in matters
of discrimination, surveillance, and even torture (for instance in Guantanamo)
in certain individuals’ decision to engage in political violence.”
Can we turn now to some of the perverse effects of these choices that
have been made in counter-terrorism?
FR: Yes. Here the reports of the UK’s independent reviewer of
terrorism legislation, David
Anderson, were really clear in documenting how a certain number of state
practises in counter-terrorism such as stop-and-search in the streets (section
44.1 and 44.2, now revoked), the Schedule 7 stops at the borders when people
travel used by the UK authorities, and many other measures have adverse effects
and touch a very large population that has nothing to do with terrorism.
These procedures have in common that they involve extensive contact with the
authorities, despite the fact that there is no clear idea that the person
involved is a suspect in a terrorist investigation. In France, we are talking
about such techniques of counter-terrorism as those in which a very large
number of people are arrested and detained pre-emptively while officials see
what comes out of the interrogations, even if they have to release a lot of
these people in the process. If you look at the official numbers published by
Europol you will see that France carries out the largest number of
counter-terror arrests, but then also has the largest number of individuals ‘released
without charge’. Laurent Bonelli has documented rather well how that works.
But France has other techniques, like the regional units for the disruption
of radical Islam (Pôles régionaux de lutte contre l’Islam radical), which
consists of agencies from non-law enforcement services such as tax,
veterinarian, health and safety and the police going into cell-phone stores,
butchers, different kinds of shops, raiding entire streets because they have
targeted one shop or business which they think supports terrorism. But in order
to be invisible and not seen to target specifically Muslim businesses, they go
and visit the entire street. Then they look in detail into a particular
business, trying to find anything they can peg onto its business practise, which
has nothing to do with terrorism. It might have to do with a breach in health
and safety for example, or irregularities in how the taxes were declared – but
they scour the business for sufficient fines they can levy to disrupt the
activities which they consider might be linked to the financing of terrorism.
These raids are a concern to a lot of people in France.
Meanwhile, all of these techniques have clearly signalled to the Muslim
community in Europe that they are under suspicion.
Manuel Valls, Prime Minister of France. Zaer Belkali/Demotix. All rights reserved.RB: We heard so much about free speech during the Charlie Hebdo
atrocity, but here again we have very mixed messages being raised at the EU
level where such questions are put forward for consideration as, “to what
extent online content can be blocked if it does not directly violate the law?”
– this, against a background in which hate speech legislation seems to creep
into more and more of the ways in which we deal with each other as citizens?
FR: Absolutely. This was one of the elements of the latest
legal changes in France, in which a website can now be pre-emptively blocked
and the only recourse is to an administrative judge, after the fact. So the
authorities can decide to block from one day to another a website whose content
they consider may be too close to radical Islam or justifying terrorism.
Another cause for concern is the very problematic climate set up by the new
2015 law in the UK alongside its ‘counter-extremism strategy’. It is
interesting that we are no longer talking about preventing terrorism, but
countering it now – and no longer targeting violent extremism, but ‘extremism tout
court’.
It has set in motion a huge debate and multiple problems on British
university campuses regarding academic freedom and freedom of expression. This
I think, and I go back to what I was saying before, is a direct outcome of some
of the understandings of how radicalisation works; because, the only
justification you can have for preventing somebody from speaking, even if they
are not advocating violence at all, is by arguing that, well, extreme or
radical ideas end up leading to violence in the medium or the long term.
This is the argument that I think is being deployed in the UK. It was
quite shocking that the newly-appointed Vice-Chancellor at Oxford, Louise
Richardson, felt she had to argue in defence of the right of organisations like
Cage, for example, to be invited to talk at Oxford University. The fact that
this became a piece of news, that an organisation like Cage was “allowed to
speak”, is surely quite telling about the climate of severe limitations on
freedom of expression when it comes to anything related to questioning the
practises at Guantanamo, the drones policy, the foreign policy of the UK, its
counter-terrorism strategies and so forth – a climate that it seems we are now
in.
Flickr/ codepinkhq. Some rights reserved.
RB: What is very noticeable about these perverse effects, taken in
the round, is the way they revolve around the predictive capacity of the state,
an anticipation of radicalisation which ensures that in all our countries
minority populations are caught up in the broadening nets of counterterrorism
and suspicion in significantly swelling numbers…It is no longer proof but just
suspicion which is sufficient.
FB: I would like to say two things on this point. The first of course
is that you are right that all of this is grounded in a predictive, anticipatory
idea of security. Probably one of the more significant paradigm shifts of the
past ten to fifteen years has been the increasing belief that law enforcement
and policing should be predictive rather than reactive, and this is changing
the entire system of criminal justice, so that it is no longer proof but just
suspicion which is sufficient to enact a certain number of either
administrative practises, such as the freezing of assets, control orders – they
have now been transformed into temporary measures (TPIMs) – measures that
operate below the threshold of proof, but that are thought to be enough to
restrict liberties and prevent people from engaging in terrorist-related
activities. Certainly, this is anchored in that kind of predictive understanding
of policing and that shift has been discussed a great deal in terms of
algorithms, mass surveillance, the Snowden revelations and how all of the
justifications for this mass surveillance lie in the promise – and it is
very much a promise and maybe a myth – of the ability to predict through
numbers, big data and so forth, who the next terrorist is going to be.
Now, of course some of that can be put down to an element of, “Let’s trust
the numbers.” But I would like to raise a different point that is emerging from
our current research, and that constitutes another important part of the
rationale behind counterterrorism and these new security measures. This focuses
rather on trust in society, and the ability of intelligence services, the
government, the authorities, to hijack existing relations of trust in society
and to use those relations of trust in order to make predictions. Who
do we know that you also know who is going to give us a lot of information
about you?
So it is not the logic of Google or the database that we have here, so much
as it is, to remain with the technology metaphors, the logic of Facebook. Who
do we know that you also know who is going to give us a lot of information
about you, not because of some kind of algorithm that has computed that you
might be representing this or that risk category, but through these particular
relations, whether they are interpersonal relations or professional relations?
We think we will be able to anticipate the future of these suspect individuals
by getting at them through these relationships.
Let me give you a few examples. The first is the idea that Muslim
communities need to police themselves, or that the authorities can pick and
choose some Muslims who are not suspect Muslims, but who are in fact the
trusted ones. They will occupy functions like maybe the local police officer, or
the Prevent coordinator: or maybe they will be part of an NGO working in a
specific neighbourhood on countering radicalisation. These individuals will be
co-opted into the law enforcement counterterrorism logic in order to reach
those individuals who, let’s say, the white middle class policeman is not able
to reach, because they don’t trust him.
But then there is a second category of people. The first category taps into
community relations, interpersonal relations, people – say – who grew up with
each other, so that law enforcement thinks, ‘if we are able to bring one of
those people into our ranks, then we will have a key informant (like some
anthropologists would say) for our communities over there to know what is going
on’. This is recognisable as very much a colonial logic. But the other
dimension is that this trust is not confined to interpersonal relations. And
this is the second category.
There are a whole set of professions that also
operate on the basis of trust: teachers, kindergarten instructors, university
professors, doctors, lawyers… all having a certain privileged relationship with
their clients, the students, patients, general public that they work with, that
is based on trust. And indeed they depend on those trust relations as the only
possibility for them to carry out their work properly. Right? So in a way,
these are professions that have the opposite a priori relationship with
the public to the law enforcement and security professionals. A customs officer
or a policeman should be a priori suspicious of what she or he observes,
or they won’t be doing their job properly, whereas a doctor must have her or
his trusting relationship with the patient or be unable to understand what is
going on. The same goes for a teacher or a professor: you cannot create a
proper learning environment if you don’t establish a proper relationship of
trust in the classroom.
Now, what is interesting is that the logic of counter-radicalisation is to
ask those professions to go precisely against the necessities of their
profession which are to build trust, and to replace it with a logic of
suspicion. Not only are they asking the impossible, but they are asking these
people to undermine the very basis of the relationship they must have with
those they work with. I think this is really a recipe for disaster, since it
can only take us in a few directions and none of them is desirable.
Either, let’s say, the teacher decides, “OK, she or he is not qualified to
detect signs of early radicalisation or to deal with it”, and as soon as a
young boy reads the words “terrorist house” instead of “terraced house”, the
teacher had better report them to the police because “they know better.” What
that does is to completely undermine any trust the class might have in its
teacher. They will be afraid that the next time they write or say something
dodgy or suspicious, they will be reported. When you read about this in the
news, it might be funny and absurd if it wasn’t so tragic. But on a day to day
basis, how will this teacher deal with a relationship of trust that has been
entirely undermined in this classroom? This remains an open question.
I have carried out some research with some social workers here in the
Netherlands who are extremely alert to this phenomenon. Two things happen.
Either they behave like this teacher and they report, but the reporting only
works for them if nobody else can disclose the fact that they have reported a
person. A youth worker working with a group of young men from the
neighbourhoods of the Hague, for example, will tell the police, but only on
condition that the police never tells anyone that he or she is the one who has
reported that individual. So the trust relationship that she has can continue,
but on the basis of a lie. This is one way that it can work, but only by asking
the social worker to be untruthful about the relationships they establish.
What is the other outcome? The other possibility, and I have evidence of this
first hand, is for the social worker to tell the youth they work with, “Well
listen. I have to tell the police everything that you say, so don’t tell me
anything that I might have to report. We can talk about anything but that…” In
which case the whole purpose of using the trusted workers to report signs of
radicalisation is defeated because they would prefer not to listen rather than
have to report!
RB: Could you also explain the negative impact of the Prevent strategy in relation
to social and economic inequality, where assumptions regarding the cause of
radicalisation coincided with
substantial cuts in spending earmarked for developing disadvantaged
neighbourhoods, so that Prevent became one of the sole sources for funding…
Could you explain how this stigmatised the ‘suspect community’,
so that by 2010, the Communities and Local Government Cttee. of the House of
Commons was denouncing this focus as having “increased the risk” and "not
been constructive”.
FR: Well, this I think is quite specific to the UK. Community projects flagged as Prevent became one of the only sources
of funding.There might be a
manifestation of it in other countries, but we should look at the evidence
first. Because Prevent was initially based on the assumption that the recourse
to politically motivated violence was due to dire economic and social
conditions, it was deployed in local authorities through the Department of
Communities and Local Government – on the controversial basis of the percentage
of Muslim population in designated target areas. This coincided, after the
economic crisis of 2008, with important cuts in community-related spending.
Community projects flagged as Prevent became therefore one of the only sources
of funding for several NGOs, who then had to take the difficult decision
whether to accept abundant ‘counter-terrorism’ funding for their activities or
chase meagre alternative sources.
The ‘Muslim community’ here, is therefore understood as a reified,
monolithic and cohesive group which is collectively responsible for the
violence emerging from its midst, and perceived as a result to be collectively
responsible for addressing the issue. This led some to ‘tweak’ regular
community projects to match the descriptions of the funding stream (in
particular refocusing on Muslim beneficiaries), irrespective of the risk the
beneficiaries posed in terms of radicalisation. For others, this focus amounted
to pure and simple stigmatisation of the Muslim community, considered as a
suspect community composed entirely of potential terrorists.
As Paul Thomas has shown rather convincingly, for non-Muslim community
leaders, it generated frustration, as the traditional funding sources they
relied on became unavailable, and they could not claim the new ones. The
Channel mentoring programme raised similar concerns. Individuals are identified
by or referred to professionals (police, local authorities, teachers, doctors,
social workers, youth services, offender management services) who then devise a
‘support plan’ for the individual, generally through a mentoring programme.
Between 2007 and 2010, 1120 people were referred to Channel. Although
Channel is not purely targeted at young Muslims, there is a widespread feeling
in the Muslim community that regular activities such as political involvement
in peace movements or a pious religious practice, when carried out by young
Muslims, trigger unnecessary referral to the Channel programme, due to the lack
of experience of those who refer them.
RB: Do we have any idea then, what kind of chilling
effect these trust-destroying practises are having on the everyday lives of
Muslim youth in European countries, and in particular activists enjoying what
rights our democracies have to offer them ?
FR: A good example to illustrate this is the case of Rizwaan Sabir.
He was one of the two students at Nottingham University – you might remember –
who was arrested on terrorist charges for having downloaded the Al Qaeda manual
from the US Department of Justice website. He was preparing a thesis on Al
Qaeda so it made perfect sense for him to have this on his hard drive, but he
was nevertheless reported to the police and was only freed after six days of
detention. He then won a subsequent court case against East Midlands Police for
having fabricated evidence against him. There was
already a file on him.
But what is interesting about his case is that as he learned more and more
about what the police had on their files against him, it was clear that it was
not so much the terror charges that first marked him out as a potential
radical, but it was when he attended pro-Palestinian demonstrations a few years
before these events that had already placed him under surveillance. There was
already a file on him, nothing to do with terrorism, but for participating in a
march in favour of peace in Israel.
And certainly this is one of the effects of this suite of policies. Because
radicalisation is such a vague term, and because nobody knows what one sign of
radicalisation actually looks like, and frankly I don’t know what that sign
would be… everybody is working with the stereotypes they have about what
constitutes a radical. And for many, including civil servants, police officers
or maybe local intelligence services, participating in perfectly legitimate
political events which question UK’s foreign policy, or which might question
the war in Iraq or in Afghanistan, or any other topic that may not be very
palatable to the administration, or to the authorities – is considered to be a
sign of radicalisation.
Therefore, yes, I think this is an open door to all sorts of limitations on
freedom of expression, or at least, the categorisation of a perfectly regular
political activity as a form of radicalism that in the future might lead to a
possible terror attack. And this is distinctly worrying.
2003 No to Iraq march. Flickr / Vertigogen. Some rights reserved.
There is an acute and growing tension between the concern for safety and the protection of our freedoms. How do we handle this? Read more from the World Forum for Democracy partnership.