Re: You forgot "E. Gustave Jaeger"
No,I didn't: somehow your "E Option" is included in "A"...
The Making Of Terrorists And Dissidents: Europe's New War On The Third World
In recent months, we have seen newspapers across Europe
popularising the theme that immigration=criminality=terrorism. The release to the media of crime statistics by the police has encouraged this racist stereotyping. The Greek press used figures put out by the public order minister in February on the crime rate of different 'foreigner' groups to justify the rounding up of hundreds of Albanians for immediate expulsion. Amsterdam police figures, seeking to prove that youth from Surinam and the Antilles are disproportionately involved in street crime, led to stories in the press about the possibility of 'LA-style race riots' in Holland.
The link between the police, racialist crime statistics, media criminalization and politics is most palpable in Norway, where police released statistics this year attempting to prove that 'immigrants' are over-represented in crimes of violence, rape, assault and robbery. Against a backdrop of media scare stories, and with a general election pending, the Norwegian mainstream parties have attempted to out-bid each other in calls for new measures to
deport 'criminal immigrants'. The far-right Progress Party has argued that every refugee and asylum seeker should be considered a criminal unless the opposite can be proved.
Police-Fed 'Terrorist' Stories
The police are also developing links with particular newspapers in order to plant rumours about possible 'terrorist' threats. In october 1992, the Italian daily, Il Giornale, ran a series of stories, based on police briefings, which claimed that poor, Third World immigrants and refugees were likely recruits for far-left terrorist organisations.
Also in October, Paul Charman wrote an alarmist feature for London's Evening Standard on 'How world extremists set up havens in London'. Included in his 'Guide to the angry factions who could be your neighbour' (illustrated with snapshots of so-called terrorist hide-outs and their addresses) were the Kurdish Workers' Association, the Tamil Tigers, Shining Path, British Sikhs, PLO, Troops Out, ANC, and (presumably as a sop to journalistic balance) Blood and Honour.
Changing Europe's Security Concerns
But why are the police and intelligence experts feeding scare stories to a willing press now? According to Tony Bunyan, editor of the counter-information bulletin Statewatch: "The stories appearing in Europe's press merely reflect the issues raised by the security services and the police in the secret European policing forum TREVI (which stands for terrorism, radicalism, extremism and international violence). The concerns of the security services reflect the geo-political interests of the new Euro-state".
Tony Bunyan says that, since the gulf war, the military and intelligence services of Europe have been priming themselves for new fields of operation. "It is no longer the Soviet threat and, internally, the threat from Communists that concerns western governments; instead they are directing their resources towards the Third World, towards those countries who do not accept the 'New World Order'".
MI5 sits on TREVI, and its associated sub-committee the "police working group on terrorism', in which the European states are working on a common intelligence database on refugees, asylum-seekers, visa entrants and Third World migrants settled within the EC. Hence, behind one of the most obnoxious proposals in Britain's new Asylum Bill - the compulsory fingerprinting of all refugees - lies the hidden hand of TREVI.
Turning Refugees Into A Political Threat
Third World refugees within 'Fortress Europe' are considered
'dissidents' twice over. First, they are 'dissidents' of the regimes they have fled from. Then, with Europe increasingly making allies of authoritarian regimes in the Third World, opponents of those regimes within Fortress Europe become Europe's 'dissidents' also, a fifth column, the enemy within. And a whole new range of measures which go beyond mere surveillance, is being introduced to criminalise them.
In 1987, the German and Swedish police carried out a series of raids on Kurdish targets, denouncing them collectively as terrorists. And to this day, the Swedish security police periodically put out stories blaming Kurds for the murder of the Swedish prime minister, Olaf Palme. Ismet Celiphi, accused of the murder (and other unspecified terrorist offenses), was forbidden to leave his municipality from 1987 to September 1991, when the Supreme Court ruled the order unconstitutional. His lawyers have never seen the evidence against him. Celiphi complains of telephone bugging and police harassment that has destroyed his life and that of his family.
After large-scale police operations in Switzerland against Kurds accused of plotting to assassinate the Turkish ambassador, detailed information on individual Kurds is said to have found its way into the hands of the Turkish embassy. (The Turkish army was the largest client of the Swiss arms industry.)
Show Trials
In October 1992, the Swiss government published a report on
"Extremism in Switzerland". Although instigated by neo-nazi attacks on refugee hostels, the report dismissed the far Right as a diminishing problem and went on to list foreigners, exile, refugee and left groups as the main danger to the state.
But even before this, a show trial against Turkish-Kurdish refugees had, according to the Swiss organisation 'Komitee Schluss mit dem Schnuffelstat' (Committee to End the Prying State) exposed the security concerns of the state. On January 14, 1992, riot police raided the Bern office of the socialist Turkish-Kurdish journal Mucadele, arresting 26 people, including women and children. The raid was accompanied by a press campaign in the Blick newspaper (the Swiss equivalent to the Sun) that accused Mucadele of orchestrating crime to fund terrorism, and of running an
extortion racket.
At a special press briefing, the Swiss public prosecutor said that "the police had received clear information that Mucadele was blackmailing people to give money to Devrimci Sol" (a Turkish communist organization), further implying that those arrested were involved in drugs trafficking.
In December 1992, five handcuffed prisoners were led into
court, while defence solicitors and journalists were searched for weapons. But the only clear picture to emerge at this political show-trial was of a police frame-up, aided and abetted by a compliant media.
Police evidence was derisory. When asked where he got his evidence from, one policeman replied the paper Schweizerseit (a bastion of the conservative right); another cited the Blick. And when the federal Attorney's office was called to give evidence on the ideological and terrorist background of Mucadele, a note was sent saying that "special information respecting Mucadele and special knowledge of Devrimci Sol activists does not exist at our offices". The case against the Mucadele 5 collapsed.
"It is very likely that the Turkish secret service is
attempting to dry up the sources of financial support from Europe that would finance organisations like Devrimci Sol", says Christine Rumpeth, a Turkish specialist at the Max Planck Institute. She believes that the Turkish secret service, MIT, had a hand in the Mucadele case, and also cites incidents from Germany where MIT was known to be collecting information on exiles.
Expulsion
Across Europe, there are attempts to expel individuals on grounds of 'national security'. In such cases those accused of terrorist offenses have no chance of answering the evidence against them in open court. Here, where the Home office reserves the right to withhold information of the grounds of 'national security', a Sikh and a Peruvian refugee are presently under threat of deportation in such circumstances.
Two Palestinians were expelled from Sweden last December after a special court pronounced them to be members of Abu Nidal's group. The Palestinians - one of whom had lived in Sweden for a number of years and whose family had settled there - vehemently denied the charge, but both were refused the right to present their case in open court. The Swedish government is now considering bringing in a new law to make it easier to refuse entry to those believed to be a threat to its 'security laws'.
In September 1992, Omar Tariq, who had lived in Italy for
nearly 10 years and was president of the Milan-based Union of Muslim Students, was served with an expulsion order and immediately deported to Jordan. The Union of Islamic Communities condemned the 'total absence of any real motivation for the expulsion'.
Conventions and laws governing extradition state that no refugee can be returned to his or her country or origin if s/he fears persecution or if his or her offence was clearly political. Clearly, these rights of refugees and exiles are being whittled away. But if, in the cases cited above, the state has had to announce its case against the accused (even as it withholds its evidence), a second category of expulsion, affecting workers from Algeria, Morocco, Tunisia and Turkey, is taking place even more surreptitiously.
Agreements between the EC and these 'buffer zone' countries
promise preferential terms of trade in return for the EC countries being able to return any refugee who travels through these countries back to them. The agreements have meant closer cooperation between the police and the security services of the EC and Maghreb. For example, when Tunisian W. Bennani arrived at a Belgian airport claiming political asylum, his application was refused point-blank because of the intervention of the Tunisian police, and in line with a Belgo-Tunisian convention on mutual juridical assistance.
Most horrifying of all is the case of Abdennacer Ben Yussef,
a metal worker living with his wife and children in Parma, Italy, who just disappeared without a trace. Because he had gone to the local police station to renew his residence permit, his pregnant wife went to the station to find out where he was. Although held and questioned, she was told nothing. Weeks later she found out that Ben Yussef - who had no criminal record and had never been a member of any Tunisian opposition group (he was a member of the perfectly legal Union of Tunisian Immigrant workers) - had been expelled from Italy to Tunisia (where he was imprisoned and
tortured) on the grounds of 'national security'.
Ben Yussef has since managed to escape from Tunisia. His case has been taken up by Amnesty International and the civil rights group Senza Confine.
Additional information from Migration Newssheet, Statewatch and the bulletin of the Institute of Race Realtions European Race Audit.
(Campaign Against Racism And Fascism - May/June 1993)
Buffer Zones
The EC has recently signed 'Association Agreements' with the
countries on its eastern borders - Poland, Hungary, Czeckoslovakia, Romania, and Bulgaria. Like long-standing agreements with Turkey, Morocco, Algeria and Tunisia, they give a measure of preferential trade and, in some cases, offer limited opportunities for work in EC countries. In exchange, the border countries have been forced to sign parallel agreements which make them the border policemen of
Europe. Under these:
* Special prisons in Morocco hold Africans suspected of wanting to
travel illegally to Europe.
* 2,500 Moroccan troops patrol the Moroccan coast to ensure that
refugees and immigrants are not smuggled to Spain in small fishing
boats.
* Thousands of rejected Third World and eastern European refugees
are held in prison camps in Hungary.
* Visitors to Poland (from, for example, Russia) need written
invitations, and thousands are excluded. Many more are detained to prevent them from crossing the Oder river into Germany.
* Helicopters, sea patrols, night-vision aids and electronic
surveillance are all part of a package of strengthened external border controls discussed at a conference in Budapest in February 1993, attended by ministers from 33 European countries.
(CARF - May/June 1993) |
