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26th November 2007 Published in JAPAN TIMES
Article for The Japan Times
By David Howell
Liberty versus Security – The Growing Dilemma
LONDON- The Director-General of the British Security Services (known as MI5) has
been telling the world that there are at least 2000 people inside the UK who are
involved in terrorism-related activities, and there may be many more.
Or it put it crudely, there are at least 2000 individuals bent on killing
innocent British people as they go about their daily business.
What can be done about this? Can a free society ever protect itself against
determined bombers – especially the suicide variety – and still stay free?
The answer is ‘only to a very limited extent’. Free means open, and open means
exposed and vulnerable to anyone who walks into the street, the shop, the
railway station, the airport or the market, or anywhere where people congregate,
armed and ready to kill, and ready to blow himself, or herself, up in the
process.
Some preventative steps can of course be taken. On the ground security guards
can be posted , police and surveillance teams can keep track of terrorist
suspects and hope they have not missed anybody. Shops, offices and all public
institutions can all upgrade their security arrangements, as the venerable
Palace of Westminster has now done, making it almost, although not totally,
impossible for legislators to get in and out easily. And the public can be
continuously warned to stay on the alert and report suspicions .
Intensive and prolonged searches of all baggage at airports have already taken
all the joy out of flying, and now it is even proposed that similar searches
should be carried out at railway stations. No-one has explained how to cope with
the ensuing chaos, nor whether the resulting long queues might not offer an even
juicier terrorist target.
At the government level the systems of legal administration and enforcement can
be , and are being , toughened up. An intense debate at Westminster turns on how
long terrorist suspects can be held imprisoned without trial. This touches on
the most ancient of English liberties – habeas corpus – that no man shall be
unlawfully detained without trial. Currently the limit is 28 days. Now the
Government want to extend it to 56 days.
Yet in the end all these measures, however draconian, are only treating the
symptoms of terror. The causes and roots lie elsewhere, and it is these that
have to be tackled.
Is it therefore a question of tougher border controls so that would-be killers
can be kept out of a country like the UK? The problem is that the UK, like
Japan, is an island, or a group of islands, with countless entry and exit
points, legal and illegal. What makes matters infinitely worse in the UK’s case
is that under European treaty obligations every single citizen of every EU
member state is now entitled to come and go as he or she wishes.
Arrivals from the more recent member states in Central and Eastern Europe have
been streaming into Britain, some to stay and work, and staff up the country’s
booming service economy, some for more sinister purposes, and some to disappear
into the illegal underworld.
The net effect is that control of entry into the UK – a difficult enough task
already – now means controlling the whole border rim of the European Union – a
completely impossible task.
Besides, many of the 2000 dangerous suspects already in the UK may not be
newcomers or immigrants at all. They may be the children or grandchildren of
people who came to the country generations ago. All four of the suicide bombers
who slaughtered 53 Londoners in July 2005 were British born and bred and carried
British passports.
So the real roots of terror lie elsewhere. First and foremost they lie in the
mind. Even if every entry avenue is blocked, information technology ensures that
the blood-curdling messages of terror can get directly through and the demands
of a perverted Islam can be instantly passed along the Al-Qaeda networks into
the belief systems of gullible youngsters in every country.
Via the mosques in particular, so it has been shown, the word of violence can
be, and is being, distributed, glorifying murder and promising rewards , if not
on earth, then in heaven.
The British security chiefs believe that the main external sources of the poison
currently are Pakistan, Somalia, Afghanistan and Iraq, with Iran also feeding
and encouraging terrorist activism and enjoying the discomfort and concern of
the advanced world.
With the exception of Iran itself, all these countries are in chaos , turmoil
and virtual civil war .In all of them warped Islamic extremism has long been
pushing aside Islamic moderation and realism.
Pessimists believe this state of affairs will continue for generations and
decades, even centuries, and that it will get worse. But for the less fatalist
and gloomy here is an anecdote which suggests otherwise.
A young Iranian student was explaining how he was compelled to attend bi-weekly
indoctrination classes with his friends to understand how to hate the West and
destroy Islam’s supposed enemies. What, he was asked, did he learn? The answer
was very little. He and his class mates spent all their time exchanging text
messages on their mobiles, joking about the teachers and the propaganda and
rubbish they were pouring out.
Now there, surely, is hope. Ridicule and the mobile phone may yet prove to be
the best friends of reason, freedom and peace. If the bombers and their violent
tutors and propagators of hate can be put back in their box marked cranks,
criminals and psychopaths, and if their own societies can reject them then we
will all breathe more freely and keep more of our liberties. As a younger
generation grows, woven together world-wide by the marvels of the micro-chip, it
could yet happen that way.
Ends
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