Read more… or Read more right here… »

This is in part for the reasons given by Madeleine Bunting in a Guardian article on 18 July.

First, the families of the three Leeds-based bombers were originally, in all likelihood, from Mirpur, part of Pakistani Kashmir. Mirpuris form 70% of the British Muslim population (corrected by Madeleine herself: 70% of British Pakistani muslims), and the figure is even higher in northern towns. Just as the dominant role of Saudis in 9/11 led to a spotlight on the religion and politics of Saudi Arabia, so attention will focus on Mirpur.

This rural, impoverished district provided cheap, unskilled labour for Britain in the 60s and 70s. Most immigrants were from subsistence-farming communities and had had little or no schooling. They made a huge cultural and geographical leap to settle in the UK – the dislocation is hard to imagine.

One of the things they brought with them was the perception of a long history of dispossession and marginalisation. Partition brought terrible bloodshed and the division of Kashmir between Pakistan and India. (This was the issue cited until very recently as the most pressing political priority in the UK by the majority of British Muslims.) Within Pakistan, Mirpur is to the more dominant Punjabis what the Irish have historically been to the British, explained one Mirpuri.

However, this is not quite correct, since as Juan Cole indicates the family of Shehzad Tanweer is originally from a Punjabi village near Faisalabad, Kottan.

However, Cole also points out:

Shehzad Tanweer was very angry about what he saw as the repression of the Muslims of Kashmir by Hindu India. He appears to have been recruited by a British cell of Jaish-e Muhammad. His anger about Kashmir became a foundation for anger about other issues, including the United States.

So we might conclude that Kasmir was an issue in Beeston, but it was not presumeably such an issue for Germaine Lindsay, and it may have no connection with the new ‘London cell’, at least one of whose members seems to have come from Ethiopia:

The man arrested in South Lambeth, near Stockwell, was thought to be the son-in-law of an older woman living at an address raided by police. The arrested man’s wife and young son were also led away by police, according to residents living in the same block of flats.

David Benn-Hirsch, deputy chairman of the local tenants’ association, said the older woman had lived in the flat with her family for many years. He said they were Muslims originally from Ethiopia. He added: “I know them as peaceful neighbours and I’m shocked to hear about what has happened.”

Incidentally, while I’m posting, I really can’t agree at all with this Times opinion article from Mathew Parris. His self-proclaimed purpose is “to alert you to the enormous, insidious and mostly unconscious pressure that exists to talk up, rather than talk down, the efficacy of al-Qaeda”. Actually I would say the pressures to talk up, and to talk down are probably, using language stolen unshamedly from Alan Greenspan, about neutral. Some play up, and others certainly play down. My feeling is that the bias is more towards emphasising the ‘stupidity’ of Al-qaeda, and this would be to underestimate the problem. Whatsmore, the three pieces of evidence that Parris assembles – the explosives, the ‘chemist’, the Pakistan coordinator – may well all have disappeared without trace from the headlines for good reason: the security services may well have asked for this. On the explosives, too much reporting simply lets the terrorists themselves know the stage which the investigation is at, and excessive coverage of the Egypt and Pakistan arrests (and I think both *are* still arrested) can have negative and even explosive consequences (maybe literally, look what just happened in Egypt, and certainly the remaining part of this Al-qaeda net seems to consist of what could be described as ‘desparate men’). So all I would say is, don’t worry Mathew, all these details will one day be chewed over, and over, and over, but after the investigation has reached some interim conclusions, not before. At present we are still in the ‘throes’ of July 7 (I wish I could say with any feeling of certainty the ‘last throes’).

« Hide it

Read more… or Read more right here… »

Various thoughts, not necessarily consistent with each other:

1) Running a transition country in Southeast Europe is hard and thankless work. Voters have short memories, and are constantly comparing themselves to the much wealthier countries of Central and Western Europe.

2) Even relatively rapid economic growth won’t make them happy, especially given that most of these economies contracted in the 1990s, and a lot of people are just getting back to the relative prosperity that the enjoyed 15 years ago.

3) Voters are outraged by corruption, the entrenched privileges of the new elite, and the detachment of the political class from daily realities and indignities. Since corruption and detachment are very prevalent in these countries, it’s hard for any government to get elected against the tide of popular indignation.

4) Much of the economic “growth” is going to a relatively small elite. Thus, the impressive GDP numbers conceal a sharp growth in inequality combined with stagnating living standards for much of the population.

Still… I’m no great admirer of either the Nastase or Nano governments, but they did have some real accomplishments: peace, stability, steady growth of foreign investment (albeit from a very low base). Clinching the deal on EU membership should have been a strong card for both Nastase and Saxecoburgotski. Yet all three are out of work.

Nobody else in the region has elections soon, so it’s hard to say if this is a trend or an accident.

« Hide it

Read more… or Read more right here… »

Well, one thing is clear, at face value this group seem to be somewhat less than consistent in their claims. Amongst other things they claimed responsibility for power blackouts in the US which were not in fact terrorist related. But despite the doubts, there are grounds for thinking that this group cannot be entirely dismissed: the possibility that they are using counter-information to keep us guessing might be one of them. This article has a good summary of the various hypotheses about them. In particular this part stands out:

The only proviso, of course, is the natural concern of security officials over the role of disinformation in the new cyber-conflict. The major question is how much, or if, the confusion surrounding the Abu Hafs al-Masri Brigades serves the cause of the Mujahideen…….

Is the confusion surrounding the Brigades, therefore, an elaborate double-bluff? The experience of Madrid makes it a difficult call. Last December, al-Qaeda operatives posted a 50-page manifesto, calling for attacks on countries that had allied themselves with the United States in its campaign in Iraq. [3] With elections approaching, Spain was singled out as a target country that “could not tolerate more than three attacks before deciding to withdraw from Iraq.” The longer term plan behind this focused on the belief that “the withdrawal of the Spanish or Italian forces?would serve as a huge pressure on the British presence which Tony Blair would not be able to overcome?Hence, the domino tiles would fall quickly.” In this case, their prediction was fully vindicated.

Well if the experience of Madrid makes it a difficult last call, the experience of London makes it even more so. Firstly there is the claim from the Spanish newspaper El Mundo that Spanish police identified a website posting from this group on May 29th which seemed to have given the ‘all clear’ for an attack.

Secondly the principal suspect allegedly arrested in Pakistan is a member of Jaish-e-Mohammad and who else is a member of this group, well, Daniel Pearl’s killer Ahmed Omar Saeed Sheikh, is for a start, and what would be the significance of this, well the name Abu Hafs Al Masri was the nom de guerre of Muhammad Atef, a former Egyptian police officer and chief lieutenant to bin Laden who was killed in the US bombing of Afghanistan in 2001. And who was closely associated with Atef, well Ahmed Omar Saeed was apparently.

Non of this is, of course, conclusive, but I think there are sufficient grounds accumulating for not simply dismissing this group out of hand.

« Hide it

Read more… or Read more right here… »

Written before 09/11 the book has in fact a great deal of relevance to understanding the background to the kind of fanaticism we have recently witnessed from the four London suicide bombers. Maloof’s testimony is instructive, largely because his account is autobiographical.

As one Amazon reviewer notes:

“In the Name of Identity is as close to summer reading as philosophy gets. It is a personal, sometimes even intimate, account of identity-in-the-world, not a treatise on the thorny metaphysics of identity. A novelist by trade, Amin Maalouf is a fluid writer, and he is aided by Barbara Bray’s award-winning translation. His aim is to illuminate the roots of violence and hatred, which he sees in tribalistic forms of identity. He argues that our convictions and notions of identity–whether cultural, religious, national, or ethnic–are socially habituated and frequently dangerous. We’d give them up, he argues, if we thought more closely about them.”

Thinking more closely about them, of course, is what Maalouf has himself spent many years doing.:

“A life spent writing has taught me to be wary of words. Those that seem clearest are often the most treacherous. `Identity’ is one of those false friends”

“I am posed between two countries, two or three languages, and several cultural traditions”

According to another Amazon reviewer

“One of the most important points in Maalouf’s book is that the cultural identity of human beings shifts in different phases of their lives. It is a great danger in getting to closely tied to one single side of cultural attachments, whether it is religious, ethnical or national. At the same time it is substantial to not explain everything seen in light of religion, but also connect the fact that religious, historical (by this, he means political), cultural and material circumstances influence each other mutually. Maalouf deliberates this with examples from conflicts where violence and identity cleavages work together as twin mechanisms, e.g. the Middle East, South-Africa, Rwanda and Algeria.”

Amongst these ‘shifts’, those which occur in adolesence, and during the ‘young adult’ phase, would normally be thought to be amongst the most complex and the most dangerous, as we are seeing right now.

Another reviewer puts the problem like this::

“Maalouf?s self-described task in this book is ?to try to understand why so many people commit crimes nowadays in the name of religious, ethnic, national or some other kind of identity,? how what he calls ?identities that kill? are made and sustained. His answer is simple and straightforward:

murderous identities are born of humiliation. Thus, if we want to address the problem of ethnically or religiously motivated violence, we must work to counter the conditions under which people are humiliated or denigrated for being part of some ethnic or religious or national group.”

This presents us all with a problem. Again let the reviewer explain:

“He also discusses the causal importance of what many perceive to be an American-led push toward globalization to generating a sense of humiliation, marginalization and alienation in members of non-western, non-hegemonic ethnic, religious and national groups. In what becomes, after September 11th, a rather chilling passage, he asks: ?How can they [non-westerners] not feel their identities are threatened? That they are living in a world which belongs to others and obeys rules made by others, a world where they are orphans, strangers, intruders or pariahs? What can be done to prevent some of them feeling they have been bereft of everything and have nothing more to lose, so that they come, like Samson, to pray to God for the temple to collapse on top of them and their enemies alike??

Maalouf’s solution:

“In response, he proposes what he calls a ?moral contract??a reciprocal agreement of mutual recognition between presently dominant and subordinate groups in the world, such that all people everywhere may legitimately feel that they are equal participants in the emergence of a ?common civilization,? that they are reflected in it and reflect it in turn. Within a given society, the moral contract would take the form of an agreement between members of the majority culture and those of minority cultures to treat each other as equals, and to take seriously the constitutive nature of the other?s culture. To this end, each must be prepared to give up his claim to cultural purity. Majority members must not predicate full-fledged membership on a complete abandonment by minority members of their cultural heritage; rather, they must be prepared to accept them as full members in light of?indeed, in celebration of?their cultural (or ethnic or religious) difference. For their part, members of minority cultures must be prepared to adapt, at least minimally, to the basic rules and values of the majority culture, even if this means abandoning some of their cultural practices.

It is important to notice that what Maalouf is talking about is not the kind of “laissez faire” multiculturalism which has been practised in the UK and Canada, it is a much more demanding form of inter-cultural interaction. The contract he talks of implies rights and responsibilites on both sides of the ‘cultural-divide’. Given what recent events have forcedus to recognise about what has been happening in Beeston and other parts of the Uk in recent years, perhaps a fresh look at the kind of implicit contract newcomers have been being offered at the identity level could be considered to be something which is long overdue.

« Hide it