TUESDAY OCTOBER 30 2001

US faces attack 'within a week'

FROM ROLAND WATSON IN WASHINGTON

AMERICA was braced for another terrorist outrage in the next week after the
FBI said that it had received a credible threat of an imminent attack.
John Ashcroft, the Attorney-General, said that he could not be clear about
the target or the method of attack, or whether it would be launched against
the US mainland or its interests abroad. But he sent out a warning to the
country’s 18,000 law enforcement agencies to heighten their vigilance.

Mr Ashcroft said specifically that the threat had been levelled “in the next
week”.

In a first indication of increased tension, an American Airlines Boeing 757
en route from New York to Dallas was diverted to Dulles International
Airport in the early hours of today because of a threat. All the passengers
were taken off the aircraft safely.

The FBI issued a similar security warning a month ago, placing the country
on its highest state of alert, which has remained. Rober Mueller, head of
the FBI, said that the warning may have foiled an attack.

Mr Ashcroft and Mr Mueller, making a joint appearance at the US Justice
Department, said they appreciated how frustrating such incomplete
information was, but they had decided to go public to encourage people to
report any activity they regarded as suspicious.

The warning came hours after President Bush warned the country to maintain
its guard against terrorist attacks.

Mr Bush said: “We believe that the country must stay on alert, that our
enemies still hate us. Our enemies have no values that regard life as
precious. They’re active. And therefore we’re constantly in touch with our
law enforcement officials to be prepared.”

The White House has often struggled to negotiate clearly the dividing line
between its warnings of the need for vigilance and its urgings for people to
get on with their lives. Mr Bush tried a new tack yesterday, casting the
American public as being in the front line of the home front in the war
against terrorism.

“The American people must go about their lives and I recognise it’s a fine
balance,” Mr Bush said, “but the American people also understand that the
object of any terrorist activity is to cause Americans to abandon their
lifestyles. And every American is a soldier, and every citizen is in this
fight.”

The FBI’s last public warning followed a broacast by al-Qaeda threatening
the US mainland and all American interests around the globe.

Like many of its pronouncements during recent weeks, last night’s warning
prompted more questions than it answered. Government officials said that
they had concluded the warning was “most likely” linked to the al-Qaeda
network, masterminded by Osama bin Laden, America’s No 1 suspect for the
September 11 hijackings, but Mr Ashcroft did not go so far in public.

The FBI’s initial warning of more possible terrorist attacks came before the
first anthrax case was revealed, but Mr Mueller played down a connection.
Asked if the warnings were related to anthrax, he said that he had “no
reason to believe at this point in time” that they were.

The first warning was issued via the FBI website and last night’s hastily
arranged appearance by America’s foremost justice officials to deliver the
bulletin was an indication of the urgency attached to it.

SOURCE:THE TIMES OF LONDON.


THE INDEPENDENT NEWSPAPER OF LONDON:
The media should keep asking questions until it gets some straight answers.
30 October 2001
Governments and the media have an unfortunate but time-honoured tendency to
blame each other when things are perceived to be going wrong. Now that the
American-led "war on terrorism" seems to be running into the sand, our first
instincts in the media corner are to question the intentions and competence
of our political leaders . Ministers, meanwhile, are quick to blame
journalists for their political discomfort.

Twice in as many days, the Foreign Secretary, Jack Straw, has taken the
media to task for impatience. And Mr Straw is by no means alone in feeling
that the media – especially television – has sacrificed authority and
accuracy on the altar of round-the-clock news. The proliferation of
statements, press conferences and interviews, not just on the airwaves but
in the columns of daily newspapers, all contribute to a barrage of noise
that may indeed distort parts of the picture.

Nor may Mr Straw and his fellow politicians be entirely wrong when they
accuse the media – as he did at the weekend – of a lack of "humility and
memory". But too much humility, and the media would have no opinions to
offer; too much memory, and we would no longer be reporters of news as it
happens, but chroniclers, with unrealisable ambitions of producing something
far more than the first, impressionistic draft of history.

Ministers may be disappointed and frustrated with the impatience they
observe in the media. But they must also understand where at least some of
the impatience originates. Comparisons are being drawn, on the government
side, between media dissatisfaction with the slow progress of the campaign
against terrorism, and very similar complaints voiced about the sluggishness
of the early stages of the Kosovo war. As we witnessed then, there is
nothing like victory to erase such complaints. Something similar may happen
in Afghanistan too: the sudden collapse of the Taliban or the capture of
Osama bin Laden still cannot be ruled out.

Nor should we forget how close the United States' forces came to striking
the Taliban a vital blow in the very first days of bombing. A chief aide and
the young son of the Taliban leader, Mullah Mohammed Omah, were both killed
in US attacks, while the Mullah owed his escape to political indecision in
Washington. But that failure cost the Allies dear. After three weeks of
bombing, the coalition seems no nearer to either of its objectives –
capturing Osama bin Laden or toppling the Taliban – and it is hard to see
what more is envisaged than continued strikes on a country and a people that
had little enough to destroy at the start.

It is true that officials on both sides of the Atlantic insisted from the
outset that the campaign would be long and hard, although the estimates have
grown from mere months to years; it may even take as long as the Cold War.
And we in the media may be too impatient for drama. But it is also true that
both Americans and Britons have enough experience of official versions of
military conflict to discount much of what officials say. How many times was
the airport at Port Stanley rendered unusable? How often was the US about to
dispatch its Apache helicopters to Kosovo? When the commander of the Marines
says that his troops are "not ready", is this disinformation or evidence of
transatlantic discord?

There will always be friction between governments and the media at times of
military conflict: the imperatives of the two are too different to make for
cosiness – and thank goodness for that. But in this campaign the messages
from officials have been especially blurred and contradictory. This has
raised justified questions about the precise means and objectives of the
campaign. Asking such questions is our job – and we will continue to ask,
until we are given answers.



Backyard terrorism

The US has been training terrorists at a camp in Georgia for years - and
it's still at it

George Monbiot
Tuesday October 30, 2001
The Guardian

"If any government sponsors the outlaws and killers of innocents," George
Bush announced on the day he began bombing Afghanistan, "they have become
outlaws and murderers themselves. And they will take that lonely path at
their own peril." I'm glad he said "any government", as there's one which,
though it has yet to be identified as a sponsor of terrorism, requires his
urgent attention.
For the past 55 years it has been running a terrorist training camp, whose
victims massively outnumber the people killed by the attack on New York, the
embassy bombings and the other atrocities laid, rightly or wrongly, at
al-Qaida's door. The camp is called the Western Hemisphere Institute for
Security Cooperation, or Whisc. It is based in Fort Benning, Georgia, and it
is funded by Mr Bush's government.

Until January this year, Whisc was called the "School of the Americas", or
SOA. Since 1946, SOA has trained more than 60,000 Latin American soldiers
and policemen. Among its graduates are many of the continent's most
notorious torturers, mass murderers, dictators and state terrorists. As
hundreds of pages of documentation compiled by the pressure group SOA Watch
show, Latin America has been ripped apart by its alumni.

In June this year, Colonel Byron Lima Estrada, once a student at the school,
was convicted in Guatemala City of murdering Bishop Juan Gerardi in 1998.
Gerardi was killed because he had helped to write a report on the atrocities
committed by Guatemala's D-2, the military intelligence agency run by Lima
Estrada with the help of two other SOA graduates. D-2 coordinated the
"anti-insurgency" campaign which obliterated 448 Mayan Indian villages, and
murdered tens of thousands of their people. Forty per cent of the cabinet
ministers who served the genocidal regimes of Lucas Garcia, Rios Montt and
Mejia Victores studied at the School of the Americas.

In 1993, the United Nations truth commission on El Salvador named the army
officers who had committed the worst atrocities of the civil war. Two-thirds
of them had been trained at the School of the Americas. Among them were
Roberto D'Aubuisson, the leader of El Salvador's death squads; the men who
killed Archbishop Oscar Romero; and 19 of the 26 soldiers who murdered the
Jesuit priests in 1989. In Chile, the school's graduates ran both Augusto
Pinochet's secret police and his three principal concentration camps. One of
them helped to murder Orlando Letelier and Ronni Moffit in Washington DC in
1976.

Argentina's dictators Roberto Viola and Leopoldo Galtieri, Panama's Manuel
Noriega and Omar Torrijos, Peru's Juan Velasco Alvarado and Ecuador's
Guillermo Rodriguez all benefited from the school's instruction. So did the
leader of the Grupo Colina death squad in Fujimori's Peru; four of the five
officers who ran the infamous Battalion 3-16 in Honduras (which controlled
the death squads there in the 1980s) and the commander responsible for the
1994 Ocosingo massacre in Mexico.

All this, the school's defenders insist, is ancient history. But SOA
graduates are also involved in the dirty war now being waged, with US
support, in Colombia. In 1999 the US State Department's report on human
rights named two SOA graduates as the murderers of the peace commissioner,
Alex Lopera. Last year, Human Rights Watch revealed that seven former pupils
are running paramilitary groups there and have commissioned kidnappings,
disappearances, murders and massacres. In February this year an SOA graduate
in Colombia was convicted of complicity in the torture and killing of 30
peasants by paramilitaries. The school is now drawing more of its students
from Colombia than from any other country.

The FBI defines terrorism as "violent acts... intended to intimidate or
coerce a civilian population, influence the policy of a government, or
affect the conduct of a government", which is a precise description of the
activities of SOA's graduates. But how can we be sure that their alma mater
has had any part in this? Well, in 1996, the US government was forced to
release seven of the school's training manuals. Among other top tips for
terrorists, they recommended blackmail, torture, execution and the arrest of
witnesses' relatives.

Last year, partly as a result of the campaign run by SOA Watch, several US
congressmen tried to shut the school down. They were defeated by 10 votes.
Instead, the House of Representatives voted to close it and then immediately
reopen it under a different name. So, just as Windscale turned into
Sellafield in the hope of parrying public memory, the School of the Americas
washed its hands of the past by renaming itself Whisc. As the school's
Colonel Mark Morgan informed the Department of Defense just before the vote
in Congress: "Some of your bosses have told us that they can't support
anything with the name 'School of the Americas' on it. Our proposal
addresses this concern. It changes the name." Paul Coverdell, the Georgia
senator who had fought to save the school, told the papers that the changes
were "basically cosmetic".

But visit Whisc's website and you'll see that the School of the Americas has
been all but excised from the record. Even the page marked "History" fails
to mention it. Whisc's courses, it tells us, "cover a broad spectrum of
relevant areas, such as operational planning for peace operations; disaster
relief; civil-military operations; tactical planning and execution of
counter drug operations".

Several pages describe its human rights initiatives. But, though they
account for almost the entire training programme, combat and commando
techniques, counter-insurgency and interrogation aren't mentioned. Nor is
the fact that Whisc's "peace" and "human rights" options were also offered
by SOA in the hope of appeasing Congress and preserving its budget: but
hardly any of the students chose to take them.

We can't expect this terrorist training camp to reform itself: after all, it
refuses even to acknowledge that it has a past, let alone to learn from it.
So, given that the evidence linking the school to continuing atrocities in
Latin America is rather stronger than the evidence linking the al-Qaida
training camps to the attack on New York, what should we do about the
"evil-doers" in Fort Benning, Georgia?

Well, we could urge our governments to apply full diplomatic pressure, and
to seek the extradition of the school's commanders for trial on charges of
complicity in crimes against humanity. Alternatively, we could demand that
our governments attack the United States, bombing its military
installations, cities and airports in the hope of overthrowing its unelected
government and replacing it with a new administration overseen by the UN. In
case this proposal proves unpopular with the American people, we could win
their hearts and minds by dropping naan bread and dried curry in plastic
bags stamped with the Afghan flag.

You object that this prescription is ridiculous, and I agree. But try as I
might, I cannot see the moral difference between this course of action and
the war now being waged in Afghanistan

The prime minister's real test will come if he has to break ranks with Bush

Hugo Young
Tuesday October 30, 2001
The Guardian

Tony Blair will today ask the nation to stiffen its moral fibre in the war
against terrorism. He should not need to do this. War was started by the
other side seven weeks ago. It has been fought by our side for three weeks.
If we're facing a three or four-year effort, three weeks seems a little
early to be doubting the nation's moral commitment. If the span is to be
more like 50, as the chief of the defence staff idly suggested on Friday,
then today's oration to the Welsh Assembly can only be seen as a gnat's bite
on the hide of an elephant. But there's a reason why it has to be attempted,
which tells one quite a lot about the mismatch between the two closest
allies in the anti-terrorist coalition.
In the US, there's no particle of doubt about moral fibre. America was hit.
There can barely be a sentient American in the furthest reaches of Idaho who
does not feel the inextinguishable consequences in his or her gut. The
American reaction may be primitive. It's unlikely to please fastidious
Europeans. But it will never be smoothed away. Time will not heal it. The
memory will remain the more enduring because such a thing has not happened
before. The assault on the nation's free and rich existence simply has to be
avenged. Though that word is never used, it's the one that comes closest to
fitting the sentiment that has banished all doubt from the American mind.

So there's little criticism in America, either of the campaign or, more
strikingly, of the way it's being conducted. Despite the manifest futility
of continuing to bomb Afghanistan, the president receives the benefit of the
doubt from all kinds of normally cavilling newspapers and columnists.
There's some reporting, in the up-market press, of bits of the campaign that
have gone wrong, especially the domestic part of it, the bungled response to
anthrax. Otherwise, doubts about the detailed choices the Pentagon is making
every day get buried deep inside the unsullied emotional commitment of a
nation that can name, even if it cannot find, its mortal enemy.

The moral view, in other words, unites a nation without even needing to be
spelled out. The appeal that Mr Blair will today make to Britain - that she
knows the difference between right and wrong and will always be guided by
that - applies in this case a lot more clearly to the US. Senator John
McCain, whose piece we print today, gives voice to this. He calls for an
unyielding militaristic response, regardless of allied disagreement or any
other conventional ideas. Most Americans will regard this as justified. To
get near their mind-set, one might best consider how the British would feel
if terror planes had been crashed into Canary Wharf and Big Ben.

But they weren't. That's coming to be the point. This omission weakens the
war's hold on the British gut. Most people here may regard the campaign as
being in pursuit of a cause that is not only just but necessary to life,
limb and human happiness. They want terrorism to be dealt with. But they
haven't been in the line of fire. As time passes, the cause, however right,
becomes a little more academic than it will ever be to Americans. This is
beginning to generate a certain detachment, which coexists with the
strategic pacifism that has existed in some quarters from the start. Our ICM
poll today shows support for military action softening. There's a coolness
among the people here that you will seldom find in New York or California.

The government, however, is not cool. It is not able to be cool. The crisis
has pushed Mr Blair to make the most passionate speeches of his life. Being
so much further out front than other European leaders has given him,
ministers claim, influence over President Bush. In the future, they say,
Bush could never afford to lose him and will therefore continue to hold back
from what the Brits don't like. I'm quite certain Blair has sensible
opinions, especially about the folly of continued bombing. But the enormity
of what happened to America comes into play here too. It drowns the British
voice, just as it engulfs US self-criticism. The attack bulks much larger
than anything we could say, and will appear more so the longer it is not
redressed.

This gap in national perceptions - the unequal feelings of the peoples - is
the one Mr Blair will try and bridge. It's why he's already playing the
Churchill card, even as the British sense of alarm is waning not rising. And
some developments should assist in focusing the issue. In particular, if the
bombing is replaced by more controlled if perilous land operations against
the Taliban, domestic critics will have to decide where they stand. Are they
just against the killing of civilians by ruthless and clumsy bombardment, as
they mostly claim? Or against the entire effort to neutralise al-Qaida and
do anything to terrorists anywhere except send in UN therapists with bags of
gold? Absent the bombing, all targets gone, we'll get a better measure of
the conscientious objectors.

Another aid to the prime minister's commitment is the state of the political
class. Leading the Conservative opposition is a man more completely in
fealty to Washington than he is. There'll be no trouble from across the
House if Mr Blair finds himself sunk ever deeper in George Bush's war. Quite
the opposite. But the political class aren't everything. The people, not
just the politicians, are being asked to get ready for the long haul, and
this is where Blair's support for Bush, whatever Bush feels determined to
do, can be far from guaranteed, as the weeks move into months, and the
months to years. At some stage - possibly sooner rather than later - moral
fibre will not be the issue, and popular judgment about the national
interest will take over.

The British war cabinet line is as follows. They see military action
confined to Afghanistan, and worry about how it will succeed. That's why we
get these casual, bewildering discrepancies about how long the campaign will
last. The war part, conceivably, could take a year or three: staggering
thought, both economically and strategically. The 50-year campaign, by
contrast, is meant to be a description of the political, economic and
diplomatic alliance to be forged against terrorists and their harbourers:
extraordinary prophecy, but one the British might be led to understand.

The American perspective is potentially quite different, answering America's
unique experience last month. It looks to the military option, if necessary
spread wide. As is well known, there are important men in Washington who
thirst to extend this thing to Iraq, and whom history has taught no humility
as to the chances of it succeeding let alone the chances of it getting
wholly out of control. Mr Blair's undeviating allegiance to Washington so
far is justified by the global importance of smashing al-Qaida and Bin
Laden. It should also strengthen his hand in trying to stop the US extending
the purely military campaign, and asserting his place, along with Secretary
of State Powell, as a man of realism. "Blair is one of the few grown-ups at
the table," a well-placed Washington observer told me yesterday. But it's
not hard to see a time when the moral fibre in question will be his own,
provable by his willingness to make a break.

Comparing opponents of this war to appeasers is crassly ignorant

Paul Foot
Tuesday October 30, 2001
The Guardian

The first I heard of Adam Ingram was when I spotted his name on a blacklist
leaked to me at the Daily Mirror in 1987. The list, compiled by the Economic
League, long since defunct, named "subversives" who might cause trouble if
employed. I was dismayed that my own name was not on the list and that Adam
Ingram's was. He was a newly-elected MP and seemed to have spent most of his
early political life in the not entirely subversive environment of the East
Kilbride Labour party. I protested vigorously in the Mirror about this
smear.
Now, however, Mr Ingram is minister for the armed forces, and likens those
of us who oppose the war in Afghanistan to appeasers of Hitler in the 1930s.
This theme was taken up by the government's chief whip, Hilary Armstrong, in
her historic interview with Labour MP Paul Marsden. Last week the question -
can opponents of the current war be compared to appeasers of Hitler? - was
asked on the BBC's Question Time, but none of the five panellists answered
it.

So here are one or two features about the situation in Afghanistan that seem
to distinguish it from the situation in Europe in the late 1930s, and appear
to have eluded Adam Ingram and Hilary Armstrong. By 1939, the population of
Germany had grown to 86m. The chief reason for its rapid growth was the
annexation of the Rhineland (1936), Austria (1938), Czechoslovakia (1938)
and Poland (1939). Afghanistan by contrast has a population (at most) of
25m, at least a third of whom are starving. The population figures are going
down all the time because hundreds of thousands of people are fleeing the
country. As far as I can discover, the number of countries invaded or even
threatened by Afghanistan is nil.

In 1939, Hitler and his colleagues had built the most powerful military
machine in the world on the back of one of the three largest economies in
the world. The German army had 100 divisions. In reserve, Hitler's special
forces, the SA and SS, had 1.5m members. The German Luftwaffe, only a few
planes in 1933, could take on any other air force in the world. By contrast
the Afghan armed forces rely almost entirely on third-rate weapons and
museum-piece planes stolen years ago from the Russians or donated by the
Americans.

While Hitler's forces aimed at annexation and attack, the Afghan armed
forces are absorbed in defence against opponents in a civil war. While
Hitler's armies, backed by the entire state machine of Germany, constituted
a constant threat to all neighbouring states, the Afghan army does not
threaten any other state. Indeed, the threat from Afghanistan does not come
from the state at all, but from terrorists sheltered by the state. In these
circumstances, any comparison between appeasement of Hitler in 1939 and
opposition to the war in Afghanistan is crass to the point of imbecility.

Pulverising an already pulverised country does not harm the terrorists
harboured there - it builds support for them in other impoverished
countries. It does not preserve the frightful images of September 11 - it
obscures them in daily military blunders in Afghanistan.

· The proposals of the trade secretary, Patricia Hewitt, to allow
shareholders to vote on the amount of cream dished out to fat cat directors
won't apply to this morning's annual meeting of shareholders of the big
drinks combine Diageo. Paul Walsh, the company's chief executive, sees his
basic remuneration package (salary, bonus, pension, chauffeurs, free health
etc) rise by 16% to £1.7m. But wait. What is this unobtrusive little item
tucked in under the main remuneration news? "In addition to the above
emoluments, the directors received payments and made gains under longer-term
incentive arrangements." These mystery gains cost the company £6.7m,
compared to £2.4m last year, an increase of 277%.

Paul Walsh was in the money once more. He got £2.1m (only £370,00 the
previous year). All in all, Mr Walsh got a fantastic £3.9m. Most of these
mighty increases were ascribed to something called TSR and something else
called Sepsos, variations on the old Tory theme of share options, handed out
by directors to themselves, bought cheap and sold dear. How did the 71,000
Diageo workers do in the same period? Wages and salaries were slightly up -
1.8% - but their "aggregate remuneration" fell, from £1,612m last year to
£1,605m.

None of Patricia Hewitt's proposals would have made the slightest difference
to any of this. Shareholders are not inclined to vote against their bosses.
But if it wanted to, the government could easily slim down the fat cats. A
100% income tax on annual income of more than £500,000 would be a start, and
might even build a few hospitals into the bargain.


Britain's hidden history

Reclaiming little-known stories of 500 years of black presence in this
country is an education for all of us

Lola Young
Tuesday October 30, 2001
The Guardian

In the early 1980s, a friend and I visited a school in north London as "role
models" for black children and to deliver a message: "You have a history,
not just in Africa or the Caribbean but here in Britain. It is a history
that goes back to Roman times, and there are individuals about whom you
should know more."
We talked about Mary Seacole, the Jamaican "doctress" who offered to help
Florence Nightingale tend the sick and wounded at Sebastopol during the
Crimean war: a woman who, after being rejected by Nightingale, used her own
resources to set up a hospital at the front, and whose funeral in London in
1881 was a major public event. After the talk, we became aware of
incredulous looks from the kids. One eventually spoke: "You made this up to
make us feel better, didn't you? If it was true, why haven't our teachers
told us about it? There's not been anything on TV about this woman. I don't
believe you!"

Though hardly a household name, Seacole's achievements have now been
acknowledged through television, radio and literary biographies, and
commemorated with a blue plaque on one of the places in London where she
lived. But what about the other black people - writers, actors, political
activists, artists, doctors, inventors and artisans - who have made their
mark on the cultural and political life of Britain since at least the 16th
century?

Shortly after that encounter with the sceptical schoolboy, I came across the
story of Sarah Baartman, a South African woman abducted from her home in
1810 and brought to London, Manchester and Paris. She was put on display,
semi-naked, in freak shows and examined by scientists of the day. After her
death in Paris at the age of 25, she was dissected and her genitalia and
other body parts put on display in the Musee de l'Homme in Paris. She gained
notoriety during the l9th century as a representative of all that was
different and deviant from the norm, in sexual and racial terms. I was
intrigued by the way in which her physical shape (she had what were
considered to be grossly extended buttocks) was used by 19th-century
scientists to demonstrate the inferiority of the African "race".

But there was something else that got to me. During the five years when she
was displayed around Europe, she was written about, drawn in cartoons,
became the subject of a play, was referred to in a court case and the House
of Commons - and yet hardly anyone today knows about her significance in
19th-century abolitionist struggles or in the development of "scientific"
racism. Many people still grow up believing black people first arrived in
Britain in the 1950s - and they are not even quite sure how and why they
came here even then.

Doubtless there are millions for whom the significance of October in the
calendar of black British life is a mystery. But in case you thought that
the notion of black history is one confined to the US or black nationalist
militants, October is black history month - and after two decades it is
really taking off, with a huge amount of activity around the country. The
exclusion from our educational system of black contributions to the
mainstream of British history encourages white people to think of us as
being without a history or heritage. At the same time, it is also a source
of alienation and disaffection among young black people in particular, but
also for the post-Windrush generation in general. Sadly, much historical
evidence of black peoples' presence in Britain over the last 500 years or so
has been lost. The imperative now is to collect, document, preserve and
display what remains.

By bringing such evidence to the attention of black people hungry for more
knowledge of their past, and to white people who may think they already know
about theirs, black history month can make an important contribution to the
understanding of how and why history gets made in the forms it does. Of
course, on its own, a more complete knowledge of these many hidden histories
cannot cure racism or ignorance. But it can help make people think before
taking on a misty-eyed view of Britain as an all-white nation since time
began.

Some aspects of our histories are painful: slavery and colonialism are
obvious examples. But we cannot expect to move forward and develop more
effective ways of engaging with "cultural diversity" without acknowledging
the past and recognising the tensions and contradictions that are a part of
historical events and processes.

For me, black history month is not about saying that there are two - or more
- histories defined by racial or cultural identity. After all, we are
talking about all our histories, not just those of black peoples. It's a
strategy to raise awareness, and disseminate information about the rich
texture of British history. It's a necessary adjunct to research that
reveals the evidence for interconnectedness of historical narratives and
recognises the extent to which we are all in the business of making history.

· Lola Young is project director at the Archives and Museum of Black
Heritage and professor of cultural studies at Middlesex University.

TUESDAY OCTOBER 30 2001

Rage of Luton Muslims

THERE is a terrible, visceral rage among Luton’s young Muslim brotherhood, a
fury so powerful that already dozens of men, all British born and highly
educated, have disappeared to fight for the Taleban. It has left parents
terrified, the town’s mosques full of loathing and yesterday, as The Times
discovered first-hand, seen journalists and photographers physically
attacked.
Afzal Munir, 25, a newly married business graduate and one of two men from
the Bedfordshire town killed in a US rocket attack on Kabul, worshipped at a
one-room radical mosque situated in the Call To Islam Bookshop, above an
insurance shop in the Dunstable Road. Within a minute of arriving outside
the mosque, this Times reporter and cameraman were set upon by a Muslim man,
who had rushed, enraged, from a halal butcher shop.

“You insult Islam, you corrupt Islam!” he screamed, smashing the camera to
the ground and grabbing another photographer by the throat. “You don’t
understand how angry we Muslims are!” Five other Muslim men joined him,
surrounding us, as he demanded the other camera. Their sense of fury was
frightening.

Five hundred yards away, outside Luton’s Central Mosque, the third largest
in the country, Mohammed Abdullah, a 22-year-old accountant, articulated
this rage. His words should serve as a warning to Geoff Hoon, the Defence
Secretary, who yesterday said British men joining the Taleban would either
die in Afghanistan or face prosecution if they returned here.

“They want to die there,” Mr Abdullah said. “These are well-educated people.
They have families. I knew Afzal. He loved his wife. But you must
understand: all Muslims in Britain view supporting the jihad (holy war) as a
religious duty. All of us are ready to sacrifice our lives for our beliefs.I
am jealous of Afzal. He has reached paradise.”

He continued: “There are people leaving all the time. Not just in Luton, but
all over Britain. We, as Muslims, don’t perceive ourselves as British
Muslims. We are Muslims who live in Britain. All we want to do is go to
Afghanistan to defend the honour and sanctity of Islam. I have a wife who is
eight months pregnant. But I am thinking of going and helping my Muslim
brothers. I read that we are brainwashed. That is nonsense. We are
intelligent people and we hate America and the British Government for the
bombing.”

Behind such talk, which dismays the elderly leaders of Luton’s 22,000
Muslims, lurk the seductive, articulate disciples of Sheikh Omar Bakri
Muhammad, leader of al-Muhajiroun, the British Islamist organisation that
encouraged Mr Munir and Aftab Manzoor, the other dead man, to join the
jihad. Sheikh Omar, who is under investigation for allegedly issuing a fatwa
against the Pakistan President, General Musharraf, described the two men as
“martyrs beyond a doubt”. Shahed, the group’s Luton leader, admits that he
urged the pair to join Osama bin Laden’s jihad — but not “physically” — by
donating money.

“But if we write about issues, about what is happening to our brothers in
Palestine, it can excite people. If I see Tony Blair on TV, and listen to
his hypocrisy over Palestine, I want to grab his throat.”

The group has been causing problems in Luton since 1994, when Sheikh Omar
and his followers tried to take over control of the Central Mosque. It, and
other extremist organisations, now recruit outside the town’s 50-odd
mosques.

Targeting the young, they repeat, again and again, that all obedient Muslims
must support bin Laden and his holy war. They are banned from the Central
Mosque and the university campus, but Mr Munir attended their Friday
meetings. He went to school and college locally, loved cricket and football,
and three weeks ago disappeared without telling his wife where he was going.

“He was a quiet, extremely religious boy,” Mohammed Sulaimen, president of
the Central Mosque, said. “All parents are worried. Many have gone to join
the Taleban, perhaps dozens. Afzal, he took his passport, some money, and he
goes. This group, it keeps taking people, brainwashing them. They give them
these pamphlets. It makes them angry. But what can we do? We can’t stop them
going.”

Syed, a community worker, has visited Muslim communities across the country.
“They are disappearing all over Britain. They say they are going down to the
shops, and never return,” he said.

Shahed and supporters set up a stall in central Luton yesterday, chanting
anti-American slogans and carrying banners.

“The Devil is America, and the British Government,” said Abdullah Khan, 23.
“It is Bush and Blair I blame for Muslims going to fight. They are being
provoked to do it by those two Great Satans.”


SOURCE:THE TIMES OF LONDON 30/10/01


With the very best of good wishes,
Musa Amadu Pembo
Glasgow,
Scotland
UK.
[log in to unmask]
May Allah,Subhana Wa Ta'Ala,guide us all to His Sirat Al-Mustaqim (Righteous
Path).May He protect us from the evils of this life and the hereafter.May
Allah,Subhana Wa Ta'Ala,grant us entrance to paradise .. Ameen


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