02.06.2004

Defend Abu Hamza's citizenship

Today, an islamic cleric. Tomorrow, progressives and socialists. No matter how despicable his politics, communists should never support the censorship of 'suspect' minorities, argues Ian Donovan

The arrest of Abu Hamza al-Misri poses some complex questions for communists. The ultra-islamist cleric, who formerly preached at Finsbury Park mosque, faces various charges of terrorism and hostage-taking, as well as allegedly aiding al Qa'eda and the Taliban. He also faces potential extradition to the United States, and, in a separate case, being stripped of his acquired British citizenship and possibly deported to his native Yemen, where the hostage-taking took place.

Hamza is, out of his own mouth, a reactionary advocate of indiscriminate mass terror against civilians on an international scale, and a die-hard enemy of the working class and of progressive forces everywhere. He implicitly welcomed the September 11 suicide-hijacking attacks on (mainly) the civilian population of the United States.

His mosque was the place where such fanatic suicide terrorists as Richard Reid, the man who tried to blow up a trans-Atlantic airliner with a bomb hidden in his shoe, and Zacharias Moussaoui, the so-called '20th hijacker', who is alleged to have missed participating in the 9/11 atrocities only because of an inconvenient arrest, were nurtured politically. Hamza's sermons are said to have provided their inspiration.

Abu Hamza is of course a hate-figure for the tabloid press - indeed someone who revels in his own notoriety with something of the showman about him, as many have noted. He boasts that he gained his trademark disabilities (he has a false eye and a hook in place of his right hand) fighting the USSR in Afghanistan in the 1980s. More to the point is that during his Afghan period, and for a considerable number of years after, he was regarded by many as probably a CIA asset himself. As of course was his co-thinker, Osama bin Laden. Abu Hamza is now incarcerated in Belmarsh top-security prison in south east London.

Looking at these bare facts abstractly, one would think that class-conscious workers and progressives would have no more reason to quarrel with his incarceration than we would question the jailing of the likes of David Copeland, London's fascist nail-bomber of 1999. If, like Copeland, there is real evidence against him that could stand up before a jury, he would no more deserve any defence than this Nazi killer. He is undoubtedly of a similar ilk in many ways.

However understandable such a reaction may be from many people, including among immigrants of muslim origin who regard Abu Hamza's ravings as a provocation of violence and prejudice against their entire communities, one has to be very cautious about letting the state incarcerate even reactionaries like Hamza without proof. And we must firmly oppose the attempt by the British state to deprive him of his British citizenship. Not out of any consideration for Hamza, but simply because such an action is a potential danger to anyone the British state considers inimical to its interests in the future.

Powers being used against Hamza were taken by home secretary David Blunkett as part of a legal shake-up that exploited fears of terrorism to whittle away at such rights as the inviolability of one's citizenship, allowing foreign-born people to be stripped of their British citizenship and deported. It is not difficult to imagine such draconian measures being used as part of some future witch-hunt against leftwing or progressive political movements to punish 'subversives'. 

Hamza is appealing against the removal of his British passport to the European Court of Human Rights; this aspect of his case, at least, deserves the wholehearted support of socialists and progressives. While the individual appellant may be odious, such a legal victory would be very important in protecting British citizens of overseas origin against the arbitrary removal of citizenship.

It appears that the evidence that the Bush administration is using to back up its demand for Hamza's extradition comes from a British internee, Feroz Abassi, held in Guantanamo Bay for the past couple of years and subjected to solitary confinement and interrogation four times a day; and an American, one James Ujaama, who was himself facing terrorism charges worth up to 25 years in jail, but has had his prospective sentence reduced to a mere two years in return for providing evidence against Hamza. 

The British government, in keeping with its acceptance of European human rights legislation that forbids judicial executions, has obtained agreement from the US that Hamza will not face the death penalty as a condition for processing his extradition.

With both of these erstwhile witnesses, the potential for coercion and the strong possibility of fraudulent testimony are obvious. However, in my view, it is impossible to proclaim in advance that the accusations against Abu Hamza are simply false. Given the reactionary and vile nature of the accusers, and the similarly vile nature of the accused, you could almost flip a coin on that one. However, the workers' movement must be vigilant against the kind of fraudulent testimony that could simply be used to stitch up Hamza, and whisk him off to some life-long incarceration in a US penitentiary.

It must do so, again, not out of concern for Hamza per se, but because of the potential for injustice to other, less vocal people - those without Hamza's big mouth and talent for self-publicity. Whether muslims or other 'suspect' minorities, all kinds of progressive people could easily be caught in the web of a US incarceration machine that (along with its British 'cousins' of course), has already, from Abu Ghraib to Guantanamo Bay, in the words of one US politician, erected a 'new gulag'.

In such circumstances, the defence of civil liberties - and particularly those of vulnerable minorities and migrant communities - must be the priority of the left and the working class, when we consider cases like that of the turbulent cleric of Finsbury Park.