War On The Third World

Those of us who opposed the bombing of Afghanistan warned that the war betweennations would not stop there. Now, as Tony Blair prepares the British people foran attack on Iraq, the conflict seems to be proliferating faster than most of uspredicted. But there is another danger, which we have tended to neglect: that ofescalating hostilities within the nations waging this war. The racial profilingwhich has become the unacknowledged focus of America's new security policy is indanger of provoking the very clash of cultures its authors appear to perceive.

Yesterday's Guardian told the story of Adeel Akhtar, a British Asian man whoflew to the United States for an acting audition. When his plane arrived at JFKairport in New York, he and his female friend were handcuffed. He was taken to aroom and questioned for several hours. The officials asked him whether he hadfriends in the Middle East, or knew anyone who approved of the attacks onSeptember 11. His story will be familiar to hundreds of people of Asian orMiddle Eastern origin.

I have just obtained a copy of a letter sent last week by a 50-year-oldBritish Asian woman (who doesn't want to be named) to the US immigrationservice. At the end of January, she flew to JFK to visit her sister, who issuffering from cancer. At the airport, immigration officials found that on aprevious visit she had overstayed her visa. She explained that she had beenhelping her sister, who was very ill, and had applied for an extension. When theofficers told her she would have to return to Britain, she accepted theirdecision but asked to speak to the British consul.

They refused her request, but told her she could ring the Pakistani consulateif she wished. She explained that she was British, not Pakistani, as herpassport showed. The guards then started to interrogate her. How many languagesdid she speak? How long had she lived in Britain? They smashed the locks on hersuitcases and took her fingerprints. Then she was handcuffed and chained andmarched through the departure lounge. "I felt like the guards were paradingme in front of the passengers like their prize catch. Why was I put inhandcuffs? I am a 50-year-old housewife from the suburbs of London. What threatdid I pose to the safety of the other passengers?"

Last week, a correspondent for the Times found 30 men and a woman camped in asqualid hotel in Mogadishu, in Somalia. They were all African-Americans ofSomali origin, who had arrived in the US as babies or children. Most wereprofessionals with secure jobs and stable lives. In January, just after therelease of Black Hawk Down (the film about the failed US military mission inSomalia), they were rounded up. They were beaten, threatened with injections andrefused phone calls and access to lawyers. Then, a fortnight ago, with nocharges made or reasons given, they were summarily deported to Somalia. Now,without passports, papers or money, in an alien and frightening country, theyare wondering whether they will ever see their homes again.

All these people are victims of a new kind of racial profiling which the USgovernment applies but denies. The US attorney general has called for some 5,000men of Arab origin to be questioned by federal investigators. Since September11, more than 1,000 people who were born in the Middle East have been detainedindefinitely for "immigration infractions".

The Council on American-Islamic Relations has recorded hundreds of recentinstances of alleged official discrimination in the US. Muslim women have beenstrip-searched at airports, men have been dragged out of bed at gunpoint in themiddle of the night. It reports that evidence which remains shielded from thesuspect, of the kind permitted by the recent US Patriot Act, "has been usedalmost exclusively against Muslims and Arabs in America". In the US, peopleof Middle Eastern and Asian origin are now terrorist suspects. Some officialsappear to regard them as guilty until proven otherwise.

Similar policies appear to govern the judicial treatment of detainees. Duringhis press conference on December 28, President Bush initially misunderestimateda question, and provided a revealing answer. "Have you decided," hewas asked, "that anybody should be subjected to a military tribunal?"Bush replied, "I excluded any Americans." The questioner pointed outthat he meant to ask whether Bush had made any decisions about the captives inGuantanamo Bay. But what the president had revealed was that the differentialtreatment of those foreign fighters and John Walker Lindh, the "AmericanTalib" currently being tried in a federal court in Virginia, is not anaccident of process, but policy. He couldn't treat a white American like thecaptives in Camp X-ray and expect to get away with it.

These attitudes pre-date the attack on New York. Patterns of GlobalTerrorism, a document published by the US counter-terrorism coordinator inApril, appears to define international terror as violence directed at UScitizens, US commercial interests or white citizens of other nations. Non-whitesare the perpetrators of terror, but not its victims.

In Angola, for example, the "most significant incident" in the year2000 was the kidnapping of three Portuguese construction workers by rebels. Themurder of hundreds of Angolan civilians is unrecorded. In Sierra Leone,terrorism, the report suggests, has afflicted only foreign journalists, aidworkers and peacekeepers. In Uganda, the Lord's Resistance Army's appears tohave done nothing but kidnap and murder Italian missionaries. The DemocraticRepublic of Congo, where terror sponsored by six African states has led to thedeaths of some 3m people, isn't mentioned. Yet domestic terrorism in the UnitedKingdom and Spain is covered at length.

There is, of course, vicious racism on other sides as well. Bin Ladenthreatened a holy war against Jews. The men who kidnapped the journalist DanielPearl forced him to announce that he was a Jew before cutting his throat. I havelost count of the emails I've received from Pakistan and the Middle East,claiming that 4,000 Jews were evacuated from the World Trade Centre before theattacks.

This makes security policies based on racial discrimination even moredangerous. By treating non-white people as if they are the natural enemies ofthe US, the government could generate conflict where there was none before. Atthe same time this policy establishes splendid opportunities for terrorists withwhite skins, as they become, to the eyes of officials, all but invisible.

This is the morass into which Tony Blair is stepping. "These are notpeople like us," he said of the Iraqi leadership on Sunday. "They arenot people who abide by the normal rules of human behaviour." Some wouldargue that this quality establishes their kinship with British ministers. But topersuade us that we should go to war with Iraq, Blair must first make itsleaders appear as remote from ourselves as possible.

The attack on Iraq, when it comes, could in a sense be the beginning of athird world war. It may, as hints dropped by the US defence secretary, DonaldRumsfeld, suggest, turn out to be the first phase of a war involving manynations. It may also become a war against the third world, and its diaspora inthe nations of the first.

(George Monbiot is Honorary Professorat the Department of Politics in Keele and Visiting Professor at the Departmentof Environmental Science at the University of East London and the author of CaptiveState: the corporate takeover of Britain, and the investigative travel booksPoisoned Arrows, Amazon Watershed and No Man's Land. He writes a weekly columnfor the Guardian, UK)