Racism in the air

Asian travellers are being searched for 'terror signs' in Britain's covert racial profiling

Hasan Suroor in London

The danger of relentlessly targeting one ethnic group is that besides reinforcing racial and ethnic prejudice it can alienate the very people whose cooperation is needed to fight terrorism.

DISCRIMINATION: What do a British Member of European Parliament (MEP), an airline pilot and two university undergraduates have in common except that they are all British? Until a few weeks ago, if someone were to ask this question an instant response would have been: "They are all Asians, aren't they?"

But now they have a new common bond. All four have been victims of covert racial profiling, the newest method being used by Western security services to pick out potential terrorists at airports and on trains and planes.

Claude Ajit Moraes, an Asian Labour MEP, who commutes between London and Brussels, says that, invariably, he is singled out for extra security checks at airports and railway stations while his fellow white MEPs are waved through. He complained that he was detained twice and subjected to a full body search at airports, and on one occasion, securitymen at Charles de Gaulle airport in Paris refused to believe that he was an MEP despite his diplomatic passport.

"As a British Asian male travelling by air and Eurostar most weeks, I am stopped and searched regularly. Since 9/11, I've noted the frequency of these stops increase in comparison to my white colleagues, and have, as an MEP, taken up the cases of people who believe they have been unfairly targeted.

And if you believe that this can be just a minor inconvenience, then ask one of my constituents who was strip-searched because they had been 'profiled' - with nothing found," the MEP wrote on The Guardian Unlimited website.

Ajit Moraes was at least allowed to travel. Amar Ashraf, an airline pilot, was less lucky. He was thrown out of a United States-bound flight minutes after he boarded it following a stringent security check at Manchester airport. He was told that the airline was not carrying any "standby" passengers that day. As he got down from the plane, he was approached by two armed police officers who questioned him - asking him, among other things, whether he knew why the U.S. authorities wanted him off-loaded.

"I was the only person asked to get off and can't believe there weren't others on standby tickets. I think as a Muslim I was an easy target... this was discrimination," Amar Ashraf told the media. He wanted to know why he was interrogated if the only reason he was removed was that there was not enough room for a standby passenger. He was convinced that he was a victim of racial profiling.

Equally humiliating was the experience of university students Sohail Ashraf and Khurram Zeb, who were forced off a Manchester-bound flight from Spain because some of the co-passengers refused to travel with them on board suspecting that they might be terrorists. Accused of behaving in a "suspicious" manner, the two were "escorted" out by the police who questioned them at length for several hours.

And why? Because they were Asians, "frequently" looked at their watches, spoke in a language that some thought was "Arabic", and looked over dressed for the climate in Spain at the time. As The Independent pointed out: "It seems that this combination is now enough to get someone ejected from a plane. For there was no evidence that they were terrorists.

They had gone through all the security checks." What happened was "nothing less than mob rule", the newspaper said pointing out the airline crew should have stood up to the "irrational fears" of passengers instead of "capitulating" to them.

The students said later that they had done nothing to arouse suspicion. "Just because we are Muslim doesn't mean we are terrorists," they said.

These are not isolated incidents. Since an alleged plot to blow up American planes in mid-air by British Muslim extremists was uncovered by Scotland Yard on August 10, it seems to have become nearly impossible for Asians to travel in the West without being humiliated.

Almost all Asian air travellers - whether British, Indian or Pakistani-have a story to tell, though most of it goes unreported. The nightmarish experience of 12 Indians, who were removed from a Mumbai-bound Dutch flight and kept in prison in Amsterdam for two days, shows the risks Asians, especially Muslims, face when they undertake air travel.

There has been some criticism that these men effectively brought it upon themselves by behaving in a manner that was not warranted in the prevailing climate of heightened security concerns. They may have been guilty of silly behaviour but behaving badly does not amount to offence requiring hand cuffing; certainly it is different from behaving in a threatening manner.

The question remains: would a group of white Europeans, behaving in a similar fashion, have been marched off in handcuffs and thrown behind bars? Western governments tend to pick up diplomatic rows with developing countries on lesser violations of the human rights of their citizens.

And what about the Labour Party MEP, the airline pilot or two university students - none of whom gave any apparent cause for suspicion and yet were treated as though they were a threat simply because of the colour of their skin? It is significant that there has not been a single incident of white Europeans being humiliated in the name of security. The only inference that can be drawn from this all-Asian saga of harassment is that either Asians have a special propensity to behave foolishly or they are all seen as potential terrorists.

Despite denials by Western governments and security services, it is obvious that "racial profiling" is going on, and there is now a de facto new offence of what has been described as "Travelling whilst Asians" (TWS as the media has called it). Commentators have warned that if the trend continues, Asians might face an effective "apartheid" in air.

"In a year's time, you will arrive in the blank neon tedium of Heathrow and approach the passport controls with the usual weary anxiety. Only now, something will be different.

If you are white or Chinese or black, you will be filtered into a fast-streaming, security-loose queue. If you are Asian, you will join the high-security line, to be prodded and poked for terror signs. Your offence? Flying While Asian," wrote Johann Hari, a leading British analyst, in the online edition of The Independent.

One commentator suggested that soon there could be separate flights for Asian and Europeans. He may have said it in jest, but already nervous Asian fliers are talking about avoiding Western airlines and sticking to their national carriers. "At least Air India would not throw us out for speaking in Hindi or Urdu or for changing our seats," said an Indian businessman who travels frequently between Delhi and London.

In Britain, racial profiling became a contentious issue even before 9/11 and the London underground bombings of July 7, 2005. In the pre-9/11 and 7/7 era, the victims of racial surveillance were mostly African youths. The police strategy to fight street crime relied heavily on stopping-and-searching persons from African communities.

They supposedly fitted the "profile" of a typical offender, and were seen to be more likely to commit a crime than others. Since 9/11 and 7/7 this race-led strategy has been adopted to fight terrorism and this time it is directed at people of Asian appearance, for obvious reasons.

To an extent, it makes sense to keep an extra vigil on communities or group which have been a source of terrorism in the past. But the danger of relentlessly targeting one ethnic group is that, besides reinforcing racial and ethnic prejudice, which has its own consequences, it can alienate the very people whose cooperation is necessary in order to flush out the extremists from their ranks.

"That's unpalatable to everyone.... What we don't want to do is actually alienate the very communities who are going to help us catch terrorists," Ali Desai, chief superintendent of the Metropolitan Police, told the BBC.

Ajit Moraes says racial profiling "simply doesn't work - and can be counterproductive". Citing research by the Open Society Institute (OSI), an independent think-tank, he wrote that the assumption that race or religion was an "accurate predictor of terrorist" was a "recipe for disaster". What was needed was "good intelligence, community support, good policing and sharper aviation security" rather than racial profiling on a large scale.

"In the U.K. the proportion of 'Asians' stopped by police under the new anti-terror legislation tripled in the 18 months following 9/11. To date, not one of these has resulted in conviction for a terrorism offence.

Massive data-mining operations in Germany from the end of 2001 until early 2003 collected sensitive personal information about 8.3 million people - but did not identify a single terrorist subject. Other manifestations of ethnic profiling in Europe researched by the OSI included invasive raids on mosques and mass identity checking - again producing no chargeable suspects," Moraes pointed out.

Critics also argue that excessive reliance on racial profiling could divert attention from other sources of threat. Besides, it could help terrorists to change their tactics by using less predictable "conduits" - people from a different racial profile than those the police may be looking for.

More ominously, anything that has a whiff of "demonising" people on the basis of their ethnicity could lead to a dangerous East-West divide at a time when the world seems to be hovering on the precipice of a "clash of civilisations". Let us not forget Europe's own painful recent history of ethnic prejudice in a hurry.

Courtesy: Frontline