Prince Harry isn't the only exiled Brit who wants to be heard

Tuesday, March 16 2021

By Michael Glackin

Newspapers in the UK have devoted a fair bit of coverage in recent days to the tale of an exiled Brit. A UK citizen, who having turned their back on life at home, is now languishing in a hot, arid country, thousands of miles from their family, surrounded by strangers and fearing for their safety. A person desperate to tell their story to a British public that, for the most part, has absolutely no desire to hear it. 

No, not Prince Harry, sixth in line to the throne of the United Kingdom, and currently residing in a nine-bedroom mansion in southern California, but Shamima Begum, Jihadi child bride, and currently rotting in a dusty internment camp in northern Syria.

Prince Harry, I gather from the snippets of his “tell-all” interview with television superstar Oprah Winfrey, is looking for a purpose in life.

Begum is just looking for a life.

Now aged 21, Begum was one of three schoolgirls from London who travelled to Raqqa six years ago to join Daesh at the height of the Syrian war. The other two, Amira Abase and Kadiza Sultana, are understood to have been perished in the conflict. Readers may remember Begum’s UK citizenship was revoked by the UK government on national security grounds just days after she was found, by The Times newspaper, in the Al-Hawl refugee camp in 2019.

Last week, the UK Supreme Court refused Begum’s request to return to the UK to challenge that decision, ruling she is too dangerous to be allowed back into the country. While preventing her return, the court added that Begum’s appeal against the decision to revoke her citizenship should continue once she can participate without "public safety being compromised”. Bearing in mind she is currently living in a tent under armed guard that particular part of the ruling may prove about as much use to Begum as a handbrake on a canoe.

Many in the UK are quite happy for Begum to rot in Syria.

Daesh’s fondness for butchering, burning, and beheading the innocent, and for throwing homosexuals off high buildings were well-known before Begum ran away to join them. Moreover, none of this seemed to bother her much while she ensconced in Raqqa.

However, as I have said before, I believe the decision to strip Begum of her citizenship is wrong. To make Begum stateless, on the basis of a decision she made as a 15 year old child is shameful. Like it or not, Begum was radicalized through grooming that occurred in the UK. She is a UK problem, not one that should be outsourced to another country.

Oddly enough, like Prince Harry, Begum’s destiny may lie in the US. 

US President Joe Biden, like his predecessor Donald Trump, wants foreign Jihadis currently held in Syrian internment camps and prisons to be sent home. The US has long been concerned that the camps are breeding grounds for the rebirth of Daesh.

In November, General Frank McKenzie, the Marine commander overseeing US military operations in the Middle East, warned refugee camps had become “fertile ground for the propagation of radical ideologies”, leaving inmates “hostage to the receipt of ISIS [Daesh] ideology”.

McKenzie urged the west to repatriate those held in the camps, and reintegrate them into their home communities. Last month, Jeffrey DeLaurentis, US ambassador for special political affairs, also warned the United Nations that repatriations were needed to counter the threat from the Daesh.

The US has taken back Americans held in Syria and called on other countries to do the same. In response, Germany and Finland have repatriated women and children from Syrian camps, but Washington has expressed "frustration" with the UK’s refusal to accept responsibility for its citizens.

Last week’s UK court ruling, which was gleefully welcomed by the country's combative home secretary (interior minister) Priti Patel, flies in the face of US strategy. It vindicates the UK government’s decision to revoke not just Begum’s citizenship, but also that of an estimated 50 other UK citizens, and their children, who remain in Syrian camps. It puts the UK government firmly on a collision course with the Biden administration.

The Biden administration is not all that well disposed to UK Prime Minister Boris Johnson’s government at the best of times. The two leaders share a genuine desire to act on climate change, but Biden, like every post-war president bar Trump, views the European Union as an important political partner. Thus, he is not a fan of Brexit, Johnson’s signature political achievement. The odds on the elusive post Brexit UK-US trade deal, much talked about by Trump but never enacted, have lengthened considerably under Biden. 

The US President, who has Irish ancestry, has also warned Johnson against re-establishing a so called “hard border” between the Republic of Ireland and Northern Ireland amid Brexit inspired trade complications. Moreover, it is worth pointing out that the US still pays the lion’s share of the bills for the Syrian internment camps. Biden will likely decide soon that if there aren’t any Americans being held in them it’s an expense he can do without.

It is against this backdrop that Begum’s fate could ultimately be decided, and as such her future, like Prince Harry’s is inextricably linked to the US.  It may well prove to be more politically expedient for the UK to allow Begum back to face trial, and demonstrate some goodwill towards Washington, than continue to hang her out to dry as a bauble to an increasingly xenophobia electorate.

And anyway. When Begum and her schoolmates left London and  travelled overland from Turkey to join Daesh, they became the hip global poster girls for the group and fundamentalist Islam. Returning Begum, putting her on trial for whatever crimes she has committed and rehabilitating her would turn her into the poster girl for the values the UK purports to hold dear. It would show the true strengths of liberalism over the death cult she foolishly embraced. If the US President needs to nudge Johnson to remind him of that, then so be it.

As for Prince Harry. Most people in the UK are happy for him to stay where he is.

Michael Glackin is former Managing Editor of Beirut newspaper The Daily Star.

Patel and the UK’s broken asylum system

The Daily Star

Tuesday, October 6 2020

By Michael Glackin

It’s official. The UK asylum system is, in the words of Home Secretary Priti Patel, “broken”. 

Well, on one level that makes it like much else in the UK government right now. But more of that in a moment. First, our “Broken” asylum system.

In her speech to the governing Conservative Party annual conference at the weekend - delivered virtually due to COVID-19 restrictions - Patel promised a new “tough but fair” policy for asylum-seekers. The purpose of the new scheme is to essentially deter refugees illegally entering the UK by hopping into small boats and crossing the English Channel from France.

Patel insists the current legal system for refugees is unfair because it treats those who cross the Channel illegally exactly the same as those who apply for asylum through other recognized routes. In her speech she accused those who attempt to enter the UK after passing through other safe European countries of “shopping around for where they claim asylum”  and “lining the pockets of despicable international criminal gangs”.

Such language about people who, more often than not, are desperately escaping from war zones and persecution, is hard to stomach. However, there is little doubt that people trafficking is big business and the criminals running these schemes exploit and endanger those who are desperate enough to fall prey to them.

Indeed, a day after Patel’s speech, members of an Iranian people-smuggling gang, that used small boats to ferry migrants across the Channel were arrested by police in a joint operation across northern Europe. Eurojust, the EU agency for criminal justice cooperation which oversaw the operation, said the gang of mostly Iranian nationals trained migrants to operate the boats and charged $3,500 per person to cross.

However, Patel’s plan doesn’t just stop at the people traffickers. It also includes new laws to ensure failed asylum claimants can’t “clog up the legal system” by launching endless legal appeals against deportation. Such appeals, instigated by what she called in her speech “leftie lawyers” and “do-gooders” have, according to the Home Office, resulted in the top law firms for immigration legal aid work pocketing more than $50 millions of taxpayers' money in the last three years alone.

If all that isn’t enough, the home secretary was already facing criticism - and not just from “leftie lawyers” and “do-gooders”- after it was revealed she was considering plans to use wave machines to push refugee dinghies back across the English Channel, or more accurately swamp them with water.

Indeed, she has also considered transporting asylum-seekers to detention camps in the remaining far flung outposts of what used to be the British Empire, including Ascension Island in the South Atlantic, and St. Helena, where Napoleon was exiled after Waterloo.

To be fair, Tony Blair’s government had also considered using Ascension Island to process migrants back in 2003, but quickly abandoned the idea. Patel has refused to deny the plan has been discussed.

Why? Well, the real reason for both the policy, the inflammatory language, and the deliberate leaking reports to the press about wave machines, is it all plays well to a segment of the government’s electoral support at a time when Prime Minister Boris Johnson is under increased pressure over his government’s shambolic handling of the COVID-19 pandemic and never-ending Brexit talks.

There are constant rumors that Johnson wants to quit, exhausted by both his spell in intensive care after he caught COVID-19, and the weight of government.

There are fears the UK may be forced to enter a second lockdown amid a rise in COVID-19 infections due to the government’s failure to set up a robust test, track and trace service. Meanwhile, the European Union last week announced it was taking legal action against the UK over breaches to the Brexit withdrawal treaty.

Patel’s tough talking on refugees is a distraction from these issues, as well as a reassurance to a key constituency of the government’s far right-wing supporters who believe the UK is in danger of being swamped by immigrants.

For the record, asylum claims in the UK are falling, although the number of desperate people paying people traffickers to transport them across Europe and then across the Channel has increased. Around 7,000 people, the overwhelming majority fleeing persecution or war in Syria and Somalia, have arrived in the UK this year after risking their lives in small boats to cross the Channel. Last year the figure was less than 2,000. But even at 7,000 we are hardly suffering an invasion across the channel from asylum seekers.

Indeed, under the 2014 Vulnerable Persons Resettlement Scheme the UK promised to resettle a meager 20,000 Syrian refugees by 2020, considerably less than other European countries, such as Germany. To date, the UK has only taken in around 17,000.

That amount will rightly be seen as small beer to the Lebanese, who are estimated to be hosting around 1.5 million Syrian refugees. Indeed, Lebanon is the country with the largest number of displaced people per capita. Of course, we shouldn’t forget the UK has also given around $4 billions in aid to the Syria crisis since 2012, its largest ever response to a humanitarian crisis and considerably more than comparable European countries such as France.

But according to the UNHCR, 4.6 million Syrian refugees, out of 6.7 million worldwide in 2018, have been hosted by just two countries, Turkey and Lebanon. 

Against that backdrop, you could argue the dumping of migrants in places thousands of miles from the UK has been going on for some time. 

The problem in the UK right now though is that talk of transporting refugees to faraway islands, or attempting to more or less drown them with wave machines, will be cheered by a worryingly large segment of the country.

Such moments occur from time to time in politics everywhere, and today can be seen across Europe and of course, in the US. The UK is no exception. The difference in the UK now is that the politicians who espoused such views used to be on the fringes of UK politics, not at the heart of government.

Older readers may remember Enoch Powell, an anti immigration but leading Conservative politician (whom Patel was mockingly compared to in a Guardian newspaper cartoon this week). Powell, who oddly enough opposed the arrival of Ugandan Asians such as Patel’s parents into the UK, was sacked by the then-Conservative leader Edward Heath for his views on immigration and race.

Today he would probably be promoted.

As I have noted before on these pages, Patel’s chequered history includes her now infamous “holiday” to Israel in 2017, during which she secretly met Israeli premier Benjamin Netanyahu, among others. Patel was secretary of state at the Department for International Development at the time and following her “holiday” recommended that her department should use its funds to pay for Israeli Defense Force field hospitals in the occupied Golan Heights. When details of her Israeli trip emerged later she was promptly sacked by then-Prime Minister Theresa May.

Her restoration to government came about only because Boris Johnson has surrounded himself with right-wing poodles who won’t indulge in criticism, constructive or otherwise, of what passes for his leadership. 

Patel’s new plan is simply a dog whistle to those who want migrants to feel so unwelcome they will not want to set foot in this country.

The odd thing of course is that Patel’s parents arrived in the UK after being expelled from Idi Amin’s Uganda in the early 1970s. They settled in Herefordshire, a rural agriculture county in the west Midlands of England, and prospered, establishing a chain of convenience stores. Had she been home secretary when her parents arrived they might well have spent unhappy years watching the ships sail by on St. Helena, like Napoleon, while their right to live in the UK was decided. I wonder if they would have taken their chances with the people traffickers?

Michael Glackin is a journalist based in the UK and a former managing editor of The Daily Star. This article was published in The Daily Star on Tuesday October 6, 2020. 

Begum return tests UK values

The Daily Star
Monday July 20 2020
By Michael Glackin

Shamima Begum, London born, but currently a resident of Al-Roj refugee camp in north east Syria, is said to be delighted but also "very nervous" about her potential return to the UK after a four year absence.

It's fair to say her delight is not shared by too many others in the UK, though like her, many are nervous about it.

In case you missed it, Begum, once the hip poster girl for so called "Jihadi Brides", was reacting to the decision by a UK court that she should be allowed to return to the UK to launch an appeal against the removal of her British citizenship.

The decision has caused outrage. Conservative Party parliamentarian Andrew Bridgen said: "Most Brits will rightly think that when you swear allegiance to another country that declares war on Britain, that you have given up all the rights and protections and privileges of your British citizenship. After this ruling it appears you have not."

Public anger at the court's decision was hardly helped by Begum's lawyer, Tasnime Akunje, who during a television interview last week said he couldn't be sure she wouldn't pose a terror threat to the UK.

In case you have forgotten, Begum, now 20, was 15 when she ran away from her east London home with two school friends to join Daesh in 2015, boarding a flight to Turkey then making her way to Syria. Once there, she was soon married a jihadi fighter and spent the next three years in terrorist-controlled territory.

In 2019, after the defeat of Daesh, she was found by The Times of London in Al-Hawl refugee camp. She told the newspaper that she had no regrets, admitted to being well aware of the atrocities Daesh carried out during its reign of terror, and wasn't troubled by them.

"When I saw my first severed head in a bin it didn't faze me at all. It was from a captured fighter seized on the battlefield, an enemy of Islam," she explained. She quickly moderated her views in subsequent interviews, but the then-UK home secretary, Sajid Javid, stripped her of British citizenship on national security grounds, effectively making her stateless.

Begum was denied permission to fly back to the UK to appeal Javid's decision. But that changed with last week's Court of Appeal ruling. The Court of Appeal concluded that "the only way in which she can have a fair and effective appeal is to be permitted to come into the United Kingdom to pursue her appeal."

Priti Patel, the UK's combative home secretary (the minister in charge of law and order), has said the government will appeal the ruling to the UK Supreme Court and prevent Begum's return until it makes a decision.

Patel's department has been criticized for its decision to appeal, but the reality is it had little choice. If Begum is allowed back it opens the floodgates to dozens of other Daesh extremists that have been stripped of UK citizenship to return. Indeed, similar legal actions from families of others languishing in Syrian refugee camps are being launched as we speak.

In the event Begum returns to the UK for her court appeal, she will be arrested and charged with terror-related offenses. After that, there are only two outcomes. She will either win and be handed back her British passport and do jail time, or lose and face deportation.

But to where? No one wants her.

The Kurdish authorities currently holding Begum have repeatedly called for the UK to take her back. When the UK removed her citizenship, it argued that under Bangladeshi law, Begum, whose parents are from the country, was a citizen of Bangladesh by descent so would not be stateless.

Needless to say, Bangladesh didn't want her. Indeed, the country's foreign minister, Abdul Momen, said last year that Begum had "nothing to do" with Bangladesh. Hence Patel's determination to keep here where she is.

However, Begum is the UK's responsibility. She was born in the UK, educated here, radicalized here, and spectacularly failed by our police and government.

Begum's family claims she was radicalized through online grooming and that the authorities were aware this was happening. The school Begum attended in London was, shall we say, "well known to the police." Indeed, after one of her school friends had run away and joined Daesh, Begum was interviewed by the UK's counter-terrorism police without the knowledge of her parents. She and the two girls she absconded with, both of whom are now believed to be dead, were even given letters by the police to take home to their parents which needless to say the girls promptly destroyed without their parents ever reading them.

Begum is a UK problem, not one that should be outsourced to another country, even if one could be found for her.

Moreover, stripping Begum of her UK nationality on the basis of her heritage sets a dangerous precedent.

The government's argument suggests, indeed makes plain, that if you are the UK-born child of immigrants, your citizenship is flimsy, a nickel and dime version of citizenship. On that basis, if Patel if ever fell foul of the law, she could end up in Uganda, the country where her parents were born. It is hard not to conclude that what the government is saying is that the children of immigrants, like Patel and at least three of her cabinet colleagues, are actually only "UK lite."

In an increasingly polarized UK, that message has clear appeal to the mob, but it diminishes all that the UK purports to stand for.

Begum must now account for her actions, and that is best served by ensuring she stands trial for her crimes in a UK court. Begum could be jailed for up to 10 years for being a member or supporting Daesh. Security sources have indicated Begum was a member of Al-Hisba, Daesh's morality police, and allegedly "stitched suicide bombers into explosive vests." If that is proven she could face a life sentence.

As I wrote on these pages when Begum first emerged from the ruins of Daesh's collapsed caliphate in early 2019, returning her to the UK, putting her on trial for whatever crimes she has committed and rehabilitating her would perhaps turn her into a poster girl for the values the UK holds dear, and show the true strengths of democracy and liberalism over the death cult she and others embraced.

That remains true today. Let Begum, and more importantly, the victims of her actions, see justice done.

Michael Glackin is a UK-based journalist and a former managing editor of The Daily Star.

Don't confuse toppling statues with confronting the past

Monday, June 15 2020
By Michael Glackin

One of the most iconic images of the US led invasion of Iraq in 2003 was the toppling of the towering statue of Saddam Hussein in Fidros Square in Baghdad. It started with a group of Iraqis, one of whom was Kadhim Al-Jabbouri.  Kadhim had spent more than a year in one of Saddam’s jails and claimed more than a dozen members of his family had been killed by the regime. After fruitlessly hammering at the statue with a sledgehammer, Kadhim was relieved when a unit of US Marines arrived in a M88 armored vehicle. The marines attached a chain to the statue from their vehicle and the rest is history. Images of the giant statue being ripped from its plinth beamed around the globe, and made the front pages of the world’s newspapers the next day. 

A similar fate has befallen a number of statues around the UK, and elsewhere, in the last week, following the brutal killing of George Floyd at the hands of police officers in the US, and the globalisation of the Black Lives Matter movement.
Most of the statues targeted in the UK are those of Georgian and Victorian luminaries who had links to the slave trade. That they ended up being commemorated with statues is largely due to their philanthropy, often founding schools for the poor. The fact that the wealth which funded their philanthropy was made in trade of human flesh is rarely noted on their monuments. However, against the backdrop of Floyd’s murder, other statues, those with no links to the slave trade, have also been targeted, most notably the statue of Britain’s wartime leader Winston Churchill in Parliament Square.

Earlier this month his statue was daubed with the words “racist” during a Black Lives Matter demonstration.  Another protest at the weekend saw the statue, as well as the Cenotaph – the memorial to the dead of the two world wars – boarded up to protect them from protestors. A small number of people have now ridiculously demanded Churchill’s statue be taken down.

Churchill held indisputably abhorrent views on race. He famously said “I do not admit for instance, that a great wrong has been done to the Red Indians of America or the black people of Australia. I do not admit that a wrong has been done to these people by the fact that a stronger race, a higher-grade race, a more worldly wise race to put it that way, has come in and taken their place."

And it’s not just words. Churchill’s treatment of the Marsh Arabs in Mesopotamia in 1920, during the Iraqi revolt, remains controversial. Churchill, then UK secretary of state for war, was a vocal supporter of using chemical weapons against the insurgents, decades before Saddam actually did so. In the event Churchill ordered the air force to drop almost 100 tons of bombs indiscriminately on the region killing around 9,000 Iraqis to quell the revolt.

And yet, while working as a journalist covering the battle of Omdurman in Sudan 1898, Churchill denounced the British Army for its treatment of enemy casualties, many of whom were ill-treated and some even murdered after a British led Egyptian and Sudanese force defeated the army of Abdullah al-Taashi, the successor to the Mahdi, Muhammad Ahmad. In an ironic parallel with the current frenzy of statue toppling, he also denounced the destruction of the Mahdi's tomb and the seizure of the Sudanese leader's skull as a souvenir. Churchill wrote: “To declare that to destroy what was sacred and holy to them was a wicked act, of which the true Christian, no less than the philosopher, must express his abhorrence.”

Clearly, while Churchill believed white people, primarily white Protestants, were superior, he did not believe it right to treat non-white people inhumanely, even when zealously prosecuting war. It is also surely worth pointing out that Churchill’s views on race pale beside those of Hitler's murderous racial hierarchy. Churchill did not seek to wipe out every Arab in 1920, or every German when he opposed Hitler. Once those he fought against were defeated, Churchill's wars ended. For Hitler and the Third Reich, exterminating Europe's Jews, Gypsies, and every political opponent was an end in itself. The Nazis continued killing Jews and their political opponents, and others who resisted them, right up to the very last day of the Second World War, long after it was clear the war was lost. 

Churchill was not perfect. He held opinions that no politician would dare think today, let along express. However, as military historian Max Hastings put it this week, it “seems grotesque to suppose that if this fault is weighed in the balance against his vast services to Britain, and to mankind, it can justify defacing his image in public, or toppling him from the pantheon of national heroes.”
There is also talk of renaming the Rhodes Scholarship, which allows students from Africa, the Arab world, and the US among others, to study at Oxford University. The scholarship was established in 1902 with money from Cecil Rhodes, who expanded British imperialism in southern Africa at the end of the 19th Century, and was the founder of Rhodesia, now Zimbabwe.

Where will this end? Should we also now tear down the London School of Economics (LSE)? Nothing personal. Indeed, I once, shamefully, turned down a generous bursary from the LSE in favour of starting my first job in journalism. Journalism’s loss some might say. The LSE was founded by those secular saints of the left, the Fabians, Beatrice and Sidney Webb. But the diaries of Ivan Maisky, who was the Soviet Union’s ambassador to London from 1932 to 1943, reveal socialist Beatrice held some unsavoury views on race. After a meeting with Beatrice, in October 1939, Maisky wrote: “I mentioned what Churchill said to me the other day: ‘Better communism than Nazism!’ Beatrice shrugged her shoulders and noted that such a statement was not typical of the British ruling elite . . . But then, for some reason, she found it necessary to add: ‘Churchill is not a true Englishman, you know. He has negro blood. You can tell even from his appearance.’” Beatrice then told Maisky “a long story” about Churchill’s mother coming from a family in the American South and her sister looked like a “negroid”.

For what it’s worth, I’m all for certain monuments being taken down and consigned to museums with explanatory notes which properly explain their role in history. But we shouldn’t airbrush our murky history. We should own up to it and explain it. I would prefer if my children had been properly taught Britain’s role in the slave trade in school, as I was at my tiny state school in London five decades ago.
Let’s confront our past, understand it, and learn from it. Toppling a statue would not have saved George Floyd’s life, but a better understanding of our shared past, and our sins, might have.

The final irony is all this statue toppling brings us back to Fidris Square in Baghdad. Speaking a dozen years after he helped destroy Saddam’s monument, Khadhim, lamenting on the state of his war torn country, said: “I feel pain and shame. I ask myself, ‘Why did I topple this statue?’. I'd like to put it back up, to rebuild it. I'd put it back up but I'm afraid I would be killed.”
Michael Glackin is former managing editor of The Daily Star.

A PAN AM grievous miscarriage of justice

The Daily Star
Monday March 16 2020
By Michael Glackin

The wheels of justice turn slowly, but grind exceedingly fine, the old adage goes. Well the first part is definitely true.

Last week Scotland’s judicial system ruled that Abdelbaset al-Megrahi, the only man ever found guilty of the bombing of Pan Am flight 103 in 1988, in which 270 were killed, may have been the victim of a “grievous miscarriage of justice.”

The Scottish criminal cases review commission announced Wednesday that it will refer Megrahi’s conviction, for the largest mass murder in British history, back to the appeal court. An earlier appeal against the conviction in 2002 was unsuccessful.

The New York-bound Pan Am flight blew up as it flew over the Scottish town of Lockerbie after taking off from London. So when Megrahi eventually came to trial, a dozen years after the event, he was tried by a specially convened Scottish Court that sat in The Netherlands. Megrahi was sentenced to 27 years by three Scottish judges who found him responsible for putting a suitcase containing a bomb aboard a flight from Malta to Frankfurt. From there the suitcase went on to London and was transferred to the New York flight that exploded less than 40 minutes after takeoff.

The main evidence against Megrahi was that he was positively identified by a witness, Maltese shopkeeper Tony Gauci. Gauci claimed he had sold clothes to Megrahi which were later found scattered over the crash site and had been in the suitcase containing the explosive device.

Last week the commission said “no reasonable trial court could have accepted that Mr. Megrahi was identified as the purchaser” of the clothes.

It’s the latest twist in the long running saga of Megrahi and the bombing of Pan Am 103. Last year five former members of the Stasi, the now defunct intelligence service in communist East Germany, were questioned over the bombing. The former spooks, now in their 70s and 80s, were interviewed as witnesses, not suspects.

A few years earlier, in 2017, Scottish prosecutors announced they interviewed two Libyans they had identified as “new suspects” in the bombing. The “new suspects” were far from new. Both had been of interest to the original investigation in 1991. One was Abdullah al-Senussi, Libya’s intelligence chief and brother in law of Moammar Gadhafi. He had already been convicted in absentia by a French court in 1999 after being found guilty of involvement in the bombing of a French UTA airliner over Niger in 1989. He is currently on death row in Tripoli for crimes committed by the Gadhafi regime though his family are pressing for his release.

The other “new suspect”, Mohammed Abouajela Masud, who I believe is also still in prison in Tripoli completing a 10-year sentence for bomb-making, was almost indicted alongside Megrahi in 1991 for the Pan Am bombing. Masud is also thought to have been involved in the bombing of a Berlin discotheque in 1986 frequented by American military personnel. The disco attack led to U.S. airstrikes against Libya soon thereafter. Depending on your point of view, this is what led to the bombing of Pan Am 103.

The conviction of Megrahi, who died in 2012, three years after he was released “on compassionate grounds,” was based on the theory that Gadhafi had ordered the bombing in retaliation for the U.S. airstrikes against Libya.

Gadhafi admitted responsibility for the Pan Am bombing in 2003, but this was always seen as an economically pragmatic move, rather than an admission of guilt. Former Libyan prime minister, Shukri Ghanem, said as far back as 2005 that the decision to accept responsibility was to “buy peace and move forward.”

It’s worth remembering that after the U.S.-led occupation of Iraq, then U.K. Prime Minister Tony Blair took the lead in persuading Gadhafi, to give up on Libya’s nuclear program, the first step in his international rehabilitation. In 2003, Libya paid $2.7 billion in compensation to the families of those killed - around $10 million per victim. In 2004 international sanctions imposed on Libya were eased and a raft of Western oil companies signed multi-million dollar contracts to explore and develop oil and natural gas in the country.

You don’t have to be Hercule Poirot to see that Libyan compensation payments and the continued incarceration of Megrahi were a small price for Gadhafi to pay to repair his reputation and open the floodgates of Western investment.

The case against Megrahi always stank, and his early release from jail in 2009 added to the smell.

The key witness against him, Gauci, was given a $2 million reward for his evidence by the CIA and placed in a witness-protection program. Gauci, who even the Scottish prosecutor who indicted Megrahi described as being “an apple short of a picnic,” returned to Malta and died there in 2016 aged 75.

But if Megrahi wasn’t responsible, who was?

Lest we forget, in October 1988, two months before the Pan Am bombing, German police raided an apartment in Frankfurt and arrested several Palestinians. The raid unearthed explosives, weapons and, crucially, a number of radio cassette recorders similar to the one used to detonate the Pan Am 103 bomb. Most of the Palestinians were members of the Syrian-controlled Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine-General Command, headed by Ahmad Jibril, a Palestinian former Syrian Army officer. Jibril has been busy in recent years defending the regime of President Bashar Assad. He was reported to have been killed in 2014, but popped up on Hezbollah’s Mayadeen TV in 2017 to say he wanted the help of Iranian troops to invade Israel, and, as I recall, oust King Adbullah in Jordan.

The judges at Megrahi’s trial rejected the argument that Jibril was involved.

But much of the evidence indicates Jibril and the PFLP-GC carried out the bombing on behalf of Iran and Syria to avenge the July 1988 accidental downing of an Iranian commercial airliner by a U.S. warship, killing 290 people. This is backed up by evidence from the U.S. Defense Intelligence Agency showing that the PFLP-GC was paid $1 million to carry out the bombing. The DIA also claimed that Jibril was given a down payment of $100,000 in Damascus by Iran’s then-ambassador to Syria, Mohammad Hussan Akhari.

Many believe then-Syrian President Hafez Assad’s support for the U.S.-led alliance to oust Iraqi forces from Kuwait in 1991 meant Syria’s role in the bombing was swept under the carpet. It is worth pointing out that Megrahi was not formally indicted by the U.S. and the U.K. until November 1991.

But the PFLP-GC is not the only non-Libyan suspect. The Frankfurt raid also revealed compelling evidence against Muhammad Abu Talib, a former leader of the Palestine People’s Struggle Front PPSF). When German police raided the Frankfurt apartment in the weeks before the bombing, they also arrested members of the PPSF. It emerged that Talib had been in Malta two months before the bombing. He was cleared of involvement during Megrahi’s trial, despite the fact he had circled the date of the bombing in a calendar found at his apartment. Oddly enough Talib was released from a life sentence he was serving in Sweden for involvement in bomb attacks a few weeks after Megrahi’s release in 2009.

The final part of the jigsaw is the Libyan angle. The PFLP-GC was subcontracted dirty deeds for Iran and Syria, but also Libya when it was at the top of the West’s list of terrorist states. Libya’s intelligence service worked closely with a range of terrorist groups. It is possible, even likely, that Megrahi had contact with the PFLP-GC, but not credible that he masterminded and executed the entire Pan Am bombing.

Indeed, given that the authorities were so keen to pursue the Libyan angle, it is odd they spent so little time interviewing Gadhafi’s former spymaster Moussa Koussa when he fled to London as the regime was collapsing in 2011. Koussa, who in the words of one U.K. government official was “up to his neck” in the bombing, spent just three days in London and then flew on to Qatar, where he remains, living on assets that were quietly unfrozen by the West around the same time.

The full truth about the 1988 bombing of Pan Am Flight 103 may never be known. But what we do know now indicates that the guilty remain unpunished.

The wheels of justice do turn slowly, but they have still yet to grind sufficiently finely to bring justice to the 270 people who were murdered over the skies of Scotland in 1988.
Michael Glackin is former managing editor of The Daily Star. A version of this article appeared in The Daily Star on Monday, March 16, 2020.

Can Johnson deliver more than Brexit?

The Daily Star
Monday, December 16, 2019
By Michael Glackin

Last time I visited The Daily Star’s comment pages, I predicted that Boris Johnson’s Conservative Party would win the U.K. general election comfortably. Well, to be fair, Johnson had been ahead in the polls so it wasn’t a hard call. However, the huge parliamentary majority he achieved Thursday was not anticipated.
Johnson’s populist electioneering - U.S. President Donald Trump dubbed him “Britain’s Trump” - has handed the Conservative Party its largest majority since 1987 and the days of Margaret Thatcher. It is also the biggest majority for any prime minister since Tony Blair in 2001.
For all that though, it’s clear the U.K. remains divided, both between the nations that comprise it - the election saw a sharp rise in the number of separatist Scottish nationalist parliamentarians - and, despite Johnson’s overwhelming victory, between Brexiteers and those who wish to remain in the EU.
However, this election has now ended the Brexit argument. There will not be a second referendum on European Union membership, something promised by the opposition Labour Party. Meanwhile, the one party that promised to scrap Brexit, the minority Liberal Democrats, barely won enough seats to make up a football team.
Johnson’s huge parliamentary majority will ensure Brexit will now formally take place at the end of January, ending three years of deadlock. A 12-month-long transition period will then follow in which the U.K. and EU will attempt to hammer out a trade deal.
Much has been made of Johnson’s ability to appeal to working class (blue collar) voters, millions of whom abandoned their traditional party, Labour, for the Conservatives, traditionally seen as the party of the bosses.
Labour won its fewest seats since 1935 as its traditional supporters, those in the so-called Labour left-behind heartlands in the north of England, deserted it for Johnson’s populism.
But this was an election of populists. Johnson has promised to spend billions of pounds of largely borrowed money in Labour’s heartlands on infrastructure and across the country on the U.K.’s state-run National Health Service. Not to be outdone, the Labour Party committed itself to even bigger public spending programs, again based on borrowing, and promised to nationalise key industries, including energy, the train network, and even broadband services.
However, what Labour forgot, was that this election was about identity, first and foremost. Jeremy Corbyn, the far-left leader of the Labour Party, was seen by many of its traditional working class voters, as anti-British and what most people perceive to be British values.
Corbyn was better known in the U.K. for his long-standing links to Hamas and Hezbollah, and his support for nasty dictatorships in Iran and Venezuela. He is largely anti-Israel and anti-American, and even blamed NATO for Russia’s 2014 invasion of Ukraine. He has also been accused of presiding over a culture of antisemitism within his party since he became leader.
At the same time as Johnson promised to sharply increase government spending and deliver the people’s 2016 vote on Brexit, he also promised to tighten immigration controls - the most significant factor in the Brexit vote - and be tougher on fundamentalist Islamist terrorism in the U.K.
Matthew Goodwin, professor of politics at Rutherford College, Kent University, succinctly summed up why Johnson’s populism beat Corbyn’s: “It is easier for the right to move left on the economy than it is for the left to move right on identity.”
So, what will this new populist Johnson government stand for in international affairs?
Well, Brexit has so diminished the U.K.’s standing internationally, no one seems to care all that much what the new government’s foreign policy priorities will be. This is perhaps just as well because Johnson doesn’t seem to have any beyond “getting Brexit done” and securing an increasingly unlikely, and certainly unfavourable, free trade deal with Donald Trump’s America.
And herein lies the rub. Whatever reputation the U.K. enjoyed, to borrow a phrase from Bismarck, as an “honest broker” in the middle east - straddling the largely pro-Israeli America and the largely pro-Palestinian European Union - has been in tatters since the Brexit vote. Post-Brexit, Johnson, like his predecessor Theresa May, is desperate to court the White House to secure that illusive free trade deal that will compensate for exiting the world’s largest trading bloc.
To that end, the Conservative Party manifesto for this election maintained its support for a “two-state solution” in the Middle East, and that was pretty much it. There was no mention of its policies toward Syria, Yemen or Saudi Arabia. Nor did it put forward a view on the merits or otherwise of the Iran nuclear deal, an agreement the White House despises.
Interestingly, Corbyn had pledged to ban arms sales to Saudi Arabia, in protest at the kingdom’s war in Yemen. Labour also planned stop exporting arms “used in violation of the human rights of Palestinian civilians” to Israel. It was also committed to “immediately” recognize a Palestinian state.
More importantly, Johnson’s foreign policy looks set to be tailored to suit the U.K.’s trading needs, first and foremost. He has already announced plans to merge the U.K.’s Department for International Trade with the government’s business department to better facilitate potential trade deals with the U.S., Japan, and Australia. He also intends to merge the hitherto all-powerful Foreign Office with the Department for International Development to help” co-ordinate” the U.K.’s aid budget with the government’s foreign policy goals.
At any rate, the most immediate foreign policy problem facing Johnson will be the continuing trade negotiations with the EU that will begin once Brexit happens in January. If Johnson fails to broker a trade deal between the U.K. and the EU during the 12-month transition period, the U.K. could end up trading with the EU on World Trade Organization terms.
Moreover, regardless of the terms of the U.K.’s exit from the trading bloc, against the backdrop of a slowing global economy, Johnson will find it hard to deliver on all the public spending promises he made on the hustings. The U.K. economy isn’t pulling up any trees. GDP growth is expected to hit an 11-year low of 1 percent next year.
Small wonder then that immediately after his victory Johnson thanked those who, in his words, “lent us your vote.”
What this election has proved beyond doubt is that you can sell anything, regardless of whether you can deliver it. This has led to a worrying shift in our politics, to entrenched polar extremes. It remains to be seen whether Johnson is truly capable of reversing that shift and deliver more than just Brexit. Heraclitus famously said: “character is destiny.” The popularity contest is over. It is now time for him to govern.
Michael Glackin is former managing editor of The Daily Star. A version of this article appeared in the print edition of The Daily Star on Monday, December 16, 2019, on page 4.

Terror attack raises heat in U.K. vote

The Daily Star
Monday, December 2, 2019
By Michael Glackin

Beirut - Terror came to the streets of London again last week. Not for the first time, the murderer was known to police and the U.K.’s security services. British-born Usman Khan, who killed a man and a woman and wounded three others in a knife rampage last Friday, had been released from jail in 2018, less than seven years into a 16-year prison sentence.
The atrocity has raised the temperature in an already fractious election in the U.K., with both the main political parties blaming each other for allowing a convicted terrorist back onto the streets to commit murder.
Khan was originally sentenced to serve an indeterminate sentence - where no date is set for when the person will be released - in 2012 for an Al-Qaeda-inspired plot to bomb both the London Stock Exchange and the U.S. Embassy, as well as murder current Prime Minister Boris Johnson, who was then the mayor of London.
However, in 2013 the Court of Appeal quashed that judgment, and replaced it with a determinate custodial sentence of 16 years. Khan was released just eight years into his sentence, but, because he was on what amounts to parole, had to wear an electronic monitoring device.
Clearly, no one appeared to be monitoring him all that closely.
Thus, last Friday, Khan, wearing a hoax suicide belt, showed up as an invited guest at a Cambridge University conference on prisoner rehabilitation being held in the City of London, at the historic Fishmongers’ Hall.
Once there he stabbed several people before being chased by members of the public, including a Polish chef who worked at Fishmongers’ Hall and who attacked Khan with a 1.5-meter-long tusk of a narwhal, which had previously been used to decorate a wall inside the hall. Khan was then shot by police. Video footage of his last moments show police dragging the last of the members of the public who intervened off Khan’s prostrate body before an armed officer fired several shots into him.
The stabbings happened near the site of the 2017 terrorist attack by Daesh (ISIS) supporters on London Bridge, in which eight people were killed.
There are two key issues here. One, why did this happen? Secondly, what impact will it have on this month’s general election in the U.K.?
In terms of the first, questions will be asked of the U.K.’s security agencies. A string of failings by MI5 and MI6 in the way both agencies monitor known terror suspects have been highlighted over the last decade. In 2015 I wrote that the U.K.’s intelligence and security services appeared incapable of stopping not just British nationals going to join groups in Syria and Iraq, but even known terror suspects. The Daesh executioner known as “Jihadi John,” Londoner Mohammed Emwazi, was able to escape to Syria in 2012 despite being on an MI5 terror watch list which prohibited him from leaving the U.K. In fact, Emwazi was so well-known to intelligence services and detained so often by MI5 that he actually filed a formal complaint against them with the Police Complaints Commission in 2010.
Despite extensive so-called “intrusive” surveillance by security agencies of Michael Adebolajo and Michael Adebowale, both men slipped through the intelligence net and murdered an off-duty soldier, Lee Rigby, in broad daylight on a busy London street in 2013. Adebolajo has even claimed MI5 tried to recruit him prior to the murder.


Further back, the leaders of the July 7, 2005, bombings in London, which killed 52 people, were also on the radar of the intelligence services, but again slipped through the net. After the attack, MI5 insisted two of the bombers, Mohammed Sidique Khan and Shehzad Tanweer, were just “petty fraudsters.” However, at least one surveillance transcript of the pair later emerged which contained eight pages detailing plans to train for and take part in terrorist attacks.
Indeed, in 2015, Parliament’s Intelligence and Security Committee revealed a litany of security service failures when dealing with terror groups, but little seems to have changed.
Of course, terrorism does not rely on a great amount of sophistication, or collaboration that security services can monitor. A kitchen knife or a car is pretty much all you need to kill and maim people in busy cities. But it is surely worrying that so many of these so called “lone wolf” terrorists seem able to carry out their murderous attacks despite the fact that they are already on the radar of security agencies.
The attack could have significant impact on this month’s election, which many believe is the U.K.’s most important in living memory. Following the attack, Johnson said he would toughen sentences for people convicted of violent crime and terrorism if he wins the election. Yet it was his government, in the shape of Priti Patel, the combative right-wing pro-Israeli U.K. home secretary, who at the beginning of last month reduced the U.K. terror threat level for the first time in two years.
Meanwhile, a few days prior to the attack, Jeremy Corbyn, the hard-left leader of the opposition Labour Party, refused to say whether he would give the order to “take out” (assassinate) a new Daesh leader if British security forces were in a position to do so. During a car-crash interview on BBC television, Corbyn said: “If it’s possible, and only if it’s possible, then you try to capture that person.” He later added that he would “take the appropriate decisions at that time when I knew the circumstances.” However, his reluctance to give a straight answer may come back to haunt him against the backdrop of Friday’s attack.
If all that wasn’t enough, U.S. President Donald Trump is coming to town later today. Trump disgracefully used the first London Bridge attack in 2017 to publicly criticize London’s Muslim Mayor Sadiq Khan, part of a long-running feud between the two men. Khan refused to meet Trump during his state visit to the U.K. earlier this year.
Trump is also a big fan of Johnson, whom he has dubbed “Britain’s Trump.” In October he went so far as to warn that a Corbyn victory in the election would be “so bad” for the U.K.
However, Johnson is understood to have asked Trump to stop voicing his support publicly, amid fears his endorsement is actually boosting Corbyn due to the widespread antipathy most in the U.K. feel toward the U.S. president.
It may not matter. Johnson’s Conservative Party is ahead in the polls at the moment, and looks to win comfortably and finally implement the U.K.’s exit from the European Union. Either way, whoever wins, the U.K.’s intelligence net is in need of urgent repairs.
Michael Glackin is former managing editor of The Daily Star.
A version of this article appeared in the print edition of The Daily Star on December 02, 2019, on page 4.