Anger at US 'rendition' of refugees who fled Somalia

At least a hundred and fifty refugees fleeing Somalia have been arrested in Kenya and flown to Somalia and Ethiopia where they are being held in secret underground prisons - shackled to the wall - without access to lawyers, according to human rights groups.

Flight manifests seen by The Independent show that three charter planes left Nairobi for Somalia's capital Mogadishu, and Baidoa, the seat of parliament, in January and February, carrying around 80 people suspected of links with al-Qa'ida. The flights left at night, and the manifests appear to have been filled in hastily with many of the details, including the plane's destination, left blank.

Several of the suspects are understood to be held in underground prisons at Mogadishu airport where they are held shackled to the wall. Most have since been sent on to two detention facilities in Addis Ababa. Ethiopia has been accused of routinely torturing political prisoners. A further 50 or 60 people accused of belonging to Ethiopian rebel groups fighting alongside Somalia's Union of Islamic Courts were sent directly to Ethiopia.

Al-Qa'ida are either the largest and most diverse terrorist group on the planet, or they are a myth.

An idea that certain people embrace, and occasionally act upon - like the bombings in central London - but it is very hard to label such an ideology as a terrorist group in the same way that we would recognise the IRA as a terrorist group with a definite structure and a discernible chain of command.

Every time I hear of the US arresting people in places as diverse and distant from each other as Somalia and the Philippines, I am left agreeing with the Russian ex-Intelligence Chief, Leonid Shebarshin, who claimed:

“We have agreed that [al-Qaeda] is not a group but a notion.”

“The fight against that all-mighty ubiquitous myth deliberately linked to Islam is of great advantage for the Americans as it targets the oil-rich Muslim regions,” Shebarshin emphasized.

Al Qa'ida is a monster that suits America's purposes, which is why every single person held is always held as a possible al Qa'ida suspect. It is a shorthand that tells an American audience that these are the "worst of the worst" and one needn't question what one's government does to such people, one should simply feel safer that the government are taking action.

And the less linkage these people arrested have with bin Laden and others - sitting presumably in Afghan caves - only further emphasises the amorphous nature of al Qa'ida, according to the logic of Bush and Blair.

However, there is every possibility that al Qa'ida is simply being used as a political cover, and that the group is nowhere near as powerful as we are being led to believe.

Indeed, Tom Paine argues that even their supposed links to the London bombings were highly exaggerated:

The London bombings, it turns out, were the work of four alienated British Muslims, with no links to "international terrorist networks", who had learned how to make bombs by trawling the Internet. They had been radicalized and motivated, according to the report, by British foreign policies in the Muslim world—a view Tony Blair has consistently sought to undermine and discredit. The role of the alleged "Al Qaeda mastermind in Iraq," Abu Musab Al Zarqawi, we are now told, was cynically misrepresented and exaggerated by the U.S. military's propaganda units in an effort to discredit and divide the Iraqi insurgency and to provide a retrospective justification for the Iraq war by suggesting a link between Iraq and 9/11.

Wherever in the world Al Qaeda crops up, its appearance has often been uncannily convenient for the local authorities—dictators, warlords, occupation forces and elected governments alike. And often the precise nature of the Al Qaeda connection turns out, on close examination, to be tenuous or non-existent. But by that time the message has gone out and sunk in: "Al Qaeda was here".

Don't get me wrong, I'm not sitting here pretending that there is no threat at all. There is. But there is also a cynical tendency to use al Qa'ida as a catch all. As a shorthand.

Al Qa'ida and any links to it becomes the way that politicians tell us that certain people and groups are evil, and that to attempt to question your governments stance against such people or such groups is to placate such evil. To aid terrorism. In other words, al Qa'ida becomes a way of ending discussion. It is a full stop to any conversation.

Notice the way Blair has started to link al Qa'ida to Iran:

"The conventional view is that Iran is hostile to Al Qaeda: we know from our own history of conflict that, under the pressure of battle, alliances shift and change."

Notice that he offers no proof of Iranian linkage to al Qa'ida, he doesn't have to. He simply suggests that "alliances shift and change" and he's established this as a possibility.

He's using al Qa'ida a political convenience.

Now, I am sure that Bush and Blair have lots of information on this subject that we don't. However, if they really believe this organisation is as dangerous as they would like us to believe it is, then they would strengthen their argument considerably if they didn't use the al Qa'ida charge against every Somalian refugee they pick up.

At least 150 of those who managed to get through were detained by Kenyan police, including 17 women and 12 children, one a baby of seven months. Many needed medical attention but did not receive it, including a pregnant Tunisian woman who had a bullet lodged in her back.

All were held in Kenyan prisons for several weeks without access to lawyers and family members. As well as being interrogated by the FBI, human rights groups in Nairobi also claimed British officials were involved.

Is it credible to hold women and children as possible al Qa'ida suspects? I mean, seriously, aren't the US and UK in danger of emulating the boy who cried wolf?

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Tags: Somalia, Ethiopia, refugees, Bush, Blair, al Qa'ida