When terror strikes home in Britain

SUICIDE TERROR: While Sri Lanka, with relieving calm, passed the nervous phase of the LTTE’s Martyrs Day — a euphemism for the Day of Suicide Terror — two days ago, Britain awakens today to the dreaded anniversary of 7/7 when terror made its devastating strike on British Transport both on rail and road.

The terror alert in Britain has now been scaled down one notch from “critical” to “severe”, but there is no denying that Prime Minister Gordon Brown has had more than his baptism of blood in the bomb scare in London, the blazing Jeep attack at Glasgow Airport, and the terrorist alert at Liverpool’s John Lennon airport.

While Tony Blair can now reflect from a distance on the aftermath in Britain of what George W Bush and he together brought upon the United Kingdom with the cunningly and viciously calculated War on Terror and regime change in Iraq; the actual fall out from the war in Iraq and related expansion of terror worldwide is now haunting both Britain and the United States.

Whether the attack on the Glasgow Airport was a special message sent to Prime Minister Brown because of his Scottish origins and abiding interest in Scotland, or the Mercedes limousine bombs found in London was a pointer to the up-market scale of terror in the UK, the events of the past week have brought terror and terrorism right into the heartland of Britain.

When Gordon Brown said that “Britain will not yield despite a sustained threat from people associated with Al-Qaida”, and the new Home Secretary Jacqui Smith told the House of Commons the British public would not be “intimidated or let anyone stop us getting on with our lives”, they were both demonstrating the expected reaction to the reality of terror that has literally struck on one’s doorstep.

“The Independent” of July 2 quotes former Scotland Yard commissioner Lord Stevens, who will soon take over as Prime Minister Brown’s security adviser saying: “The terror of 7/7 was awful enough, but now Al-Qaida has imported the tactics of Baghdad and Bali to the streets of the UK.

And it will get worse before it gets better ... There is growing suspicion that Al-Qaida operatives possibly British- born have returned from Iraq as well as Afghanistan to guide, direct and influence groups here.”

What is left unstated is how much the British participation in what could end up as the callous dismembering of Iraq, in a wholly unreal war on terror, has brought this crisis upon and into Britain and the lives of the British people.

While, these are matters that the British public will have to study in fashioning British society’s own response to terror and the healing of Britain, one suddenly sees a country that has over the years soft-pedaled on terror suddenly realising the truth that terrorism is a scourge that needs eradication both in its cause and its manifestation.

Familiar path

To us in Sri Lanka what is happening in Britain today has an all too familiar pattern, and the reactions from its leaders are not very different from the considered responses of our own leaders too.

Gordon Brown may not have taken a cue from President Mahinda Rajapaksa in what he said about not yielding to forces that posed a sustained threat, but it is not much different to what the Sri Lankan President said, much to the annoyance of some, that he would not kneel down before terrorism.

We now have the British establishment moving fast forward to bring in more stringent laws and regulations to combat terrorism, which is likely to include longer period of detention before trial, questioning while in remand custody, more freedom for police to questioning citizens, and increased barriers for immigrants from Asian and African countries.

It is also interesting to see how organisations such as the BBC, and several other western wire-services and news channels, that have sought to sanitise terrorism in these parts by referring to the LTTE’s terror as rebel action; with the careful deletion of any reference of “terrorists” or “terrorism” of the Tigers, who they see as nothing but benign “rebels”; suddenly go gaga in reporting the terrorism that has struck Britain, with never a reference to any activities of “rebel”, “radical” or “militant” Britons in what is taking place in the UK today.

It appears that to the media pundits of the BBC, and similar thinkers, it is now inescapable wisdom that wherever there is the touch of Al-Qaida, or even an allegation of it, it shall be terrorism, with no concern for the underlying causes that are driving so many Muslims, including doctors, to take to the path of terror as the Middle East suffers under the burdens of a decidedly rapacious West, and its unsurpassed humiliation.

Tiger Tiger Just by coincidence the current threat of terror may open more eyes in Britain to the travails that we in Sri Lanka have gone through because of terrorism of the “Liberation Tigers” or “the Tamil Tiger rebels” as the BBC would have it, with a Tiger creeping into the present action even by sheer accident.

For the record the British police found one of the two Mercedes limousines planned for the major explosion in London one outside the “Tiger Tiger” nightclub in Haymarket.

It will be interesting to know whether the lure of the Tiger was purely accidental, or an iconic image drawn from the known record of the Wanni Tigers in the successful masterminding or terror.

There are signs of hope for Sri Lanka in the British police finally closing in on one of the leaders of the LTTE and his associates in the UK, barely a week before all this fear was unleashed in Britain.

The new awareness of the reality of terror and the necessity to take all necessary action to face up to the threat it poses to British society, including inter-communal relations that are in crisis, could well mean that the UK is no more the happy home away from home for the LTTE, its propagandists and fund-raisers.

If Britain begins to really share the agony that Sri Lanka continues to go through because of the LTTE’s commitment to terror, it can help pave the way to many changes in Sri Lanka, of which a search for a political solution is not the least important.

But can the pain the British feel today extend to other societies that are faced with similar threats, if there is no great economic gain for the British in doing so, and in the absence of the harsh measures that a country such as Sri Lanka has to face because of terrorism?

How many countries will follow Australia in issuing travel advisories to their citizens about visiting the UK? Who are the insurers that will impose surcharges on Glasgow, Liverpool and even Heathrow airports when they have to shut down due to terror alerts or even a blazing vehicle that rams into a key entrance?

When will we see heart on the sleeve journalists from the democracies of India, Sri Lanka or Nepal go to Britain to cover the stories that will emerge from the increased policing and the many new laws and regulations that will soon come into force with Gordon Brown’s unyielding stance on terrorism?

The face of Britain is changing fast, and regrettably it is most likely to be an unfriendly face that we will see very soon.