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Thursday, 18 August 2011

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Crime and punishment

Last week it was mentioned in this column that Jackie Sadek, the head of Britain’s urban regeneration programme, had asked that there be no knee-jerk reaction to the recent riots.

Unfortunately, knee-jerk is the only way one could describe the manner in which the authorities have reacted.

The Police have been deployed to arrest every offender they possibly can and have been filmed smashing down doors in order to arrest people. Courts are sitting around the clock to sentence the approximately 2,000 people who have been arrested since the riots began.

Some are being punished out of proportion to their offence, and people who would normally be enlarged on bail are remanded in custody. Offenders were being sentenced to the longest possible terms, often with the shortest possible trials.

Political pressure

One person was sentenced to six months for stealing water bottles worth Sterling Pounds 3.50 (Rs 620). Another was given six months for carrying a bag for picking up trainer shoes left on the street. Yet another person was remanded for stealing one Sterling Pound (Rs 180) worth of goods.

Looting and clashes in London, a result of ‘gang culture’. Picture courtesy: Google

A solicitor quoted in the Guardian newspaper said that this type of treatment was probably due to political pressure.

Parliament, in an emergency sitting, gave Police sanction to act with impunity. Lawmakers laid down punitive sanctions against those accused of involvement in the riots. These included the withdrawal of welfare benefits and eviction from government housing.

The first local authority to impose these punitive measures was Tory-run the London borough of Wandsworth. The mother of a person brought before the courts has been served an eviction notice, although she herself was not connected to the riots.

Paranthetically, it should be noted that the Geneva Convention recognises a policy of collective punishment, of penalising families for the misdemeanours of one of their members, as a war crime.

British citizens

The draconian measures against rioters have been accompanied by correspondingly ferocious rhetoric on the part of both the political elite and the media.

Politicians have been of one voice in condemning the rioters as ‘immoral’. They have absolved society of any blame for the disturbances, which they allege are caused by the rioters’ wickedness and a ‘gang culture’.

The press - with the notable exception of the Guardian - has a similar discourse. The Daily Mail’s Richard Littlejohn called the rioters ‘a wolfpack of feral inner-city waifs and strays’ who should have been ‘clubbed like baby seals’ - a reference to the appalling Western method of culling pinnipeds.

The media have been using precisely the kind of language used by the Oslo mass murderer, Anders Breivik, blaming the ‘welfare state’, the ‘liberal intelligentsia’ and ‘multi-culturalism’. The last term is code for ‘non-Western-European’. The pronouncements of the extreme right have gained acceptance. The neo-Nazi academic David Starkey said on the BBC that the notorious racist Enoch Powell had been right and that the cause of the riots was that Whites had become Black.

The English Defence League (the fascist organization with links to Breivik) has been spoken of approvingly for taking to the streets to fight the rioters.

This idiom is hardly conducive to an atmosphere of justice. And indeed it appears that retribution and not righteousness is what is being practised in Britain today. Justice cannot be arbitrary. Yet there is an obvious difference between the punishment meted out to the alleged rioters on the one hand, and the alleged perpetrators of war crimes on the other.

For example, former Foreign Minister David Miliband has been implicated in an illegal policy of torture of British citizens, as have other former ministers.

Yet no action is forthcoming against them. Nor are they labelled ‘immoral’ by the press.

Civil disturbances

The heavy-handed response to the riots will not eliminate the possibility of them happening again. In order for that to be done, it would be necessary to minimise the societal and economic causes for these disturbances. In particular, there must be compassion in dealing with these miscreants. Almost all of them are young and many are mere children.

The contrast with Sri Lanka’s treatment of captured separatist terrorists is astounding, considering that the latter were not involved in mere civil disturbances, but in outright acts of war.

The government has sought to reintegrate these former militants into society. It is recognised that these are children and youth who have been given a skewed world-view. They are being rehabilitated, given an education and found employment.

Most certainly, there has been no policy of collective punishment. The relatives of terrorist cadres are treated no differently from anyone else. Indeed, even the parents of Velupillai Prabhakaran, a mass murderer and self-confessed assassin have been looked after by the state.

Most importantly, the government acknowledges that there were grievances, genuine or imagined, which caused many youth to join the separatist battalions. It is these grievances and their causes which are being addressed through Parliament.

This provides an almost textbook example of how to deal with society’s ills, particularly those involving the crimes of the young.

 

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