For more than a century London has been a safe haven for political activists seeking to overthrow the regimes in power in their home countries. Revolutionaries have gravitated to Britain, and London in particular, because it offers a lax legal framework and easily assimilates foreigners. Some of these groups have been welcomed as democrats or liberators: most of them are now an embarrassment for a government that is helping to lead the global campaign against terror.
Not only do many organisations operate with impunity, but some of them receive official protection. One of the tasks of the Special Branch is not only to monitor the activities of potentially dangerous militants, but also to offer protection to the staff of groups that have received threats or are considered to be potential targets of attack. Thus the PLO representative in London has always been accompanied by an armed personal protection officer from the Metropolitan Police Special Branch.
In comparison to the police forces of other European countries, the 43 uncoordinated forces in England possess very limited powers. Moreover, public and commercial life is far less bureaucratic and legalistic than in most of continental Europe. People can drive cars without any photo identity cards; property can be purchased by nominees, third parties, partnerships and limited companies; bank accounts can be opened with the minimum of formalities and fund-raising is almost completely unregulated; publications are uncontrolled and customs checks at frontiers are minimal.
The police only adopt a more active role when there is evidence of a crime being, or about to be, committed. Provided organisations do not bring their turf wars into Britain the police are obliged to remain at a discreet distance. Even when Omar Bakhri, the self-styled Muslim imam of Hendon, defended an attack on a school bus in Haifa, he could not be charged for incitement to murder. He was free to continue recruiting volunteers for "active service" in Yemen, thus ensuring that his activities never compromised his status as a refugee in receipt of state benefits. The accommodating approach taken to handling such activists, who often have little support among their own ?migr? communities, does have one advantage. It seems to have played a part in keeping London free of foreign battles. London has had no middle east-inspired incidents since a car bomb detonated outside the Israeli embassy in Kensington in July 1994.
The Security Service is responsible for dealing with subversive activity in Britain. It advises the government on internal threats and on the status of potential suspects such as Leon Trotsky, who was refused entry in 1932 to avoid offending the Kremlin. MI5 has an entire division designated G Branch, devoted to countering international terrorism. This has several sub-groups: one concentrates on Sikh activists, extremists from Iran, Iraq, Kurdistan and the various Palestinian nationalists; another unit concentrates on Islamic fundamentalists and a third handles terrorists groups from the rest of the world.
Until this year, it has not been a criminal offence to plot terrorist atrocities that will occur outside British jurisdiction. In other words, an Algerian GIA bomber can travel from Harmondsworth to Paris to place an explosive device on the Metro, and return on the Eurostar, confident that he has committed no offence in Britain. His only fear is identification by the French authorities and perhaps imprisonment on remand, possibly for years, while the Legal Aid Fund opposes extradition. (One of the very few convictions obtained in recent years was that of a Sikh cell, suspected of ties to the bombers who destroyed an Air India jumbo jet on a flight from Toronto over the Atlantic 16 years ago. The Sikhs plotted to shoot a visiting Indian police officer while under MI5 surveillance. Because the crime was to be committed in the west end, and not New Delhi, arrests were made and prison sentences handed down.)
The Security Service says it is handicapped by the strict legal controls on the use of technical surveillance methods and their limited resources, both in terms of financial support and access to the language skills required to effectively monitor and penetrate target groups. The low-cost solution is to develop liaison links with other agencies-it has about 100 official links to agencies abroad-thus leaving the task of cultivating sources to them.
The result of all this is that London has become the home for an alphabet soup of terrorist groups from across the globe. No wonder so many foreign governments complain about the genteel way their enemies are treated.
Under the regulations introduced earlier this year, the Home Secretary can now proscribe certain named groups or their fronts, such as Hamas and Hizbullah, and close their bank accounts. The list of groups extends from the obvious, such as al-Qaeda, to the Kurdish PKK and more obscure Macedonian, Albanian, Chechen and Kashmiri rebels. Some of these groups accommodate numerous splinter groups in much the same way that the Palestinian cause attracts activists from across the spectrum, with some, like Palestinian Islamic Jihad and the Abu Nidal Organisation, rejecting the authority of the PLO. Similarly, Kashmiris are highly fragmented, with four organisations operating in Britain. One of them, the Jaish e Mohammed, is led by Masud Azhar, who is trying to unite all the Kashmiri Islamic groups, and is also committed to a jihad against the US. The Jaish is of particular interest to MI5 as a British passport holder, of Pakistani origin, was arrested by the Indian police in Srinigar and charged with terrorist offences. The implication was that he had been recruited and trained in Britain.
The Sikh secessionists, dedicated to an independent Khalistan within the Punjab, either support the International Sikh Youth Federation (which plots assassination in India but does not have any quarrel with western interests), or the Babbar Khalsa, which was created in 1978.
The largest other, non-Islamic group active in Britain is the Tamil Tigers, who have never sought to extend the conflict to establish an independent state outside Sri Lanka, apart from the assassination of Rajiv Gandhi in 1991. The Tamil Tiger activities in London are quite overt, with much emphasis on fund-raising, prompting frequent protests from the Sri Lankan Embassy.
Altogether MI5 monitors 21 separate non-domestic organisations which are the subject of proscription in Britain, and keeps a further unknown number under discreet surveillance. Some pose minimal threat in London, such as the Abu Sayaaf Group based in the Philippines, which has a history of seizing western hostages and is known to have links to Libya and bin Laden, and the Aum Shinrikyo ("Supreme Truth") which released deadly Sarin gas on the Tokyo underground in March 1995. The other Japanese group on MI5's list is the Japanese Red Army, led by the elusive Fusako Shigenobu, and based in the Syrian controlled Bekaa valley in the Lebanon. The JRA's bloody history dates back to the massacre at Lod airport in 1972, and its support of the Palestinian cause spreads into a wider, anti-capitalist, anti-imperialist field.
Apart from the 14 Irish groups on the British proscribed list, the two other principal European terrorist organisations active in Britain are the Basque separatists ETA and the Athens-based 17 November Revolutionary Organisation, known as N17.
Of all these groups, it is the Islamic fundamentalists that are the most elusive. There are known to be British cells of the Egyptian Islamic Jihad, and its rival, the Al-Gama'a al-Islamiya (responsible for the deaths of 65 tourists in Luxor in November 1997), plus the Islamic Army of Aden and several others. They are virtually impossible for MI5 to penetrate.
Some terrorism has been state-sponsored, most famously the support for Hizbullah from Iran. Like Abu Nidal, which has attacked British targets on 17 occasions, Hizbullah attracts special attention from MI5 because it has in the past kidnapped Britons in Lebanon. While Libya has renounced its sponsorship of terrorism, chiefly as a result of the isolation imposed after the destruction of the Pan Am flight over Lockerbie, Iran's role remains ambiguous, and Hizbullah has plenty of adherents in British mosques. Accordingly, surveillance on Iranian and Syrian diplomatic missions is as intensive now as when Somalia was providing 'Carlos the Jackal' with a safe haven.
One of the consequences of 11th September is that even the most dubious of regimes have now signed up to anti-terrorist cooperation, which may make MI5's task a little easier, but is bound to increase the number of its domestic targets too.
The new legislation, authorising the proscription list, offers a method for organisations to apply to be delisted and an appeals procedure with an independent tribunal. It remains to be seen whether the new law comes to be regarded as overly draconian, as some critics claim, or the bare minimum required by the authorities to protect the public from an amorphous adversary for whom self-preservation is not an issue. n
