Interview with Hicham Yezza & Rizwaan Sabir

Published: August 26, 2010 23:41 by Riseup Radio

Riseup: Hicham Yezza and Rizwaan Sabir were arrested under the Terrorism Act in May 2008 at the University of Nottingham. Hicham was found to be in possession of an electronic copy of the al-Qaeda training manual, copied from his friend Rizwaan who he was helping with a dissertation on terrorism. The two were released without being charged with any offence relating to terrorism, although Hicham was immediately rearrested in an attempt to deport him to Algeria. The arrests generated a huge amount of media attention and raised important questions about academic freedom, racism and the climate of fear and suspicion. They also sparked the formation of the Free Hicham campaign which, through mobilising hundreds of people to demonstrations and thousands through electronic means, eventually helped to secure Hicham's release. Hicham has now won the right to remain in the UK. In the pair's first joint interview since 2008, Riseup Radio spoke to them about the persecution they've faced since the arrests, the plight of other Muslims accused of terrorist offences, the government's anti-terror strategies, the growth of Islamophobia in the media and in the form of groups like the EDL, and what their plans are for the future.

Yezza: Hello. I am Hicham Yezza.

Sabir: And I am Rizwaan Sabir and I am a PhD student up in Strathclyde at the University of Strathclyde researching British and Scottish counter terrorism, going into the second year now. Should be completed in 2012. A very interesting subject - lot's of food for thought.

Riseup: People will be familiar with the story of what happened to you both in 2008, when you were arrested, wrongfully, under anti terrorism legislation, and I wondered if you could speak a little bit about how that's affected your lives since then.

Sabir: Well, being arrested under the Terrorism Act is quite a unique thing. Even if you're arrested for the smallest of crimes... well a crime is a crime but even if it's for a most basic thing it stays on a record, and it stays on that record for an amount of time. But the environment we find ourselves in today is, what you have is if you're arrested and detained as a suspected terrorist, and even if you're cleared... you have the case of Hicham which quite clearly highlights that the way the state behaves towards you, especially in the case of foreign nationals, if you're not a British citizen that is... But what you have even for a British citizen is a tally next to your name which appears next to every single record there is. Obviously if you're CRB checked, which appears on pretty much any kind of work with any vulnerable community or individual, the Police National Computer will have it, and just to clarify the Police National Computer doesn't say that you've been arrested as a terrorist; it says "one non-conviction, offences against the state". Now if you take that theory apart, non-conviction, it doesn't tell the police officer radioing through whether you've been charged with an offence and then acquitted; it just says you weren't convicted. So every time you have an encounter with the police, and I seem to have quite a few, I wonder if my race, my colour or my beard has anything to do with that, every time I do and they run my name through the system, a flag pops up and they start asking very personal questions like "Why were you arrested? What does this mean?" So that's obviously the most immediate one on a daily basis, if you ever have an encounter with the police. The other one is by travelling. What I've been told by a very good source is that you get put onto a terrorist watch list and this is determined by stars - it's a star grading system. So, depending on how much of a threat the state considers you, and dependent upon how many stars you've got, do they stop you from travelling? Do they interrogate you every time? Do they stop you every time? Now, out of the last probably 6 times I've travelled I've been stopped four times under Schedule 7. Two of those stops have been over one hour. The most recent one was for 2 hours, the one previous in 2008 was for 1 1/2 hours. If you're stopped under Schedule 7 for less than 1 hour, they don't have to log that i.e. you don't have any record or piece of paper given to you to say that you've been stopped under Schedule 7. So I've been stopped twice for less than an hour, i.e. no paper issued, and twice in excess of an hour, so I've been officially told. But what's happening now is that every time I travel I seem to be getting stopped and questioned and it's just turning more into general kind of questioning to harassment almost every time I travel. So that's another one. In regards to that, just the amount of press coverage led to certain events within certain communities in this country, and especially the academic community. And what's emerged now after filing certain information requests and Data Protection requests to the University of Nottingham, what is quite evident from that information, or the heavily redacted information that has been released, is that there's a substantial element of suspicion, even though both myself and Hicham were both cleared. The Data Protection requests regarding me more specifically show from certain elements within the university that they suspected I was guilty and that they suspected I was involved in something possibly subversive even though I'd been released and that a lot of material seems to indicate that. So again you've got an institutional form of, what I like to say, Islamophobia, the 21st Century equivalent of racism, an accepted form of racism, and I think that's quite worrying at the moment when contemplating and considering what to do with that information and the point is that this is what happens once you've been released, even cleared, and you've actually proven that you've done nothing wrong, and you still have this label attached to your name which is quite damaging to you as an individual, and especially as an academic or someone who's involved in security sensitive research. Every time I now have to, or want to consider doing an interview, I have to really weigh up all the ethical considerations and how will the board that's passing my ethical research proposal, how will they view my arrest and will they think that no, the risk is too high to the participant if I interview them, or is it likely that they would be arrested, etc. So, again, even though you've been cleared the problems are just... they stick with you for a very, very long time, and the fact that the War on Terror doesn't really have a clean end date in sight, certainly not at the moment, we don't know how long this will last - how long is a piece of string? We frankly don't know. So these are some of the side issues that don't really get any mainstream coverage of what it is to be arrested and released without charge and having to live with that name or that label of being a former suspected terrorist.

Riseup: Hicham, your story is in many ways equally damaging, the legacy of the arrests, but in quite a different way. Perhaps you could explain what's happened to yourself?

Yezza: Well of course, I mean obviously there's similarities and sort of a shared experience of what Rizwaan has gone through and what Rizwaan is going through now, and of course in my case it's got the whole immigration issue because not being a British citizen has meant that I've been at the receiving end of some very, very draconian laws. You know, the immigration laws in this country are the sort of laws that are at the meeting of extreme unaccountability with total power given into the hands of the most minor civil servants working for the UK Border Agency, who have almost unlimited power and discretion over the lives of people who are not UK citizens, in a way that you would never ever find in any other branch of the government or the state. And this has meant that I've had to fight for two years, since May 2008 till August 2010, against the Home Office's attempts to deport me. And the Home Office, of course, tried to deport me almost from the word go, from the very first few hours after I'd been arrested under the Terrorism Act, as soon as there was the realisation that there was nothing to the terrorism charge, that it was a completely wrongful arrest, that it was going nowhere and they realised that the pressure was on them to justify what they'd just done, the attempt was simply to divert attention and create some sort of side issue that would distract the attention of the public and all the actors concerned. They tried to deport me; they set the date for the flight a week away after the initial release from the initial arrest, but it took 18 months. It took 6 months spent in either prison or UK immigration centres, and thousands of pounds of legal fees, and thousands of pounds of money spent trying to just fight the case, not to mention tens and tens of thousands of pounds spent by the Home Office on behalf of the taxpayer trying to get me deported. And it took 2 years until, earlier this month, in August, for me to have, finally, brought the whole case to a halt. I mean, winning the case almost a year ago, and then for me to receive my residence papers and get back my documents which happened earlier this month. So that tells you what happens to other people who are not as lucky as I've been, having a huge amount of support and being in a position where I can actually fight the state and stay the course in this war of attrition that the Home Office imposes on its victims. Rizwaan has spoken very eloquently and has covered a lot of the points that are to do with what being accused of being a terror suspect actually means and it's a very good point because very early on in my case, because I happened to be an Algerian national, I questioned my safety in terms of whether I could safely travel back to my country which has a history of dealings with Islamism and so on. The idea that I had been accused of terrorism in Britain could have huge ramifications for me personally, and in the course of dealing with that, we - myself and my legal team, had requested statements from the Home Office and from the police to confirm in writing that I had been cleared of the arrests, and even now, 2 years later, after my initial arrest under the Terrorism Act, the Home Office and the police are refusing to grant that statement, on the grounds that I have been cleared because of lack of evidence, rather than because of evidence of innocence, if that makes sense. In other words you're forever guilty, but not guilty enough to be convicted in their eyes. In other words the police still considers, or at least pretends to consider, or tells people it considers that myself, and probably Rizwaan, are people who have simply escaped through their net for lack of evidence, which is extremely damaging, because that happens to pretty much anyone who is arrested under the Terrorism Act. It's a life sentence, essentially.

Sabir: I think it's really important to mention here as well the way the police operate and under what kind of paradigm they're working. When you are arrested and detained, everyone says you have a defence i.e. you talk in a police interview and prove to the police that you are not guilty of the crime and why you were, for example, in possession of terrorist literature, or contested literature. And everyone thinks that if you tell this then they will say "OK, fine," you know, "not guilty and we're not going to charge you". It doesn't work like that. The police are working on one paradigm and one paradigm only - can they prove to a jury and a court, beyond reasonable doubt, that your defence will stand or not. That's what they're thinking. Are you guilty enough to go to court and the prosecution can prove to the court that you are or not? That's it. The police are not a court, they're not the jury and they're not the judge; that's not for them to decide. If they think that a defence is not strong enough then they will charge you and they will prosecute you, or at least try to prosecute you, to try to get a conviction. I think there's a common understanding that if you get arrested you get cleared because justice takes its course, etc. Of course, it doesn't work like that. It's dependent on the police and whether they can move beyond reasonable doubt. I think that's another really, really important facet of how the legal system works and anybody that understands that will know that to be arrested, 1: it's not very difficult with the police powers that we have and the sweeping remit of the legislation but 2: how actually easy it is to be charged as a suspected terrorist even though you've done absolutely nothing wrong and what happens when you get charged with a terrorist offence? You're too dangerous to release into society therefore you're remanded in custody in a high security wing in a high security prison, for example, Woodhill or Belmarsh or Long Lartin in the north, and you have to wait very patiently for the courts to take their course and the jury to decide whether you're guilty or not guilty and with the way that our criminal justice system works at the moment, I think it's going to take you at least a year, if not more, for your trial to come to court and by that time you've served one year in prison, for what? Nothing. So this is the truth of the criminal justice system and how the police operate. Coming back to Hicham's point I think that really strengthens what he's saying and the problems with it.

Riseup: I think you've already started to answer it, but what I was going to say was I know both of you have strong social networks, you're well educated, at university, and so on, you have the resources to defend yourselves. What happens to people who end up in your situation, wrongly accused of involvement in terrorism and, for whatever reason they don't have those same resources to be able to mount a defence? Do you know how typical your cases are and what happens to other people in that situation?

Yezza: Well, I mean, there's no need to speculate. We know what happened to one of the high profile cases that followed ours, which was that of the... I think it was 11 or 12 Pakistani students in Manchester, the so called Manchester arrests, and it was incredibly similar to my case at least in terms of the immigration aspect of it. I mean, here you have 11 or 12 Pakistani nationals, students in this country, who'd been arrested under the Terrorism Act, they'd been questioned for 12-13 days, and then although there was not any evidence, not even to charge them with an ASBO, there was enough evidence, or there seemed to be enough evidence for them to be deemed a national threat to security, and that tells you everything. You know, if you've got enough evidence to classify somebody as a threat to national security and yet you cannot find anything in the laws of the land, and there are very draconian and very extensive laws under New Labour that have been introduced... so for you to not be able to find a single charge that you can find to lay on them and yet find them to be a danger to national security, and therefore use that excuse to again use immigration powers to deport them. And we've seen what happens. I mean, these people had a very, very minor network of support, compared to ours, and what happened was many of them simply were thrown in jail, could not either afford to be released or were not released because they couldn't find the legal means to do so, and, in the end, a lot of them just gave up and just accepted to be taken out of the country even though they still maintained their innocence and they still maintained their desire to stay but they simply were in a position where they were unable to defend themselves, and were taken to Pakistan... I think 10 of them have now been deported, and many of them are fighting an appeal against the deportation. But that tells you that without a network of support, most people, if they are under the immigration aspect of the laws, then they've got very, very little chance without a very strong level of support because the immigration laws are extremely powerful and can basically mean you can be put on a flight within 48 hours of being arrested and that is an immense power that the Home Office has no hesitation in using whenever someone is inconvenient enough and they need to have them out of the picture. I've met some people when I was in Woodhill prison, for example, which is a high security prison, I met some people who were accused of terrorism and one of them had been there, I think, for more than a year, and a lot of the time they've not got even an idea about what is the charge against them and this is the classic Kafkaesque predicament. You don't even know what it is you're meant to be defending yourself against. We're lucky, because, as you said, we happen to have a particular profile in the sense of having a certain level of education, having a strong network of support, and it's protected us to a great degree from what the majority of people who are subjected to the so called anti terror laws have to live through. And this is not to mention the low level harassment that happens every day whenever somebody is stopped and searched, or whatever. I mean, for example, the horrific story of control orders, which Rizwaan I'm sure can mention as well, where people are simply given a life sentence in all but name, and are driven to the edge of insanity by the state.

Sabir: I think your question's quite an interesting one. I think the figures will speak for themselves. Since 2001... since September 11th 2001 to 31st March '08 we probably had 924 convictions under the terrorism legislation, Terrorism Act.

Riseup: Convictions?

Sabir: Yeah, convictions. And if you look at the figures 93% of those are black and Asians who class themselves as Muslims. We know who the target of this law and the entire contested counter terrorism strategy is - it's Muslims, it's the government's official Muslim policy since 9/11. And I think what is proven if you don't have the network available to you that me and Hicham were very, very fortunate to have, is you face a very difficult task of trying to mobilise a series of people in your support, to prove your innocence, and again, what we've learnt through this entire 2 year ordeal, or certainly Hicham has, is the importance of widespread support. Press, activist media such as yourself as well, is very important to prove to the state that we're not going to let you get away with the crimes that you continue to commit in the name of preserving our liberties at the expense of taking away the liberties and freedoms of a very small number of people. I think Hicham's case has been truly revolutionary because I, myself, have now been involved in research on this issue since my release in 2008 and have not come across a single individual who has fought the Home Office in such a way that they've managed to stay on in this country after being branded as a suspected terrorist. So in this case Hicham's case has been truly revolutionary, and one that I hope that other individuals that have been wrongly accused under immigration laws after being released from terrorism laws will use and will try and employ in their cases as well to try and bring an element of justice to their lives, or at least try and get their lives back to a certain level of normality. So I think the figures speak for themselves. That's what happens when you don't have a wide range of support. I'm not saying that every single one of those people who have ever been convicted under terrorism laws is innocent, because there's a strong amount of evidence to prove that; I'm not contesting that, but I'm saying that certain individuals that have been charged under Section 57, 58 offences, for example, the collection of information or the collection of an article... a lot of the time it's been propaganda, material words, not even pictures or videos, which just proves again you don't have to have done anything wrong in order to fall foul of this, and if you didn't have those networks and that support, even the 5 Bradford university students that were arrested in, I think, in '04 or '05, they were charged and convicted only to be later... later their conviction was quashed and they were acquitted, but again it just shows that if you don't have that network then the threat that you face is a lot higher because the state feel that they can get away with literally anything they like. You know, lawyers can only fight to a certain extent in court but what we need is popular mobilisation, on the street, and people to fight your corner for you, and in that sense I think we're very blessed to have that support. So I think that it's very important to have that.

Riseup: And I mean, given the context of how much surveillance community in Britain, and, you know, the States and other Western countries... how much surveillance the Muslim community is under, it's not surprising that some radical literature is going to be found somewhere, regardless of how relevant that is to actually preventing terrorism. I mean, I'm sure you'll be familiar with the stories about Birmingham recently, with the security cameras that they wanted to install to form a ring of steel around particular neighbourhoods, that just happened to be Muslim neighbourhoods. What are your thoughts on the government's counter terrorism strategy?

Sabir: Soft power strategy.

Riseup: Right, yeah, soft power. What do you feel that the government's actually hoping to achieve with this? I mean, is it really just counter terror or is there a broader strategy than that? And what do you feel would really be an effective strategy for dealing with terrorism?

Sabir: Can I come in on this? With regards to Prevent I think there's two components to this. One is playing for the press, especially the tabloid press, who are vying for those to be held to account who are preaching extreme, in quotation marks, comments, i.e. anti-British governmental narrative or going against the status quo. There's a real aspect of trying to quieten the press, the tabloid press and to pretend we're doing something, and I think this is best proven by Tony Blair's famous speech "The rules of the game are changing" where he came out with this 12 point plan, and in fact every single one of those policies, other than 2, couldn't go through, wouldn't be passed or had already been implemented. Only 2 of them ever went through which proves we're only playing for the press i.e. the government is just playing for the press. So I think that's a very important element. The second element, and this is proven if you look into the documents that have been published in the mainstream by the government and especially the police and the Home Office, and there's a significant element of intelligence gathering and surveillance that is under way, and Prevent is strategically and theoretically based on a counter insurgency framework, which has a heavy element of collecting intelligence on a community, in order to understand the community, in order to allow the state, the police and the intelligence services to target their narrative that reinforces their position, more articulately, more meticulously and more specifically. You can't... if you don't know where the problem is you can't... If you know where the problem is, I should say, then you know, as the state, where the narrative needs to be sold more. So you'll co-opt certain Muslim community leaders, and you'll co-opt certain powerful groups in society such as women. Muslim women have a very powerful role, particularly in Pakistani households, which the majority of Muslims in this country are Pakistani. So you co-opt and you start off the National Muslim Women's Advisory Group to show, you know, that the government supports people who are being forced... that the government supports people who are being forced into marriage, or any other kind of social issue that is not normal in society, what we'd consider abnormal is being supported by the state purely to co-opt certain groups and push that narrative forwards, and that's what Prevent is. It's to gather intelligence; there are certain intelligence gathering operations under way at the moment. Project Rich Picture, a very, very, badly publicised, for obvious reasons, initiative, formulated by the government and the police services and the intelligence services, dedicated to collating mass intelligence on the Muslim community, to generate a rich picture understanding, to target policy more effectively. They're saying this; I'm not saying this. I'm not making it up. If you read the theories and the policy papers it's all there. So I think that's a really important part of prevent; I think that's what it's doing. It's going to get scrapped now because there's no empirical way of measuring how radical or deradicalised somebody has become because of Prevent. So I think in that sense it's going to get scrapped and I think it should get scrapped because it's been a knee jerk reaction and it's a knee jerk policy that's been formulated. What do I think? I think there needs to be few policy amendments in regard to this issue and one is I think the legislation that's in place and the other legal frameworks that are in place really, really need to be either reassessed very, very critically and scrapped in many cases. The definition of terrorism really needs to be narrowed because there's no distinction between someone standing up for their rights in North Korea and no difference between someone speaking up for, or applauding, or praising what the American revolutionaries or Ghandi did who were both.. or even for that matter Lawrence of Arabia who was a terrorist under the current definition, and what somebody's doing in the streets of Baghdad or Afghanistan like killing a market place full of people, or killing people in a market place. So I think that really needs to be tightened, so I think, in that sense, that's important, but I think we need to give, or we need to have a series of policies with a very tight check and balance approach in regards to intelligence gathering and state surveillance. I believe that state surveillance is an important part of countering the threat of terrorism, but, again, we need to have a proportionate response and we need to contextualise, and that is we need to look at the threat level and if you have a look at the figures for the threat levels they tell their own story. The predominant threat in the United Kingdom of Great Britain comes from the North of Ireland and dissident Irish republican groups. It doesn't come from Muslims, it doesn't come from anyone acting in the name of Islam. Throughout Europe in fact most of the attacks are dedicated to either separatist movements, whether it's ETA in Spain or dissident Irish republicans in Ireland, or left wing paramilitaries in Greece and Italy. That is what constitutes the majority of the threat in Europe. Yet if you look at the media coverage and the policies that are being formulated, they all tell a story of their own. So I think we need to have a proportionate response to the level of threat, and we can only have that if we have more transparency. Once we have that transparency, and I, you and everybody else who's interested in this issue can sit down and try to contribute to formulating a more coherent and proportionate policy. Until we've got all the facts we can't... I certainly can't say "This is the policy we need", but I certainly can say we need more transparency, proportionality and due process to certainly lead us towards the right direction. And from there we can have more mature policies.

Yezza: OK. Rizwaan's already covered pretty much all of the bases, but if I were to add something I'd say on the first point of what the government is saying it wants to achieve, whether this is actually their aim, I think that there's a multiplicity of overlapping agendas at work. Two of them that need to be mentioned are the political economy, so to speak, agenda, which is that, at the end of the day, this policy which says, or claims to be fighting this gigantic enemy called terrorism, or domestic terrorism, is keeping a multi billion dollar industry very busy, and whenever you're dealing with lots and lots of billions of dollars, pounds, you know that means some people will have an interest in continuing and increasing in the way they're being done, rather than the other way round. A lot of people would lose a lot of money if the government's counter terrorism programme were to be scaled down to what it should be, it's natural proportions, if anything.

Riseup: And who are the people making that money?

Yezza: Well, I mean, it's a very, very connected industry to the immigration enforcement industry. In other words, security companies, the industry that supplies the governments tools, and that goes from the physical infrastructure to things like building new prisons, to things like the immigration centres, and, of course, which is the link to my second point, the military industrial complex, because at the end of the day, the argument is that if you've got lots of angry, young Muslims supposedly wanting to inflict harm on their fellow Britons and on British society in general, there's two ways you can achieve your so called aim of trying to deal with this issue. Either you go and spend lots of billions of dollars trying to lead an illegal war somewhere very far off where lots of Muslims get killed, where you make lots and lots of people angrier, which is one way of doing things. This seems to be what the government seems to think is the best way of combating terrorism, is to pursue foreign policy issues that, by their own definition, increase the likelihood of extremist groups getting more adherents and members, and at the same time, domestically, spending more billions of dollars trying to make life hell for people who are from a particular community. Targeting them and making it very hard for them to operate in the society on an equal footing with their non Muslim fellow citizens. In other words, you can alienate a community domestically and alienate it internationally by pursuing policies that you know make that community more likely to be more vulnerable to the approaches of extremist preaching and so on. So in that sense I think it's very clear that if the government really is serious; if the succession of governments has been serious in claiming that this is their aim, they've been going about achieving their aim in a very, very interesting, and idiosyncratic and original and creative way, to say the least.

Riseup: Ineffectively, maybe?

Yezza: Yeah. I think anyone who's serious can see that the government has no interest whatsoever in fighting any so called terrorist threat, because the first thing you do when you're fighting a terrorist threat is, number 1, stop creating the reasons for that terrorist threat in the first place, and what the government has done has multiplied the reasons and the causes of that potential terrorist threat by a factor of a thousand in the last 10 years, at least. So, you know, you could see that this is, at best, a very, very lazy attempt to cover up what is, in my view, a simple attempt to cover up, number 1, to provide an industry or a number of industries with stuff to do, and second, giving the government a narrative, as Rizwaan said, that is extremely politically valuable in that it distracts the population at large, it channels anxieties and resentment into a very, very clear direction towards a very vulnerable minority, and it's classical government propaganda style action. It's very, very common, it has been used before, in other countries, in this country for many decades, and I'm sure most people who are working against this abuse of government powers are aware of this, that I think the key challenge is to try and break the barrier to the mainstream population and try and make sure that this picture, of how the government is misspending billions of pounds of taxpayer's money, to increase the threat of terrorism, which is what they're doing; that has to be exposed.

Sabir: I think you should mention the repercussions of this policy as well, that has been manifest towards ordinary men and women walking on the street, whether it's someone calling them Mr Taliban or some Iraqi insurgent or calling them a terrorist, or spitting in women's faces and their veils and the whole burqa debate as well, saying it's a security threat. So I think the two are connected and I think if anybody had the barrage of information being thrown at them for the last 10 years they would eventually start to believe that a certain element of it was true. But what you have is when you accuse and abuse your position for the sake of political objectives or political motives, such as these, what you have is you have the Muslim community drawing inward, so rather than eliminating alienation or someone... or what the government is purportedly doing which is challenging people who are segregated or practising self segregation, what you in fact do is draw them inward, because you only recognise them through being a Muslim; you don't see them as a human being. You see them as a Muslim man or a Muslim woman or somebody who has a series of political objectives that they're trying to, you know, further. But that draws the Muslim community inwards and leads to further alienation. And some of these people are some of the most smartest or are certainly meant to be some of the most smartest and are you telling me for one second that these people haven't thought of that? If they haven't thought of it they've certainly had researchers, academics, intellectuals, activists and the community saying this, yet no notice has been taken, which then ties into what Hicham has very articulately said, the reason why this is being done. So I think that really, really needs to be reassessed like I said, initially as well. Hicham?

Yezza: I agree. I concur.

Sabir: [Laughs] There's a surprise!

Yezza: Maybe I didn't cover all grounds when I answered your question about which industries, for example, are benefiting from this. This is not a conspiracy theory with no grounds, this is pretty straightforward stuff that even security companies and the military industrial complex is almost gleefully boasting about, how business is good. Until very recently, I had to go and report at an immigration centre in Loughborough, because of the fact that I had to wait for my legal documents, and at the entrance of the centre is a nice little sign that tells you the level of security threat in the country in general, and every day, and every week I've been there for the last few years it's said "Heightened", and that tells you everything, because that heightened state, presumably is something that will surprise many people who are from the general public, that this is something that is actually considered; this is the official status of security in the United Kingdom, because if you look around you you think "If this is heightened,what is calm and peaceful?" in the sense that we haven't had anything.

Riseup: It's interesting that you say that, because you look at the way that some of the media report on "Islamic extremism", or groups like the EDL or the BNP, their support comes from maintaining the idea that we are under constant threat from this, dangerous outside community, the Muslims, and there are people out there who have accepted that, and almost seem to believe that Britain is on the edge of takeover.

Sabir: Islamisation of Britain and Europe.

Riseup: Exactly, yeah.

Sabir: And what you find is, even though there might not be an element of popular support for the EDL and what they stand for, which is just flagrant fascism and racism, what you have with the EDL is an element of legitimacy and some of the things they call for because they play on popular themes. So, you know, they'll mention the burqa, they'll mention Muslims wanting shariah law, even though it's got nothing to do with challenging the legal system in this country, but certain pockets of it dealing with, for example, divorce or family issues. They'll use that, and then what that does is it shows to the public that is, on the whole, apathetic, what's happening in this regard, certainly in the regard that doesn't affect them, is you gain an element of legitimacy. The government is doing nothing to crack down on the EDL, which again is fostering... I would say a minority of the EDL, or pockets related to the EDL offshoots, a more violent strand. But there's no media coverage of it, because again, it doesn't tie into the government's narrative. Even if you look at Contest, it does say in it "Oh, we do face a threat from right wing extremism, but we're not going to focus on it." Why do you not focus on it? You've got a rise in it; you've got a resurgence in it. You're neglecting the white working class community who, within certain parts of this country are very, very misrepresented and misunderstood, and also quite isolated and do suffer, yet there's no form of action being taken in their defence or for them, to bring them into the mainstream. Everything has been Islam or Muslim orientated and, again, what that's doing is festering hatred, to say "Hang on a minute. So these guys... these guys with beards and funny hats on and funny robes on are blowing up tubes and trains and these guys are getting all the money, and our community", whether it's Hindu, Sikh or white Christian or not Christian, "they're not doing anything wrong and yet they're being neglected." So, I think, rather than enhance community cohesion or any kind of cross community interaction, what the government is actually doing is undermining community cohesion and cross community interaction.

Riseup: It could be said, couldn't it, that it's a form of divide and rule.

Sabir: Well, you could say that. Again, with the existence of the EDL... now I'm not saying that this is a conspiracy theory, I certainly don't want to do that, but it's certainly food for thought that if you have groups like the EDL going around and dancing about the place, it keeps the nation under constant guard, like, "What are these people saying and what do they want?" Yeah, they're only a group of 100 or 200, you know, the Islam4UK effect. It's only a tiny minority but they seem to be hijacking the airwaves and the broadcast media. Hardly anything exists but they do get an element of legitimacy in what they're saying and I think that's quite dangerous, and for... I think if you ask especially Muslim women who, I think, feel quite vulnerable, if you ask them what they understand the EDL to be they'll feel very threatened by it. And when I think of my family and my mother, you know, my family they wear the headscarf, some women do, when I think of them and the EDL it's quite a worrying and distressing issue.

Yezza: I think that's certainly a good point. I mean, without wanting to belabour the point, you can look at the government's own propaganda and own statement of what they see as the problem and what they intend to do about it... Well, if you take their statement at face value and say "Well, OK, we accept your statement that there is a terrorist threat, it's serious and it needs to be tackled" and so on and so forth, if you wanted to write a text book, or devise a text book strategy to increase the level of terrorism and completely exacerbate the terrorist threat, you couldn't do better than what the government's doing now. I mean, take it from the personal angle and widen that. If you look at what happened to Rizwaan, for example, just when travelling, the fact that he's been arrested 6 times, in itself can tell you...

Sabir: Detained.

Yezza: Detained 6 times... If you wanted to think of a way of using police powers to just make people more angry and antagonise members of the community, the precise member of the community that you should be seeking to try and build bridges with. And not to mention what happened in Birmingham with the CCTV scandal, and so on and so forth, and what's happening at the moment in UK prisons in terms of the Muslim population, the whole coarsening of the narrative and the rhetoric against them, it's very clear that either the government do not mean what they say, or they do mean what they say and are very, very incompetent. Now I think either option is extremely worrying. Either they...

Sabir: And arrogant. And arrogant as well in certain respects.

Yezza: Well it's partly the arrogance of it and arrogance is always not far behind whenever you find contempt for the people you're supposed to be serving, and, essentially, we have a government which is claiming to be tackling a threat and either they're doing it extremely badly or they're not doing it at all and they're basically just pretending to be fighting a threat they know is non existent, and, like I said, either scenario is extremely troublesome and is something that needs to be addressed, and it is not for the Muslim community or even the activist community. This is something that the entire population needs to feel is its problem, because it is. At the end of the day, all of this is happening, and is being allowed, and is being enabled through enormous amounts of money that is taxpayers' money. This is not just some esoteric, academic pet project that is affecting a small minority and is paid for by some obscure sources; this is something that is coming out of an already shrinking budget, and people should make it their business to ask their MPs, their councillors and their government representatives "Why is the money being spent on this?" Money that is extremely useful, that could be spent in other aspects, and why is this money being used to increase the possibility of terrorist acts rather than reduce it.

Riseup: It's been a very interesting conversation and thank you both very much for having it with me, but I just wanted to end with asking you both what's next for you, at the moment?

Yezza: Well for me this is just my first week or two of freedom to speak, where I've got my documents back and, people need to realise this, that even though I won my case against the Home Office a year ago, in August 2009, this is now my first two weeks since I've been able to actually work. And if you want to imagine the situation of somebody in my position who's won their case, who magically arrived at the stage where they won a case against the Home Office, and 99.9% of people who fight the Home Office on mmigration grounds fail, straight away.

Sabir: It's revolutionary, Hicham, don't underestimate it.

Yezza: Well, you know, this is the key. It's to try and make sure that this is a precedent that will have an effect on how the Home Office behaves in the future and it will be a sign to many communities around the country that things can be done and this image of the Home Office as a completely unbeatable monster is not true; that the Home Office can be beaten when there's a will and when the community believes enough in its cause, and the point I wanted to make is if it took a year for me, just to be able to get the right to work and the right to be able to sustain myself, that means a year where I needed to rely on a network of support and friends and supporters and so on, and this is not available to anyone. Even when you have a network of support there's no guarantee that it will be able to sustain you for so long, and this tells you about the inherent, inbuilt injustice of the way the Home Office fights its cases. It's a very, very uneven fight that they conduct against thousands and thousands of people, whether it's asylum seekers, whether it's people in my position who are suddenly very, very inconvenient, whose presence in the country is very, very inconvenient. And for me at the moment I'm just getting my bearings and planning what to do next. As you know, I'm the editor of a political magazine, Ceasefire, and, for now, this is the project on which I'm devoting my energies, and I've got other various projects that I'm working on. At the moment this is where I am and I'm taking it slowly at the moment and looking forward to working with activists and continuing the work I was doing for many years before my arrest, and trying to remain useful and keep the fight going.

Sabir: I think you should also mention you're planning to have a party and celebrate because I think that's very important.

Yezza: Yeah, for everyone from the campaign who have worked so hard over the last two years. Since the arrest in May 2008, hundreds and even thousands of people have contributed to this success and it's going to be very important to ensure they're all in the celebration of the victory.

Sabir: Absolutely. I plan to finish my PhD and after that I'm going to contemplate doing a law degree, or certainly converting my politics degree into a law degree and pursuing the legal profession. That, again, is all speculation at the moment; it's just something that's been recently occurring to me. In regards to the whole issue I'm trying my utmost to raise awareness of this, backed up by academic fact, which I hope will raise awareness, but also allow not just activists, which I greatly respect for their commitment to certain political issues and whatever they feel strongly about, but also the general public who I think certainly should be paying attention to what is happening. It may not involve them today, but certain laws have been passed in this country that could quite easily affect them. So today it's the Muslim community, tomorrow it could be fathers who want custody of their children but because of the laws that have been passed they're not allowed to protest in Parliament. That's just one law that's been passed under the guise of countering terrorism yet it remains, and it probably will remain, for the future as well. So raising awareness of that within the local community, on a national level, in an academic setting and certainly with activist communities as well, who are quite powerful... But also for the major reason that I was always a cynic with regards to activism. You know, I've always been an activist, myself, whether it's for the Iraq war or the Palestine issue, etc, but there was always an element of cynicism in my activism - what does this achieve? But one thing I now have learnt to respect about activist communities and activist members and campaigners is certainly that sustained activism and sustained hard work, and slowly chipping away at an issue, can bring about a change. You don't have to look any further than Section 44, a massive, massive draconian power given to the state, abused in almost every situation and circumstance, now repealed, liberating for me, and many like me and maybe like you and I'm sure many of your listeners, to go to London now, walk around... or any other security sensitive site, and not be harassed purely for the way they look or the way they... or what they believe or what they, you know, are judged by according to the way they look. So again, sustained activism. So that's what I intend to highlight, and continue chipping away, what I understand to be real, real draconian and problematic policies that this country is currently allowing to exist.

Riseup: I wish you both the best of luck with all your endeavours and thank you very much for talking with me.

Sabir: Thank you.

Yezza: Pleasure.