An Open Letter to the BBC: What's Islam got to do with it?

Dear BBC,

The Xinjiang research community is delighted that you continue to cover such pressing humanitarian disasters as cultural genocide and internment camps. However, your coverage of the Xinjiang, Karakax papers on the 17th February 2019 fell somewhat short of the rigorous standards associated with your organisation that should continue to be both publicly accountable and funded. I hope these comments are received in the spirit of civic engagement and support to improve your important work with which they are intended.

The key factual problem in the reporting was the representation of the operation of camps and assimilation policies in Xinjiang as focused on targeting religion per se. The expert literature on state and non-state violence in the region by Gardner Bovingdon, James Millward, and Sean Roberts, who have published on the topic for over 20 years, has demonstrated it was only after 9/11 that religion was adopted as an official public-image focus, re-representing what the party-state has always openly termed the “ethnic problem”. Policy documents throughout the 1990s did not even mention religion or extremism yet these events are re-described this way today. BBC journalists do know this, so it was unusual that in your main bulletin, the issue was represented in a manner considerably closer to the perspective of CCTV rather than the BBC or the global research community.

Your own data points to how ethnic targeting does target religion but only as one of multiple indicators of ethnic identity. Some of the key reasons for interning people include plans to travel outside China and the entirely arbitrary “untrustworthy” judgement. Preventing religious observance is one aspect of these policies but they also target language use, travel abroad, friendship with non-Chinese citizens, and general ‘cultural’ demeanour described as “manners education” in the leaked documents. The work of Timothy Grose even shows how narratives of “hygiene”, paralleling more well-known historical instances of ethnic targeting, justify destruction of traditional Uyghur furniture from people’s own homes. Uyghur language has long been removed from the school curriculum and according to the scholars and NGOs you work with, it is constantly monitored in camps as an indicator of extremism and general untrustworthiness. Religion is only one facet of identity and governance in the region, which I hope my work helps show have been described in official documents as a problem of “backwardness” for decades. In 2009, textbooks for middle-school children taught the concept of minzu xiaowang (民族消亡) to celebrate that “backward” minority groups will disappear. Ethnic unity and Patriotic Education textbooks explicitly celebrate the “disappearance” of minority languages as progress. Xinjiang’s Turkic-speaking groups are always represented as behind the advanced “settler culture” (tunken wenhua 屯垦文化) of the majority and in need of their guidance, as illustrated in the images above taken from official exhibitions. This is essential background knowledge to make sense of current policies.

These are not intellectual quibbles over minor details! The framing of these issues has real concrete impact, particularly when presented in mainstream media on an area generally considered specialised. So why does this matter?

Uyghurs and other Turkic-speaking minorities say it matters and ultimately, it’s their identity we are talking about! Uyghur diaspora groups and scholars have been calling for journalists to take heed of the fact that “this is not a war on Islam but a war on Uyghurs”, according to one Uyghur scholar, and “we are not all Muslims” according to another. There is much diversity among Uyghurs and other Turkic-speaking groups in Xinjiang. They feel you are misrepresenting their identity and they are worried about the concrete effects of that misrepresentation.

Audience reception. The reality is that in an age of popular anxieties about terrorism and Islam, your audience is considerably more sympathetic to a “war on Islam” than cultural genocide or camps for people arbitrarily deemed untrustworthy. In my line of work, I encounter British people of left and right-wing persuasions telling me they are not interested in this issue because they “don’t like Muslims” or “don’t like religion”. Your coverage does not cause that intolerance but it cannot reach those people. It may even embolden them with another example of “Muslims behaving badly” and does so by misrepresenting basic facts about people’s identity and governance of the region. Uyghurs in the UK and across Europe are concerned that representation of this issue may encourage discrimination here and give greater global support for the party-state to pursue what they describe as cultural genocide.

I commend that you cover this issue but recommend that you more fully engage with people from the region and consult a broader range of scholars with long-term experience in the region. This will help avoid misrepresenting such an important and complex set of issues.

Yours sincerely,

                                  Dr David Tobin (University of Manchester)

Identity and Empathy in the Logics of "Terror"

When Islamophobia explodes across England because an individual who happens to be a Muslim commits an act of violence, it suggests our Kingdom is not as United as our politicians like to think. In the wake of the murder of a British soldier in Woolwich, we would do well to take a step back and turn a critical lens on our media before we feel the need to lock ourselves in our homes for fear of the terrorists in our midst.

“In the life of a nation, we’re called up to define who we are and what we believe”1.

George Bush uttered these famous words in defence of the US decision to send military forces to Saudi Arabia during the Persian Gulf crisis. Bush, like most politicians, was linking identity to national security by saying identity is something we must define, enclose within national boundaries, and send troops abroad to kill and die in the name of its assumed unity. In these types of state-centric narratives of identity, we do not and must not identify with the suffering of those outside our national borders. There is the nation and there is outside the nation. “The boundaries of a state’s identity are secured by the representation of danger”2.  It is through danger which we define who we are because danger is intrinsically Other and outside ourselves. It is a representation of what we do not want to be and what we do not want to happen to us.

“Danger is not an objective condition. It is not a thing which exists independently of those to whom it may become a threat”3. Acts of violence are represented in different ways which tell us a lot about how we define ourselves. When the English Defence League assaulted police in Woolwich last night, this was represented by the mainstream media as a “protest” and the damaging of mosques were “attacks”. These are dangers but of a lesser and local order. There is no link to national security in the way the incidents are reported and discussed. On the other hand, a British soldier being murdered by a Muslim has been immediately labelled “terrorism”, a supposed threat to the very existence of our nation.

So who is under threat? For David Cameron, this was “an attack on Britain – and on the British way of life” and that “people in every community will utterly condemn this attack”. Why is this incident an attack on the “British” way of life? Why are racially motivated murders not elevated to this level of threat? Why are the lives lost to violence in working class council estates all across the UK not seen as a “threat” to our nation? These are stories of threats to people’s lives which occasionally make the news but are never seen as matters of national security. These lives are not deemed as valuable as those of British soldiers because they are not seen to embody the nation and so they are represented as local problems of an altogether less threatening nature. This is simply not the type of nation many British people want to live in and it only reinforces existing divisions over class and race to simply pretend they do not exist.

The way the Woolwich violence is represented frames our identity in a way which obscures competing perspectives on the violence and on who we are. It demands we see this attack as a threat to ourselves in a way which racial assaults and violence against young working class men are not. It demands we empathise with the victim and that we must not empathise in any way with the perpetrator. Otherwise, we are excluded from this conceptualisation of “community” which is “sickened” and intellectually paralysed with feelings of condemnation. So we are told we must feel a certain way about this because we are British. When David Cameron says “this attack sickened us all” he may be right but it sickens people in very different ways and for very different reasons. Can we not be sickened by the attack, the nationalist response, and the militaristic UK foreign policy all at the same time? Yesterday, one BBC interviewer even asked “what is that is so annoying about having British troops on their soil?”. To frame British troops invading other countries as an annoyance yet one murder in Britain as a threat to our nation exemplifies an utter dearth of empathy in Britain’s historical and current role in initiating and fomenting violent conflict, simply because it has hurt one of our own.

Condemning comes very easily but trying to understand why this happens takes effort, even empathising with people who you may find disagreeable. Some media coverage has worked to deny British people the right to make up their own minds. The video of one of the attacker’s speech was edited to deny our right to empathise by cutting out the parts where he attempts to empathise. Here is a slightly extended version where he says:

“Remove your governments, they don’t care about you. Do you think David Cameron is going to get caught in the street when we start bussing our guns? Are your politicians going to die? No, it’s going to be the average guy like you”.

You may hate the messenger but it is working class persons who are sent to wage the wars which this man himself highlighted as his reasoning behind the attack. Perhaps not going to wars in the name of national identity might make the people we choose to kill in its name feel more secure. If they felt more secure, they may be less likely to want to wage what they see as very similar wars to what happens when British troops leave our shores in the name of “freedom”.

1. Bush, George (1990) “In Defense of Saudi Arabia” in Sifry, M and Cerf, C (eds) The Gulf War Reader: History, Documents, Opinions.

2. Campbell, David (1998) Writing Security: United States Foreign Policy and the Politics of Identity.

3. Campbell, David (1998).

Is Scotland a Threat to Global Security?

The issue of Scotland’s potential post-independence approach to international relations is playing less of a role in public debates on independence than ought to be the case. However, the editorial board of the Washington Post (WP) caused somewhat of a stooshy today across Scotland by claiming that the referendum on Scottish independence is part of a “worrying trend”. Their main concern lies in how Scottish would affect “global security”, specifically that:

“An independent Scotland would significantly weaken the foremost military and diplomatic ally of the United States, while creating another European mini-state unable to contribute meaningfully to global security”.

If Scotland became independent then perhaps the UK, a leading ally of the US, would indeed be militarily weakened. This would mean no bridge between the US and the EU and less support for US military projects of “regime change” and “nation-building”. This would be a good thing for security and may force the US government to engage more diplomatically with states which offer alternative approaches to bombing the Middle East into ‘democracy’. The concern of the WP here is of course not the security of the globe. The WP is concerned about the ability of the US to maintain a position of power where it can pursue “security” projects abroad through military might and the support of key allies instead of through multilateral negotiation. This is about securing the hegemony of the alliances between actors in the US state and its leading corporations, which in recent years have invaded Iraq and Afghanistan, privatised their industries, outlawed trade unions, and then seemingly expected democracy to spontaneously emerge.

The Washington Post acknowledged that “more local government can be more efficient, more democratic” yet also that “a weaker Europe means a less stable world and less leverage for the democracies”. Their political priorities are fairly clear here: we ought to choose to be less democratic in turn for more “collective strength”. However, if it made Scotland more democratic and the world less unipolar, then independence could only promote global security.

Neoliberalism and the Decline of Global Growth

The post-World War 2 world saw global growth reach 3.5% in the 1960s and even during the crisis years of the 1970s the world enjoyed 2.4% growth. John Ruggie famously described the international system of this period as ‘embedded liberalism’ (Ruggie, 1982). Industrialised states pursued liberal economic policies but international agreements legitimised state intervention in the economy to protect the interests of labour and the socially marginalised. This was largely a compromise between the interests of labour and capital such that free-markets prevailed but the vulnerable could be protected. Neoliberalism then emerged in the midst of the 1973 oil crisis to break this compromise by prioritising capital and the interests of business primarily through privatisation of services, reduced public spending on social services, and the restriction of power of organisations which represented the interests of workers (Trade Unions). Since the adoption of neoliberalism under Thatcher in the UK, Reagan in the US and promoted globally through the IMF, the 1980s saw global growth fall to 1.4%, 1.1% in the 1990s and less than 1% in the 2000s. Meanwhile the top 1% of earners in the UK increased their share of wealth from 6.5% to 13% (Harvey, 2007). The world is getting poorer and the poor are bearing an ever increasing burden to pay to maintain a global financial system which is keeping them poor. Banks have been bailed out and nationalised because we are told we need them and this is a ‘crisis’. On the other hand, Malaria, an easily preventable disease, kills 800,000 people every year. We hear nothing of this ‘crisis’ because it occurs in regions such as Sub-Saharan Africa which have little political power at the global level and limited economic value. We are now in the midst not of a debt crisis but a growth crisis, which has to be paid for by previously protected vulnerable groups. This is being made worse as the UK continues on an economic course which cuts people's ability to support themselves by cutting pensions and restricting public sector pay so that it does not reflect inflation. Fanatical commitment to neoliberalism has meant that when growth slows, neoliberal states demand that the poor and lower middle classes get paid less in order to ‘balance the books’. This will lead people further into the debt, which is supposed to be the wiped out according to the Conservatives.

The Conservatives did not win the election in the UK outright and they did not outline their plans for pensions, the NHS, and public sector pay in their manifesto. They do not have the mandate to proceed with a plan that promotes the interests of capital over those of labour. Support the strikes before there are no social services left.

References:

Ruggie, John (1982) ‘International Regimes, Transactions, and Change: Embedded Liberalism in the Post-War Economic Order, International Organization, 36/2, pp.379-415.

Harvey, David (2007) ‘Neoliberalism as Creative Destruction’, Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science, 610, pp.22-44.

Imagining Sectarianism, Imagining Scotland

We have frequently heard the political slogan, “One Scotland, many cultures”, since it was launched in 2007 to brand Scotland a pluralistic society characterised by tolerance of difference. However, judging by a Scottish government poll which found that more than 85% of Scots want “sectarianism” to be an illegal offence with 89% declaring it “offensive”, most Scots now freely admit that Scotland has a problem with “sectarianism”. Roseanna Cunningham, Minister for Community Safety and Legal Affairs, told the BBC that sectarianism threatens the “very fabric of Scotland; we want to be tolerant, respectful, and forward looking”. Roseanna Cunningham’s comments and the first draft of the much-debated “anti-sectarianism bill” reveal how the debate on sectarianism is producing ideas about what type of nation Scotland should be and what it means to be Scottish. When we talk about sectarianism and what it means to be Scottish, we are, in the words of Benedict Anderson, imagining the nation. By limiting who is and isn’t to be thought of as authentically Scottish we produce what it means to be Scottish. Sectarianism is seen as a religious problem and to protect the “very fabric” of Scotland we need legislation to stop people calling each other “insert-religion-here bastards” but not necessarily “insert-ethnicity-or-nationality-here bastards”. This creates the danger that we ignore ethnocentrism whereas we crack down on religious bigotry. Here I seek not to evaluate the extent of sectarianism or to “take sides” but to examine how the term is used and the implications for how people understand Scottish identity.

It is a welcome change for complex issues in which history, nationalism, and religion are entangled in complex webs of self-identification to be on the front of our national newspapers instead of relegated to the sports pages. Complacency has previously allowed those discussing bigotry to reinforce national stereotypes and produce ideas about what it means to be Scottish without being challenged. For example, in 2004 the journalist Stuart Cosgrove criticised Aiden McGeady’s choice to play football for the Republic of Ireland, the country of his grandparents’ birth, instead of Scotland where he was born. Cosgrove claimed McGeady’s choice was representative of international football’s descent to the level of a “Woolworths pick and mix”. How a long history of cross-border flows of people between Scotland and Ireland has affected how people identify themselves in complex ways is dismissed as “pick and mix”. In other words, mongrel-like or not “authentic”. Like many other football journalists, Cosgrove was theorising about what constitutes national identity albeit in a comedic fashion. Cosgrove, like many commentators, employed an uncritical definition of nation as the place of one’s birth to criticise how an 18 year old footballer identified himself. His idea of national identity is exclusionary: you are simply with us (people born in Scotland who call themselves Scottish) or against us (people born in Scotland who call themselves Irish). There can be no middle ground. In a liberal democracy, which seeks to reject sectarianism, this self-identification should be an individual’s decision and the individual’s decision alone. The greatest problem here is not that people have this view of national identity. The problem is that such intolerance of those who identify themselves in a different way is left unchallenged because it is seen as belonging to the realm of football and “banter”. Thousands of people tune in to similar debates on radio stations and in print- this is influence without responsibility. Such football journalists are unwittingly imagining the boundaries of the nation through their writing. They define what it means to be Scottish and frequently exclude those who choose to celebrate what they understand to be their Irish heritage.

Dr John Kelly of the University of Edinburgh argues that the public discourse on sectarianism constructs a unified, non-sectarian identity that purportedly “real” and “authentic” Scots should share in opposition to a set of sectarian ‘Others’. In other words, by excluding certain characteristics, this discourse imagines what it means to be Scottish. In 2006 the now retired pundit, Gerry McNee, dismissed the Fields of Athenry and The Boys of the Old Brigade sung by Celtic fans along with the Sash and Derry’s Walls, often sung by Rangers fans, as “Irish tosh” “we need to get rid of”. In other words, “real” and “authentic” Scots have enclosed national identities without the “sectarian” cross-border influence from Ireland. This is of course ironic. The Sash and Derry’s walls are sung by Rangers supporters and proponents of the British Union in Northern Ireland to celebrate Britishness and how they identify themselves as not being part of Ireland. McNee’s comments were reflective of a widespread simplistic view of complex social issues that “sectarianism” comes from some barbaric outside world which we should contrast our civilised selves against.

Dismissing people’s views as “Irish tosh” because they sing songs to commemorate what they see as their British or Irish heritage narrowly draws the boundaries of acceptable public identification such that people feel their identities are under threat. This imagines Scotland as some enclosed, discrete community yet our history tells us the borders between Ireland, Northern Ireland, and Scotland are very fluid and the trans-border flows of migration are a constant. Being Irish or being British does not make one a bigot but refusing to allow people to understand themselves this way does. As Dr John Kelly noted in his written submission to the Justice Committee on the “anti-sectarianism bill”, celebration of one’s identity is not a social problem unless this involves hatred of other identities. People can disagree over the nationalist political sentiments expressed in The Boys of the Old Brigade or Derry’s Walls but it is difficult find anything in the songs themselves which express hatred of other identities. There are intolerable, racist songs sung in Scottish football grounds which is another issue altogether. However, it would be highly illiberal to criminalise songs because they celebrate identities which are not “authentically” Scottish or because we disagree with their political sentiments.

National identities can be multiple, especially in the United Kingdom. As Benedict Anderson asked “to what nation does the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland refer?”. One can be Scottish and Irish at the same time- the two countries are not sealed off and people travel and have inter-married for a very long time. One can also be Scottish and British at the same time. Many will argue it is impossible to be Irish and British but is this difference really a problem? Difference is not a problem but how it is socially organised can be. If we criminalise or marginalise people not because they hate the Other but because they see themselves as Irish or British we will create resentment and create a much more serious national conflict than we currently witness. Politicians and tourist boards can imagine an enclosed, culturally isolated Scotland but our history has different stories which should be told. If we want Scotland to be a nation of many cultures we have to allow its people celebrate their many origins.

Fear is the Path to the Dark Side

Be it fear of the Jew, the Communist, or the terrorists in our midst, fear clouds people’s judgment and drives them to demand that something, anything, must be done to alleviate that fear. Fear is used by politicians in democracies round the world to win votes and indeed by journalists to sell their writings. One could be forgiven for fearing that Britain was on the verge of the apocalypse given the sensationalist media coverage of the August riots, much of which emphasised fear over analysis. Mary Riddell of the Telegraph wrote of how “the capital city of an advanced nation has reverted to a Hobbesian dystopia of chaos and brutality”. However, the looting and the subsequent response to clean up Britain’s shopping districts, both organised through social networking sites, were utterly anathema to Thomas Hobbes’ description of a frightening state of nature of “a war of every man against every man”. Such consideration though is simply less exciting and less likely to sell newspapers.

The “firebombing” of Canning Circus police station in Nottingham was heavily reported. What media outlets didn’t follow up with was the less frightening story that little damage was done, as the photograph above shows, and Nottingham’s city centre was bustling with shoppers the following day. There were, of course, very serious events breaking out across England. However, by reporting all news in sensationalist fashion with few qualifications and less explanation, fear would keep many of us in our homes and away from the “war of every man against every man” purportedly engulfing our “advanced nation”. This is not old news we should forget about. This fear will be re-activated in the campaign for the next UK general election by politicians looking for media-friendly sound-bites. Law and order will most certainly feature.

Of course we should not be surprised by this emphasis on fear over contemplation and the sound-bite over evidence. In one discussion of the causes of the riots, the BBC invited the likes of David Starkey, known for his deliberate courting of controversy and not for his sociological expertise, to give his ‘expert’ view. His explanation was that the “whites have become blacks”. He then responded to the accusation of having no empirical evidence for his claims by saying “these are times when we need plain-speaking”. On the contrary, these are times where we need evidence and considered analysis to help us disentangle the masses of misinformation such as the Independent Police Complaints Commission’s admission that they “may have misled journalists” into believing Mark Duggan fired on police. The News of the World phone hacking scandal has revealed little but that there exists a murky series of relationships between the media, the police, and politicians. Our right to vote may not be under threat but our right to know how we are governed and thus what we are actually voting for is in jeopardy. This is all the more so when frightening sound-bites trump analysis.

David Cameron’s comments that we are walking into a “slow-motion moral collapse” reflects and helps reproduce the panic following such events. Sensationalism produced the emergence of countless “armchair generals”, in the language of Chief Constable Sir Hugh Orde. Succumbing to fear over contemplation, these “armchair generals” demanded the use of rubber bullets and water cannons, despite their limited knowledge of why such tactics are deployed. As Hugh Orde told the media, these have been deployed in Northern Ireland, the former for self-defence in life-threatening situations and the latter for dealing with massive, unmoveable crowds. Neither of these were primary features of looting which saw gangs moving swiftly from shop to shop. This didn’t stop David Cameron from very publicly announcing his personal authorisation to use both tactics. This pandered to and reproduced a climate of fear. Neither water cannons nor rubber bullets needed to be used in the end but the political drive to appear to be tough on crime and win votes was fulfilled.

More importantly, David Cameron’s claims of “moral collapse” do not reflect any empirical evidence. The Home Office’s own statistics show how violent crime in England and Wales has been in near steady decline since 1996. Despite the repeated references to youth gone wild on Britain’s streets, the Ministry of Justice reported a 9.6% drop in the number of 10-17 year olds convicted of crime between 1999 and 2009. On the surface, the evidence certainly suggests that David Cameron is exaggerating for political effect. He is using fear of moral collapse to build a reputation of being tough on crime yet this fear stops people from calmly considering the details of what is actually happening. What better way to garner support for a law and order driven agenda at the next general election than an electorate frightened of “rising crime” induced by “moral collapse”?

Many of the frightened electorate have called for harsher sentences for looters and they have got them. Judges have guidelines for minimum and maximum sentencing but they also have discretion within those parameters. Judges have responded to politicians and frightened voters with unusually long sentences as both the BBC and the Guardian have revealed. People involved in the looting are being given harsher sentences for crimes than would ordinarily be the case; 25% harsher according to the statistical analysis of the Guardian. The rule of law and equality before the law are central features of democracy. Yet here we see the application of new and unwritten rules emerging from a climate of fear and “straight-talking” instead of debate and analysis. One wonders how the imprisonment of Thomas Downey of Manchester for 16 months for taking donuts from a Krispy Kreme outlet is justifiable with reference to equality before the law. How can placing Michael Fitzpatrick, 18 in a young offender’s institution for two years and four months for drinking stolen champagne be explained with reference to codified rules of law? They can’t be. Judges in Manchester produced their own recommendations because the guidelines they are required to work under, according to the rule of law, did not cover burglary and looting in mass riots. The sentence of two young men to four years in prison for using facebook to incite a riot that never even happened was not determined according to established legal guidelines because they don’t yet exist. Paul Mendell QC, a former chairman of the Bar Association warned “the idea that the rulebook goes out of the window strikes me as inherently unjust…guidelines are not tramlines…I don’t see why [magistrates] should be told to disregard these”. However, as Communities Minister Eric Pickles told the Guardian “we cannot have people frightened in their beds, frightened in their homes”. Fear then seems enough to justify ruining two men’s lives with little consideration for the implications for two of democracy’s central tenets, the rule of law and equality before it.

The separation of powers, particularly the separation of the executive and the judiciary, are pivotal to a functioning democracy. However, many of the responses of democratically elected leading politicians to the riots have revealed serious weaknesses in their commitment to this political ideal. Menzies Campbell indicated this when he said “politicians should be neither cheering nor booing in the matter of sentencing. It is an important part of our constitutional principles that political influence is not directed at the judicial system”. Nevertheless, the Prime Minister saw fit to do just that by defending or cheering these tough sentences. He said it was good that courts were sending a “tough message”. We can leave to one side our feelings regarding the length of the sentences to ponder why the head of the executive sees fit to comment on and ultimately influence the future behaviour of the supposedly independent judiciary. The function of courts in a democracy is not to “send out tough messages” as the executive defines them but to apply the rule of law. It is only the place of the executive to endorse the decisions of the judiciary in authoritarian states where powers are not separated. David Cameron’s claim that he thinks “it’s right that we should allow the courts to make decisions about sentencing” is unlikely to be upheld if they feel under pressure from the Prime Minister to send out “tough messages” instead of applying rules.

Those who are struck by fear are less likely to ask what is going on and are instead more likely to demand ‘action’ regardless of the consequences. Fear is blinding us to look beyond the immediate and consider the future of a country under a government which can set the rule of law to one side if we are frightened. Fear is indeed the path to the dark side.