Fear of terror claims victims

Dewi Anggraeni, Contributor, Melbourne

While terrorist attacks in different parts of the world have claimed untold numbers of innocent victims, the fear generated by terrorism has also claimed, probably in a more insidious way, many victims. They are victims because they have never been charged or tried for any crime, yet they are inarguably incarcerated.

After the Sept. 11 attack on New York and Washington, over 650 people suspected of links with al-Qaeda in different parts of the world were arrested, mainly using U.S. antiterror laws enacted shortly after Sept. 11. Two of these people were Australian citizens: David Hicks, now 28, of Adelaide and Mamdouh Habib, 46, of Sydney.

Hicks was arrested in Afghanistan by the United States while allegedly fighting for the Taliban. He was eventually brought to Guantanamo Bay in Cuba, and there he has been detained without trial. We learned that Hicks, a recent Muslim convert, had gone to Afghanistan for military training with the Taliban.

However, if there is evidence that he is an al-Qaeda member, it has never been revealed, not even to his family and their lawyers. In fact, his family and their lawyers, who continue to deny that Hicks was in any way linked to al-Qaeda, have told journalists that they invariably hear news about Hicks through the media, not through official channels.

The lawyers, through their U.S. counterparts, have made representations to the U.S. courts to have Hicks released from Guantanamo and returned to Australia to be tried in an Australian court. However, the judges told them that they were unable to do anything because they (the U.S. judges) had no jurisdiction in Cuba. Repeated appeals to the Australian government have not brought the Hicks family any satisfaction.

In a CNN interview on Nov. 11 last year, when the reporter asked Australia's new attorney general, Philip Ruddock, whether the detention of the Australians was unconstitutional and in contravention of international law, he replied: "Well, the jurisdiction here is with the United States. It's not ours and we don't seek to overturn United States sovereignty in relation to those matters." Hicks has been thrown, it seems, into legal limbo.

If David Hicks was arrested while reportedly fighting with the Taliban, Mamdouh Habib was arrested along with two companions, both German citizens, while traveling on a bus heading for Karachi in Pakistan. Habib was to leave Karachi on a flight back to Australia.

Since there was nothing tangible to incriminate the three, the men protested their innocence. The two German citizens were released after their government reportedly exerted strong diplomatic pressure on Pakistan. Only Habib was kept in custody and, after some time, transferred to Egypt. When he was subsequently transferred to Afghanistan, he was then a U.S. prisoner with no claims to the protection of the Geneva Convention.

Now in Guantanamo Bay, like Hicks, he also has slipped into a legal limbo, albeit a different one, because having never fought or carried arms, he cannot possibly be treated as an illegal combatant.

What has Habib done to warrant arrest? During a trip to the United States, Habib reportedly met, and received phone calls from, a man who was later convicted of being an accessory to the 1993 World Trade Center bombing. Habib was subsequently watched and questioned by the Australian Security Intelligence Organization, continuously, for eight years.

In 2000, Habib's encounter with another alleged terrorist, Murat Ofkeli, was recorded. Ofkeli has since appeared in court in the Netherlands charged with recruiting people for a holy war against the U.S. and its allies. The case is subject to appeal.

Habib's lawyer, Stephen Hopper, elaborated on the nature of the encounter with Ofkeli during an interview with ABC radio reporter Michael Vincent on the program AM on Sept. 4 last year.

It was just after the Sydney Olympics in late 2000 when Mamdouh Habib met Murat Ofkeli, a Turkish-born Dutch citizen, after an incident involving a group of Muslim hard-liners at a prayer room in Sydney's western suburb.

"The circumstances were that a group of people associated with that prayer room had taken this fellow's passport and some money and Mr. Habib felt sorry for the fellow and tried to assist him in getting those things back," recounted Hopper.

Whether there is more to the incident than what Hopper told is so far not clear, because Habib has not yet been tried.

Events on Feb. 20 this year revealed the real reason the Australian government has seemed so reluctant to fight for the repatriation of its two citizens being held at Guantanamo. When news broke that the British government had been able to negotiate with the U.S. for the repatriation of five of its citizens from Guantanamo, journalists in Australia promptly asked Prime Minister John Howard and Attorney General Philip Ruddock if Hicks and Habib would be repatriated as well. They were told that it was unlikely.

If Hicks and Habib were repatriated, said Howard and Ruddock, they would most likely walk free, because Australia only passed its antiterror law in June 2003, long after Hicks and Habib committed their alleged crimes. Applying the law retroactively would not be possible, and it is feared that it would be impossible to convict the two under any other law.

The two Australians have been detained for over two years and nobody in Australia can tell at this stage if they are ever going to be charged. And the Australian government does not want them back because of the chance that they are linked to terrorist organizations.

If this were to happen to citizens of a country known to flagrantly violate human rights, it might be understandable, though certainly not acceptable. However, this is happening to citizens of a country known as a champion of human rights, whose government has been known to lobby other governments to improve their human rights records. Has the fear of terrorism caused such a drastic change of culture?