Gordon Campbell: Zaoui - the Algerian connection

The headline ‘Top Al Qaeda Member Surrenders’ in Wednesday’s Herald certainly suggested the forces of freedom had landed a big fish this time, but well, no….not exactly. The surrendering fellow turned out to belong to one faction of a shrinking militant group inside Algeria, and the guy happened to be giving up because his faction actually opposed being linked to al Qaeda. The group was once called the GSPC, and it had changed its name to the more newsworthy ‘Al Qaeda in the Maghreb’only late last year.

Hardly the top tier of al Qaeda, in other words. The pulling power of that al Qaeda brandname though, is something the Herald has always found hard to resist. Just one week after Ahmed Zaoui arrived in this country, the Herald was telling us that he was a ‘ terrorist on the run with links to sinister organizations…and [that] his name crops up in connection with Osama Bin Laden’s suspected South East Asian army..’ The allegations that Zaoui was a member of Osama’s secret army in South East Asia was still being recycled by the Herald, six months later.

Like the unfortunate Dr Haneef in Australia, Zaoui has been a victim of security services suddenly hyperventilating at the prospect of playing in the terrorism big leagues. By and large, the media have been more than happy to play along.

Pretty lamentable, all around. For the past five years, Zaoui has existed in the shadowlands – imprisoned and vilified on one hand, for reasons that must leave him profoundly puzzled about the nature of this country.

And befriended on the other by the well meaning - whose goodwill at times must seem equally arbitrary. One way or another, Zaoui’s destiny belongs in Algeria. The social and political climate within Algeria , as rationalised by New Zealand politicians, bids to play a major role in the final stages of Zaoui’s time in this country.

This week, Zaoui has been on the witness stand at the Inspector-General’s review, which will rule upon the validity of the security risk certificate issued against him. If confirmed, the Cabinet then will have to decide whether Zaoui can be safely returned to Algeria.

It is a bizarre process. As the British special advocate Nicholas Blake QC has said of similar cases in Britain : “ It is somewhat illogical of government to first intern for some four years, give the detainees a terrorist profile, and then argue that they can safely be returned to their countries of origin after all.”

By sheer co-incidence, the British courts have just handed down a decision this week that could hardly be more relevant to Zaoui’s situation. Essentially, the British government had sought to deport three Algerians back to Algeria on suspicion of being terrorists – all on the basis of the usual secret information that is unusable as evidence in a British court.

As the Guardian reported this week, the courts ruled that the UK government could not be certain the men would be safe from torture after they were sent back. As a consequence, any deportations to Algeria have been put on hold while the three men's cases are returned to the British equivalent of the Inspector-General – namely, the Special Immigration Appeals Commission (SIAC) for reconsideration.

This kind of collision between the courts and the Government is likely to be replayed in this country. The key point will not be whether SIS Inspector-General Paul Neazor confirms the security risk certificate – in Britain that stage is almost a formality, given the low burden of proof that is involved.

The real crunch will come with the deportation decision by Cabinet – and Zaoui can hardly be deported to Algeria with any credibility by the Clark government, while the issue of safety from torture and persecution of any deportees to Algeria remains so completely up in the air.

In recent years the British government has done its best to get around the UN conventions that prohibit deportation to torture and persecution, and the equivalent European human rights law protections. The mechanisms for doing so are either a memo of understanding, or a diplomatic assurance.

Therefore, in the wake of the London suicide bombings in 2005, Britain tried to negotiate memorandums of understanding with Libya, Jordan and Algeria, to get them to promise that suspects would be treated fairly if they were returned. Algeria flatly refused to sign any formal agreement, on the basis that the request to do so was an insult to its integrity and sovereignty – especially when the request to act honourably was coming from Britain, one of the world’s foremost former imperial powers. Just how Algeria would treat a request from New Zealand that it give a scout’s honour promise not to mistreat Zaoui is an interesting prospect to contemplate.

Surely though, the Clark government might try to argue, there has been an amnesty declared in Algeria – and conditions are on the improve. Alas, the British court ruling manages to sink that line of argument as well. Not that the authorities didn’t do their best to peddle that line. As one of the appeal court judges said: "SIAC went to a good deal of trouble to establish that in Algeria there is not now a consistent practice of gross, flagrant or mass violations of human rights or a systematic practice of torture, nor anything like it; and that the Algerian authorities would not be contemptuous of the obligations that they had undertaken."

It didn’t wash, though. As the Guardian says : the judges were shown “evidence which is capable of undermining SIAC’s 's overall conclusion" that it was safe to return the men to Algeria. In a typically Kafkaesque move though, the courts having just demolished the worth of diplomatic assurances, has sent the case back to SIAC – who do plainly believe in such assurances – to see if diplomatic assurances can be relied upon.

They might have done better to ask SIAC to listen to the Algerians’ own defence lawyer Gareth Peirce, who argued that the assurances were worthless because the politicians in Algeria who sign them have no control over the military/intelligence forces who carry out the torture and the extra-judicial killings of the regime’s opponents.

How does this relate to what is happening here? In the end game of the Zaoui case, we can expect to hear some very rosy depictions indeed from our Government of the sunny state of affairs in today’s Algeria. Undoubtedly, the security situation has improved. The GIA, to which Zaoui has been mistakenly linked by our SIS, was declared to be virtually non-existent by the Algerian Interior Minister in January 2005.

The GSPC - which stands for the Salafist Group for Peace and Conflict, is now down to only 800 – 1,200 members spread across isolated regions of several North African countries. Last year’s decision by one leadership faction to link itself with Al Qaeda has won it some headlines – and it did manage a suicide bombing incident in Algiers in April. Yet the decision has caused factional splits and surrender by many former GSPC nationalists who oppose international jihad, and the related attacks upon civilians.

The trouble is, Zaoui would still not be safe back in Algeria for several reasons. One, his own spontaneous nature would mean that if approached by those in need, he would respond. It is part of his religious obligation, as an imam. Very quickly, this could lead him back into becoming a focus for the aspirations of many Algerians, particularly among the urban poor.

Secondly – and ironically, given his treatment here – Zaoui has not yet served prison time within Algeria in the way that FIS leaders such as Madani and Belhadj have done. There will be those who would resent that fact, and would feel impelled to seek retribution. Thirdly, Zaoui’s lifelong stance of tolerance and moderation is itself a threat – perhaps the most potent threat – to a regime that has come through the civil war period determined that Islam should no longer be considered as a valid mode of expression for opposition to the ruling regime.

In the current climate, political Islam is to be officially viewed as akin to extremism, and managed accordingly. Zaoui spoils that picture. As the RSAA [para 975] concludes, ‘Someone such as the appellant, with the intellectual, doctrinal and moral weight to articulate [Islam’s] values in a way likely to find a resonance inside Algeria represents a constant threat to the regime and will thereby be targeted.’

That is the irony, alright. In all likelihood, New Zealand will end up labeling Zaoui a security risk and will deport him back to a regime grateful for the excuse that we’ve given to them - so that they can then eliminate the dangerous message of tolerance that he actually embodies.

Next : Zaoui as precedent for our immigration laws

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Disclosure : Gordon Campbell now works as a media officer for the Green Party. He has been writing about the Ahmed Zaoui case since 2003.

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