I gave up buying the Observer for the same reasons Nick Cohen gave up on the left: the Iraq war, which the paper championed. The joys of social media, however, mean I have kept up with the lengths to which he goes to promote his ‘What’s Left?’ thesis. In case you missed it, said thesis derives from a refusal to accept the left’s opposition to the invasion of Iraq and other ‘liberal interventions’, which persuaded him that by implication (and via some ‘useful idiots’) the entire left has lost the plot and tacitly supported/supports Saddam Hussein, the Taliban, Hamas, suicide bombers, Colonel Gaddafi, Bashar al-Assad and so on. While he has made many perfectly reasonable arguments about the need for opponents of imperialism and injustice to apply the same standards to dictators and repressive regimes, the subtext is always the (neo-con) righteousness of war against ‘militant Islam’, which he equates with fascism.

His latest Observer column, ‘The agonies of Bangladesh come to London’, broke new ground in terms of dedication to this cause. The crux of its argument is as follows: (1) secular, Tahrir Square-type demonstrations are currently taking place in Shahbag junction in Bangladesh, inspired by a flawed trial for war crimes of members of Jamaat-e-Islami (an organisation that participated in the Pakistan army’s horrific atrocities against the uprisings that led to Bangladesh’s independence in 1971); (2) a solidarity demonstration in east London was attacked by stone-throwers on 9 February, allegedly by people sympathetic to Jamaat; (3) the attackers are allegedly connected to a mosque whose establishment has been supported by people on the ‘scoundrel left’, which supports Bangladeshi ‘Islamic extremists’; (4) multiculturalism ‘can’t be liberal’ because it allows Islamic extremism to flourish; (5) it’s 1936 all over again and the left is on the wrong side of history: both in Dhaka and London, liberals must ‘pick sides’.

So let’s take the Pepsi Challenge. At face value, #Shahbag is the latest incarnation of a wave of protests that have swept the world since Egyptians flocked to Tahrir Square – it has already been branded a ‘Bengal Spring’. Young, liberal, tech-savvy Bangladeshis have occupied Dhaka and refuse to go home until their demands are met; the protests have spread throughout the country. So we’re on their side, right? Of course, except that a large, youthful demonstration does not a Tahrir Square make. Tahrir was primarily about democracy and revolution; Shahbag is first and foremost about vengeance and demands for the death penalty for convicted war criminals. Not an easy one for us liberals, as Nick points out.

But surely we can fall in line behind the Shahbag demands to expunge Jamaat-e-Islami – the ‘Islamo-fascists’ – from Bangladeshi public life. Sure, except that the Shahbag protests are not simply or even expressly anti-’Islamist’ (a concept that is far easier to reconcile at Harry’s Place than in Bangladesh itself, which is of course an overwhelmingly Muslim country); they are against ‘Razakars‘, collaborators and war criminals. And they are against an entire generation of corrupt politicians that has failed to deliver social justice and development following the country’s violent birth – or at least they might be if the ruling Awami League wasn’t backing and exploiting the protests for its own political ends.

This elicits another problem for us liberals: as recently as 1996, Jamaat-e-Islami (JI) was part of the Bangladeshi government, in a coalition with the Bangladesh Nationalist Party (BNP). While all of the major Bangladeshi political parties are seen to harbour war criminals, the Awami League has selectively targeted JI and the BNP for ‘accountability’ in its discredited tribunals. It is of course horrifying, as Nick Cohen points out, that a prominent Shahbag blogger appears to have met his violent death at the hands of JI sympathisers, but the same organisation cannot be blamed for threats to journalists, the disappearance of opposition BNP members, deaths in police custody or extra-judicial killings. Politics may appear to have taken a back seat since the Shahbag protests erupted, but few would deny that civil war is a distinct possibility. Black and white enough for you to ‘pick sides’? What about peace and reconciliation and international law, a solution to which other liberal commentators have pointed?

We should not be deceived: only through the clarity of Nick Cohen’s righteousness can this be reduced to a simple tale of ‘liberals’ vs. ‘Islamists’ befitting a ‘clash of civilisations’. As for the ‘agony’ of ‘Bangladesh coming to London’, all these events really tell us is that diaspora communities bring their politics and their grudges with them (just like political commentators married to simplistic narratives). Using this as a stick to beat British multiculturalism is nothing but shameless politicking. The scoundrel right must be delighted in such articulate bidding.

I am grateful to Suhas Chakma for his comments on a draft of this article.

Ben Hayes is project director at Statewatch and a fellow of the Transnational Institute (Twitter @drbenhayes)

At issue was the new EU return directive, which was voted on by the European Parliament in mid-June, paving the way for its formal adoption this autumn. The package of measures aims to harmonise key aspects of EU member states’ policy and practice regarding the expulsion of ‘illegal’ migrants. Among the common standards the directive will impose is a maximum detention period of up to 18 months for people being deported and a five-year EU re-entry ban for all those expelled. The agreement was greeted with widespread condemnation from the human rights community and beyond.

While such criticism is wholly justified, the return directive did not exactly fall out of the sky. On the contrary, the draft directive has been on the table since September 2005 and represents a crucial component of the EU’s common immigration and asylum policy, under development since 1999. In this sense, the directive is merely the latest tool – and there are many – geared toward the systematic registration, surveillance and control of all migrants and refugees in the European Union.

Legislating expulsion

The European Commission justified the original proposal of 2005 with the claim that ‘minimum standards’ on expulsion were necessary to improve practices in member states where people being deported were denied procedural rights or kept in poor conditions. However, in proposing an upper time limit of six months detention, the Commission threatened to lower standards in those countries that had shorter maximums – such as France (32 days), Spain (40 days) and Italy (60 days). There is no maximum in the UK and Ireland, which have opted out of the directive, along with Denmark leaving the UK free to continue to detain people pending deportation on security grounds indefinitely.

The Commission’s proposal also made expulsion orders mandatory for all illegal residents, albeit by prioritising ‘voluntary’ over forced return (‘voluntary’ being a fluid concept, often offered by states as the only alternative to detention and forced return). But at least it included some important guarantees for third-country nationals subject to expulsion proceedings that would, in certain cases, have prevented their deportation on human rights grounds.

A number of member states, however, thought these far too generous and by the time the EU working party on expulsion had finished with the text in 2006, these safeguards had been substantially diluted. Things got a lot worse when Germany took over the presidency of the EU in 2007 and substantially re-drafted the text, lowering the ‘minimum standards’ the directive was supposed to introduce even further.

In an attempt to reach agreement with the European Parliament, the subsequent Portuguese and Slovenian presidencies adopted a more conciliatory approach. While these improved the text, the EU Council (member-state governments) had ploughed ahead, proposing an administrative detention period of up to 18 months, the ability to detain and expel unaccompanied minors, the expulsion of people to transit countries (rather than their countries of origin) and a re-entry ban of five years. Many of the principles protecting human rights and procedural guarantees proposed by the Commission disappeared.

With growing and vociferous opposition from human rights organisations and the European Parliament’s civil liberties committee, the council now resorted to a familiar tactic: coercion. It told the parliament’s ‘rapporteur’ and the leaders of the various political groups that if the council’s ‘compromise’ text was not adopted there would either be no agreement whatsoever, or a strong likelihood that the incoming French presidency, which had already proposed a further draconian clampdown on ‘illegal’ immigration, would push for even lower standards. To its shame, the parliament not only accepted this premise, but adopted the measure at what is called ‘first reading’, following secret discussions with the council presidency.

The first-reading procedure was introduced for uncontroversial or highly technical legislative measures subject to ‘co-decision’ (between the parliament and the council), but two-thirds of all EU legislation is now adopted in this way, including all 13 measures on immigration and asylum adopted since 2004. Its effect is to completely remove the final stages of the EU’s legislative process, ruling out a second and third reading, limiting public scrutiny.
The return directive was passed on 18 June, with 367 MEPs in favour and 206 against. A subsequent ‘declaration’ by the member states, which has no legal force, stated that it would not provide grounds for those states with more favourable rules to lower their standards in accordance with the EU’s new ‘level playing field’. But within days, Italy had trebled the period that people being expelled could be detained from 60 to 180 days.

Europe’s deportation machine

While the directive has galvanised much opposition, there has been far less concern that EU policy as a whole now provides for the wholesale criminalisation of all irregular migrants (including the vast majority of refugees). Within this process, expulsion is merely the final sanction in a regime geared ever more toward detection and detention.

In the late 1990s all member states began fingerprinting asylum applicants and ‘illegal’ migrants; all the records are housed in the EU’s Eurodac database, which went online in 2000. Fingerprinting is now being extended to all visa applicants, whose data will be housed in a new EU visa information system (even where visas are refused), and all EU passport holders.

The ‘biometric’ identity documents and fingerprint scanners, now being rolled out across Europe, will be complemented by a new EU ‘entry-exit’ system designed to detect ‘illegals’ and visa overstayers, and the new ‘second generation’ Schengen information system, which will be used to enforce both deportation orders against those who have absconded and entry bans against those successfully deported.

‘Carrier sanctions’, fines for employers of ‘illegals’ and widespread raids on migrant communities complement these efforts on the ground. The result is that migrants lacking the legal authority to remain – despite the absence of any credible statistics, the EU claims there are some eight million ‘illegals’ present in its territory – are driven further and further ‘underground’, where they become susceptible to ever greater coercion and exploitation. The new French presidency of the EU was highly critical of the recent ‘amnesties’ granted by Spain and Italy to regularise people in this position, and is now seeking to outlaw any future concessions of the same magnitude.

The return directive itself is merely the latest measure in a long line of EU explusion policies adopted since the entry into force of the Amsterdam Treaty in 1999 – among the most controversial is a 2004 decision on joint explusion flights. ‘Collective expulsions’ are actually prohibited under a protocol to the European Convention on Human Rights and were theoretically banned again in the EU Charter of Fundamental Rights of 2000, but the EU simply ignored these rules. Commissioner Vittorino, who had responsibility for home affairs at the time these measures were passed, instead called upon member states to ‘educate their citizens that joint [expulsion] flights have nothing to do with collective expulsion’.

Expulsion airways

The first flight to be organised under the auspices of the EU took place in July 2005 when a charter flight collected 60 Afghans from the UK and France and deported them to Kabul. Two months later, Spain, France and Italy organised a joint charter flight to expel 125 Romanians from the EU (people who would 15 months later become EU citizens when Romania acceded to the Union), sowing the seeds for the current attack on Roma in Italy.

Frontex, the fledgling EU border police, also has a growing mandate to detect people residing unlawfully in the member states and enforce expulsions on their behalf, including collective expulsions. This is a mandate it takes very seriously, having recently requested its own fleet of aircraft for this purpose.
Finally, having long used money from the European refugee fund (which was designed to be used for the ‘integration’ of refugees) to finance their expulsion policies, the member states can now draw directly from a new ‘European return fund’, a 629 million euro programme that will run to 2013, of which 47 million euros is earmarked for Frontex operations.

All of this comes at a time when the EU professes to be ‘dependent’ on migrant labour to maintain current European standards of living, and amid proposals for a new ‘blue card’ scheme to streamline entry procedures for people needed to fulfil specific labour shortages. If trafficking in human beings is a crime, the EU is starting to look like the biggest trafficker of them all.

Ben Hayes is a researcher with Statewatch (www.statewatch.org)
and the Transnational Institute

It’s easy to get worked up about surveillance. By definition, the surveillance society is not a democratic society in which surveillance is pervasive. It’s one in which surveillance is so pervasive that it threatens the very fabric of democracy. The libertarian intuition that we are ‘descending into a police state’ is borne of this concern. As ever more laws are introduced to regulate social and material life (not least the 3,000 new criminal offences said to have been introduced by New Labour), and ever more aspects of our lives are monitored and recorded, the more we are asked to account for ourselves and the more we can be held accountable for.

In a nutshell, the problem is that it is but a few discrete steps from the information society we cherish to the surveillance society we fear. To avail ourselves of today’s hi-tech goods and services we have little choice but to allow those who provide them to collect more and more information about us. And let’s be honest: as long as they keep this information secure and confidential, we’re not all that bothered. Secretly, we may even quite like being profiled, targeted and ‘rewarded’ with Amazon book recommendations, discounts and freebies.

Although unwanted ‘spam’ has gotten beyond a joke, the principles of ‘data protection’ appear to work reasonably well in the private sector. The 1995 and 1997 EC directives, and the 1998 UK Act, have imposed clear legal obligations on ‘data controllers’ to protect personal information, while ‘taking your privacy seriously’ has become a corporate mantra.

So far so good: things to hide, but little to fear. Bring the state into the debate, however, and the equation quickly changes. A new generation of surveillance technologies, population databases, identity management systems, ‘dataveillance’, data-sharing and data-mining tools are providing the state with the capacity to construct an almost unimaginably detailed picture of our private lives. At the same time, our celebrated data protection laws are being systematically circumvented and unravelled in order to legitimise the very practices they were designed to prevent.

Who’s tapping your phone?

A few years ago, the police needed a warrant to access your telephone records – now all they need is your phone number. This revolution in communications surveillance was carefully orchestrated. In 2000, parliament adopted the misleadingly titled Regulation of Investigatory Powers Act (RIPA) which, rather than regulating state surveillance, bequeathed to the police and a host of other public bodies the spook-like power to access directly the records held by communications companies. In place of a judicial warrant, an ‘authorisation’ by a senior officer would now suffice. In accordance with data protection rules, telecoms companies were also duly deleting our phone records after we had paid our phone bills (a matter of a few months at most). ‘Not so fast,’ said the Home Office, using the 2001 Anti-Terrorism, Crime and Security Act (ATCSA) to introduce a voluntary code on ‘data retention’, under which the major ‘telcos’ would not only retain their records for up to one year, but provide the police with direct access to their databases. The House of Lords did its level best to restrict the purpose of the Act to ‘serious crime’ but this would inevitably prove meaningless once data had been retained.

Not content with the voluntary code, the Home Office now demanded mandatory data retention by all telecoms companies and internet service providers (ISPs). But rather than returning to parliament, which had already judged ATCSA a bridge too far, the UK government went to the EU to seek an agreement with the force of European law. A discreet amendment to EU data protection rules followed in 2002, and an EC directive on data retention was eventually adopted in 2006.

In 2007, the Home Office returned to parliament to make its voluntary code mandatory by statutory order (meaning no debate), with the justification that the UK was merely fulfilling its obligations under EU law. This is a flagrant case of ‘policy laundering’. Just as ‘money laundering’ describes the passage of illegitimate funds through outside institutions and back into legitimate circulation, policy laundering involves the use of intergovernmental organisations to agree policies that lack political legitimacy in order to bring them into practice.

The cumulative effect of mandatory data retention cannot be understated. All our telephone and internet traffic data must now be stored for at least 12 months (perhaps longer in future – up to three years as in Ireland, or five as in Italy) in case the police or other state agencies need to look at it. The list of other agencies includes, among others, the Tax Office, the Food Standards Agency, the Department of Health, the Immigration Service, the Gaming Board, the Charities Commission and 475 local councils.

Should the police wish to see your telephone records today, they no longer need to show ‘probable cause’ to a judge. They just need to turn on their computers (or phone a friend). In 2005/6, this power was used a staggering 439,000 times over 12 months – a figure certain to rise with mandatory data retention and its extension to internet usage by 2009. The lack of independent scrutiny means we can only guess what the police were up to, but in accessing records more than 1,200 times a day, we can be certain that their activities went far beyond the scope of organised crime and terrorism.

Pulling a Swift one

Telecommunications data retention is but one example of the state placing legal obligations on the private sector to facilitate surveillance. ‘Policy laundering’ is again in evidence, somewhat ironically, in the EC money laundering directives of 1991, 2001 and 2005. These directives have effectively reversed the principles of banking secrecy and privacy in financial transactions by placing a legal obligation on financial institutions to retain data for five years and report all ‘suspicious financial transactions’ and customers to the police. In the UK, ‘failure to disclose’ those suspicions is now a criminal offence punishable by up to five years imprisonment.

The money laundering directives now also apply to auditors, accountants, tax advisors, estate agents, lawyers and notaries, dealers in high-value goods and casinos (not that this has done anything to curb systematic tax evasion and corruption by the rich and powerful), while under the UK Terrorism Act 2000, we are all now liable to prosecution for ‘failure to disclose’ any suspicions we may harbour about terrorist activities. As these so-called ‘due diligence’ obligations come to represent the wholesale privatisation of surveillance, government whistle-blowing, as David Kelly and Craig Murray can testify, is positively discouraged.

Further obligations have been placed on the airline industry to provide states with information about their passengers (so-called ‘passenger name records’ or ‘PNR’). Under successive EU-US PNR agreements – which the European Parliament voted against on four occasions – US agencies now have direct access to European passenger reservation databases. There are few meaningful restrictions on the use or onward exchange of the data they extract. This means that even if you’re only taking a BA flight from London to Amsterdam, up to 35 categories of personal information that you supply could find themselves in the US Department of Homeland Security’s inbox. Perhaps it’s time to start reading the ‘terms and conditions’ before ticking that box? Except that if you don’t tick that box, you can’t book the ticket.

In other cases, corporations are simply handing their data over to state agencies in the absence of any lawful requirement to do so. In 2006 the New York Times broke the story that the US was secretly monitoring every transaction sent through the global Swift money transfer organisation – which is based in Brussels – via an illegal ‘mirror’ in the US. The EU responded by formally granting the US access to the Swift data.

It is suggested that the use of ‘mirrors’ by the US government is widespread, and endemic where US-based multinationals are concerned. This begs a question: when corporations are requested to hand over or provide states with access to their data in the name of combating terrorism or some other evil, are they really going to refuse in practice? The same question applies to public bodies, with Transport for London apparently all too ready to provide the security services with a ‘backdoor’ into the congestion charge and Oystercard systems.

Stasi 2.0

The debate about ID cards masks far more insidious developments. Over the coming decade, the vast majority of the EU’s law-abiding population will be fingerprinted, registered and placed under de facto surveillance. Once again, governments have taken advantage of the EU to ‘harmonise’ national policy on the introduction of ‘biometric’ passports, ID cards, resident permits and visas. Article 18(3) EC of the EU Treaty should have prohibited EU legislation from the outset as it states clearly that the power to adopt legislation ‘shall not apply to provisions on passports, identity cards, residence permits or any other such document’. The member states simply ignored this provision and then used the new ‘reform treaty’ to belatedly add these powers to the EU mandate.

Under the ID Cards Act of 2006, from around 2010 everyone renewing their UK passport will be required to attend one of 69 ‘enrolment centres’, where they will be fingerprinted (all ten), photographed and asked any of the 200 questions designed by the Home Office to test the applicant’s identity, provenance and entitlement to remain in the country. Under EU rules, applicants for a visa to any EU member state will soon be subject to an almost identical process in their own country (with data retained in EU databases even if the visa is refused).

Your new biometric passport will contain an embedded radio frequency identification (RFID) chip that includes your fingerprints and other personal data, an identity card (with another RFID chip) and a number. The RFID chip is there to transmit your data, from distance, to special airport scanners, which scream ‘hack me’ to all those so inclined.

Your special number relates to your record in the UK national identity register (NIR), which links you to every other piece of information the state has ever collected about you. As the campaign group NO2ID has explained, the NIR will become ‘an index to all other official and quasi-official records. Through cross-references and an audit trail of all checks on the register, the NIR [will] be the key to a total life history of every individual, to be retained even after death.’

At the same time, a new generation of ‘e-borders’ will mean that all entrants are fingerprinted upon entry and given a de facto police record. The UK ‘e-borders’ system is to contain up to 90 specific categories of data on individuals and will record all movement into and out of the UK.

Shocked by the Stasi analogy in the subheading? You may be missing the point: the Stasi didn’t ask many questions because they already knew all the answers. Nor is it simply a case of ‘Business or pleasure, sir?’ making way for some rather more direct questioning. As more and more data is collected on the premise of border control, the techniques and technologies deployed at the border are simultaneously being deployed on the streets. ‘Multi-agency’ police checks (basically roadblocks with benefits, tax, immigration and DVLA inspectors in attendance), massive immigration raids and collective expulsions, hand-held fingerprint scanners, mobile access to police computer systems – these are all now matters of policy rather than legislation, and the subject of little if any debate.

You are a security risk

States are also investing heavily – and usually secretly – in the kind of predictive algorithms developed for direct marketing purposes in the belief that ‘risk profiling’ will help identify terrorists, criminals, psychopaths, problem children (see ‘Generation ID’, opposite) and other dangerous people before they have the chance to do us harm. This corresponds to more and more ‘preventative’ police powers – Asbos, security-based detention and so on. As EU policies, ‘terrorist profiling’ and computer-assisted passenger screening are now being introduced across Europe.

These types of programmes raise several fundamental objections. Primarily, by using assumptions about ethnicity, religion, nationality, lifestyle, education, health, wealth or criminal record as indicators of risk, these systems are intrinsically discriminatory. In turn, they inevitably lead to actions against large numbers of innocent people on a scale that renders the exercise both unacceptable and pointless. In the wake of the discovery of the Hamburg cell’s involvement in the 9/11 conspiracy, for example, German federal police agencies collected and analysed data on some 8.3 million Muslims (and suspected Muslims) in Germany but failed – despite hundreds of surveillance operations, arrests and interrogations – to find a single terrorist.

As Douwe Korff, international law professor at London Metropolitan University, points out, it is important to stress that this is not something that can be fixed by better design: ‘Attempts to identify very rare incidents or targets from a very large data set are mathematically certain to result in either an unacceptably high number of “false positives” (identifying innocent people as suspects) or an unacceptably low number of “false negatives” (not identifying real criminals or terrorists). This is referred to scientifically as the “base-rate fallacy”; colloquially, as “If you are looking for a needle in a haystack, it doesn’t help to throw more hay on the stack.”‘

Democracy’s prospect

Despite the fact that the judicial regulation of surveillance is fast disappearing, many liberals have faith that the surveillance society can be somehow ‘democratised’ – a few new data protection rules here, a little bit more accountability there. This is disingenuous to say the least: mass surveillance, data retention and risk-profiling are the very things data protection law was designed to prevent. Once these practices are introduced, the law can give little practical effect to the supposedly fundamental right to protection from undue or arbitrary interference by the state.

Others suggest that the very same technology used to hold the citizen to account can be turned inwards, so that ‘glass citizens’ are governed by transparent states, as it were. But in a country that won’t even allow telephone intercepts as evidence in court because the police and security services don’t want to compromise their secret listening programmes, this appears a remote proposition.

So the job rests firmly with what remains of society. But in the absence of any rational appraisal as to the desirability and effectiveness of surveillance systems, never mind more concerted efforts to halt the march of the surveillance state (particularly via the EU), there can be little cause for optimism. And if you tolerate this, your children really will be next.

Ben Hayes is a researcher with Statewatch and the Transnational Institute

Baluchistan is split across western Pakistan, eastern Iran and southern Afghanistan. Much like the Kurds, the Baluchis are victims of empire, with their resource-rich territory conquered and divided by successive regional powers, from the Persians to the British. It was British colonial rule that determined the modern political geography of Baluchistan, in the 1947 agreement with India that created Pakistan.

The Baluchis resisted their forced assimilation into Pakistan and by the time Bangladesh had gained independence from Pakistan in 1971, they too were demanding greater autonomy from the political elite in Punjab. President Zulfikar Ali Bhutto’s refusal to grant any meaningful powers to Baluchistan’s first elected body in 1972 resulted in a bloody five-year war in which 3,000 Pakistani soldiers, 5,000 Baluchi fighters and many more civilians were killed.

The Pakistan air force carried out strikes throughout rural Baluchistan and napalm was used as part of a ‘scorched earth’ policy. Iran, concerned about the future aspirations of its own Baluchi minority, also joined the military action. The war ended in 1978 when General Muhammad Zia-ul-Haq, who had ousted Bhutto in a military coup, offered an amnesty to Baluchi fighters.

Almost 30 years on, despite producing more than one third of Pakistan’s natural gas and accounting for only six per cent of the population, Baluchistan remains the country’s most impoverished region. In recent years, acts of violence against the continued presence of Pakistan’s military have increased. These include attacks by the BLA on power facilities, railway lines and military checkpoints. Alleged financial assistance to Baluchi fighters from India and countries in the west, renewed designs on the exploitation of Baluchistan’s natural resources and the presence of Taliban fighters have all fuelled tension in the region.

Following the alleged rape of a Sihndi doctor by a soldier at a hospital in Sui, in January 2005, Baluchi guerrillas launched a crippling attack on the Sui natural gas production facility, Pakistan’s largest. President Pervez Musharraf’s retaliation was swift and merciless. Warning that ‘this is not the 1970s’ and promising that ‘they will not know what’s hit them’, he dispatched Pakistan’s F- 16s and helicopter gunships (newly supplied by the US) into the mountains and deserts of Baluchistan to deliver the kind of collective punishment now all too familiar in occupied lands.

In the past year six Pakistani army brigades and a 25,000- strong paramilitary force have been deployed. Local groups claim that 450 Baluchi politicians and activists have been ‘disappeared’ and that more than 4,000 Baluchis are in detention, many in secret locations without charge or trial. As winter approached, Unicef called for immediate UN food and medical aid to 84,000 Baluchis displaced by the troubles, including 33,000 children, but the federal Pakistani government repeatedly blocked or ignored requests from aid agencies for permission to operate in Baluchistan.

Last August, 79-year-old Nawab Akbar Bugti, a tribal chief, former governor of Baluchistan and leader of its largest political party (the JLP), was assassinated in targeted Pakistani air-strikes. In December, two more prominent nationalist leaders were arrested.

Iran has also stepped up its repression of Baluchi activists, arresting hundreds and sentencing many to death; public executions are commonplace. Last week it emerged that the extradition of Rashif Rauf, he of the alleged plot to bring down airliners using liquid explosives fame, could be dependent on Britain returning several prominent Baluchi activists to Pakistan.

The Home Office website provides the following explanation for designating the BLA as ‘terrorist’: ‘BLA are comprised of tribal groups based in the Baluchistan area of Eastern Pakistan [sic], which aims to establish an idependant [sic] nation encompassing the Baluch dominated areas of Pakistan, Afghanistan and Iran.’

The failure even to describe the geography of Baluchistan correctly reflects an ignorant quid pro quo with General Musharaf: we need his help with our ‘war on terrorism’, so we support his.

This position is at best counterproductive, and at worst reckless. Pakistan’s crackdown on moderate and anti-Taliban Baluch and Pashtun nationalists is strengthening the Islamist forces that coalition forces are fighting in Afghanistan, while the ISI (Pakistan’s internal security agency) is widely believed to provide extensive support to the Taliban. With crude geopolitics like this, who needs enemies?