The arrest of a number of Algerian refugees on 14th January for allegedly
making the poison ricin, and the accompanying death of a Special Branch
officer, have led to an ever-intensifying media panic. Strange that this
should suddenly happen now, when Blair is having real difficulty selling
Bush's oil war to his cabinet colleagues, let alone the public. There have
been stories in the media since last year about random terrorists of north
African origin. 'Terror attack on Tube planned' was one sensationalist
headline in December, though the men arrested for it were later released
without charge, like some of those arrested this time. But the releases
haven't made it into most of the mainstream media while, with a couple of
exceptions, journalists have remained silent on the nature of ricin. This
has led people to believe a mass gas attack in the style of Winston
Churchill may have been planned. The truth is that ricin is a lethal toxin.
But it has to be delivered into the body to work, so it's a weapon of
individual terror or assassination rather than the indiscriminate terror
that an F-15, say, is capable of. The most infamous use of ricin was when
Bulgarian secret police murdered dissident Georgi Markov in London in 1978,
using a poisoned umbrella. It's perhaps worth speculating why police made
such an elemental error when they arrested the men in Manchester. In my
experience, they're not slow in handcuffing people. And this was an
anti-terrorist operation, which implies they at least thought the men were
dangerous. Did someone higher up in Greater Manchester Police tell the
officers to go easy, or was it just a cock-up? It's unlikely we'll ever
know the full facts, but it's certainly convenient for Blair if he can
pretend these men have a link to Iraq. This, however, may prove difficult.
The mainstream media have focused on the number of Algerians coming to
Britain and claiming asylum, and how some of them may be terrorists.
There's been precious little attempt to understand why Algerians might flee
their homeland, why they might turn to terror and why they may not want to
go to France. In 1991, the Algerian generals scrapped elections because the
Islamic Salvation Front won them. Since then, over 80,000 people have been
slaughtered. European, primarily French, intelligence services knew all
about this, but guess what - Algeria has oil and gas, so they've kept
schtum. In 1997, Observer journalist John Sweeney wrote, "so why the
silence? Let us not underestimate the power of the state of Algeria. It
squats on huge oil and gas deposits worth billions. It supplies the gas
that warms Madrid and Rome. It has a £1.8 billion contract with British
Petroleum. No western government wants to make trouble with the state of
Algeria. Its wealth buys silence, buys complicity. Since the military junta
overthrew the country's democracy, 80,000 have been killed: Europe's gas
bill." The sad truth is that the Algerian military behave in the same way
Saddam Hussein does. They suppress all opposition, particularly working
class, ethnic and Islamist groups. The only difference is that their
paymasters haven't fallen out with them yet. Martin H. See the current
issue of Black Flag for a report of the Kabylie revolt against the Algerian
military government. Available from Freedom Press, price £1 plus 50p
postage in the UK, £1 elsewhere.
http://www.ainfos.ca/ainfos15775.html
