• Greg Barton

18 July 2007
Countering terrorism means winning hearts and minds, writes GREG BARTON

ALTHOUGH no one died, 16 July 2007 can be added to the list of dates when Australia lost something in the struggle against terrorism. The decision by the immigration minister, Kevin Andrews, to revoke the professional employment visa of Dr Mohammed Haneef represents a heavy blow for the Indian doctor and his young family. It also represents a significant blow to Australian justice and to our efforts to counter terrorism. This is not to suggest a comparison to the loss that occurs when lives are snatched away and bodies maimed in the horrors of a terrorist attack, as happened in New York, Bali and Jakarta. Nor is it to suggest that the issues involved are simple and the answers clear. But something has been lost and we need to recognise that.

Terrorism is an awful thing. It works on the principle of leveraging impact and influence well beyond the initial and direct victims of criminal violence with the intention of bringing about political change. Terrorists do this in part by provoking the sort of political and security responses that can fuel their public relations and marketing efforts to sow seeds of doubt, cultivate sympathy and recruit support.

Modern terrorism is very much a struggle for hearts and minds. Our efforts to counter terrorism must likewise, if they are to be truly effective in the longer term, concern themselves with hearts and minds. Responding to perceptions and building trust are key elements in this struggle and we neglect them at our peril.

The British police understand this dynamic better than most police forces. It is a realisation learnt the hard way through decades of violence linked to the troubles in Northern Ireland. They understand the importance of community policing - of building rapport with the communities that terrorists claim to represent. They have learnt that without winning the confidence of these communities they cannot hope to win a lasting peace. And yet despite this awareness and much good work the British police acknowledge that have yet to win the trust and broad support of British Muslims and Muslim communities.

The Australian Federal Police have learnt much from both their British and Indonesian colleagues. Their remarkable success in our region deservers our praise and gratitude - many attacks have been thwarted and likely many lives saved. Consequently, when the AFP appeals to Kevin Andrews to use his powers to keep Haneef in detention we should carefully weigh the matter before jumping to conclusions about election year politics. And whilst it is certainly right that we should be concerned about antiterrorism legislation eroding civil liberties we also need to be mindful of the challenges facing police in anti-terrorism cases.

In Australia we have been quick to criticise the Indonesian courts when we perceive them to be too soft on terrorists but what we generally fail to understand is that courts in open democratic societies all around the world have found it difficult to successfully prosecute terrorists. Just as we learnt earlier with respect to organised crime, it is one thing to have reliable intelligence of criminal intent and collusion it is quite another thing to prove it, beyond reasonable doubt, in a court of law. The fact that Al Capone was finally bought to task on charges of tax evasion was certainly not because the FBI did not care about his racketeering.

So in general terms the frustration felt by the AFP in responding to terrorism threats is entirely understandable. All too often they are damned when they do take action and damned when they don’t.

Nevertheless, the facts as we know them in the case of Dr Mohammed Haneef demand that we give the matter careful scrutiny. The police, quite rightly, took time to make a careful investigation of the material evidence against him. At the end of this process, all they could say publicly against Haneef is that he “recklessly” passed on a pre-paid mobile phone SIM card, presumedly with sufficient remaining credit to be of some value, to his second cousin when he left Britain to come to work in Australia. Just how reckless this act was remains unclear. Did Haneef know enough about his cousin to recognise the danger that he posed? Clearly the Queensland magistrate who heard the evidence against Haneef judged him to be of sufficiently low risk to society to have granted him bail on the modest undertaking of $10,000.

Haneef’s passport had been handed in and it is reasonable to expect that, once out on bail, he would have been kept under careful police surveillance. It is understandable that the AFP might feel it necessary to continue working on the Haneef case but it is difficult to see what could possibly have been lost had he been allowed out on bail.

Sadly the cost of Kevin Andrew’s intervention is potentially very high indeed. There is, of course, the considerable personal cost to Haneef and his family. But quite about from this there is the inevitable ongoing cost to our efforts in countering terrorism.

Enduring success in our long struggle with terrorism will depend very much on people like those in the extended family of Dr Haneef speaking up when they see things that concern them. If such people feel that they cannot, or dare not, approach police to talk about the worrying behaviour of their cousin, their neighbour, or perhaps even their brother or son then we will all lose.

And if our carriage of justice is perceived as being partial and prejudicial then we risk not only being deprived of vital intelligence but also handing the terrorists a public relations bonanza that will serve to both lesson community vigilance and further expose vulnerable young idealists to the seductive allure of a global struggle for justice. •

Greg Barton is the Herb Feith Research Professor for the Study of Indonesia at Monash University where he works with both the Global Terrorism Research Centre and the Centre for Muslim Minorities and Islam Policy Studies. He is the author of Indonesia’s struggle: Jemaah Islamiyah and the Soul of Islam, published in APO’s Briefings series by UNSW Press.

Photo: Immigration Minister Kevin Andrews speaks during a press conference in Canberra on 16 July 2007 after cancelling the visa of Dr Mohamed Haneef. AAP Image/Alan Porritt.