Lawrence Peter Ampofo
Engagement with Local Communities in Spain
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Engagement with Local Communities in SpainIn order to understand the motivation for the Spanish Government’s attempts to engage with local communities as part of its counter-terrorism strategy after 11-M, it is first necessary to provide a contextual background of the rise to prominence of international terrorism for Spanish policymakers. While a more in-depth discussion of the development of terrorism in Spain is outlined in Chapter Two, it is felt that this section will provide a framework of understanding for the eventual insights that are derived in this chapter. The terrorist attacks perpetrated against the US on 11 September 2001 had global ramifications. National security strategies and political acts (e.g. PATRIOT Act 2004, Présidence de la République 2008) were established by a range of states with the mandate of protecting their publics against a new type of adversary in the form of ‘violent extremists claiming to act in the name of Islam…the threat is greater in scale and ambition than terrorist threats [faced] in the past’ (UK Cabinet Office, 2008: 1). National governments immediately and emphatically fixated the focus of their counter-terrorism strategies on the roles played by immigrant religious and cultural communities, especially Muslim communities. The principal motivation for the focus on the link between Muslim communities and terrorism came from public announcements of culpability by the former leader of al-Qaeda, Osama bin Laden, for the 2001 US terrorist attacks and threats of further violent actions. Commenting in 2004 on his role in the terrorist attacks on the US, Bin Laden stated: ‘God knows it did not cross our minds to attack the towers but after the situation became unbearable and we witnessed the injustice and tyranny of the American-Israeli alliance against our people in Palestine and Lebanon, I thought about it…Your security is not in the hands of [Democratic presidential candidate John] Kerry or Bush or al-Qaida. Your security is in your own hands and each state which does not harm our security will remain safe’ (The Guardian, 2004: 1). In this statement, Bin Laden highlighted that US-led military involvement in the Middle East was the overriding reason for acts of terrorism committed by al-Qaeda. It is for this reason that Bin Laden declared fatwas against the US and its allies in which he emphasised that defending the Islamic religion was the motivating force for the use of terrorist acts for the al-Qaeda organisation. In 1996, Bin Laden declared: ‘The people of Islam have suffered from aggression, iniquity and injustice imposed by the Zionist-Crusader alliance and their collaborators . . .It is the duty now on every tribe in the Arabian peninsula to fight jihad and cleanse the land from these Crusader occupiers. Their wealth is booty to those who kill them. My Muslim brothers: your brothers in Palestine and in the land of the two Holy Places [Saudi Arabia] are calling upon your help and asking you to take part in fighting against the enemy – the Americans and the Israelis. They are asking you to do whatever you can to expel the enemies out of the sanctities of Islam’ (National Archives, 2003: 1, emphasis in original). In 1998, he had similarly announced: ‘the killing of Americans and their civilian and military allies is a religious duty for each and every Muslim to be carried out in whichever country they are until Al Aqsa mosque has been liberated from their grasp and until their armies have left Muslim lands…We – with God’s help – call on every Muslim who believes in God and wishes to be rewarded to comply with God’s order to kill Americans and plunder their money whenever and wherever they find it. We also call on Muslims…to launch the raid on Satan’s US troops and the devil’s supporters allying with them, and to displace those who are behind them’ (National Archives, 2003: 1, emphasis in original). The 11 September 2001 attacks represented a significant shift in the perceived threats faced by the US and its allies, including Spain. Terrorist acts had been committed by foreign persons within Western borders in the name of Islam, forcing governments and supranational agencies alike to significantly alter their counter-terrorism strategies to mitigate the threat. Osama bin Laden’s comments above indicated his belief that the US and its allies had illegally occupied what he considered to be Muslim territory, and that violence perpetrated against the US, its allies and interests by all Muslims was, as a result, permissible. His declaration of culpability following the 11 September attacks on the US, in addition to in-depth investigations by global intelligence services (Revisión Estratégica de Defensa, 2003), led governments to the conclusion that loosely connected terrorist groups, committed to enacting political violence in the name of Islam, constituted their principal terrorist threat. Following the 2001 attacks, a number of countries quickly revised their counter-terrorism strategies (Présidence de la République 2008, UK Cabinet Office, 2008). The Spanish Government, however, decided to forego drafting a national security strategy that focused on the threat of international terrorism committed in the name of Islam at this time. Instead, as discussed in Chapter Two, it elected to focus the majority of its counter-terrorism resources on dismantling ETA (Bobbitt, 2008, Jordán, 2005). From 2001 to 2003, the conservative Government led by José María Aznar succeeded in reducing the frequency of ETA attacks by severely disrupting their logistical capability and arresting high-profile ETA members. In addition, Aznar prohibited the Basque political party Batasuna from practicing mainstream Spanish politics, as it had been accused by the Government of maintaining high-level links to ETA. As the frequency of ETA attacks decreased and there appeared to be no discernible threat emanating from al-Qaeda, Aznar convincingly demonstrated that his decision to focus on Spain’s Basque terrorism situation was vindicated (Celso, 2006). However, the threat to Spain from al-Qaeda and other North African organisations had been increasing steadily and surreptitiously since the mid-1990s. The conflation of the Algerian and Moroccan armed organisation Group for Preaching and Combat (GSPC, Groupe Salafiste pour la Prédication el le Combat) and the Armed Islamic Group (GIA) into the Al-Qaeda Organisation in the Maghreb (AQIM) in 1998 presented Spain with a significant terrorist concern. The organisation’s networks extended from North Africa into Spain and Western Europe, aided by criminal organisations, to the extent that they were fully capable of perpetrating violent attacks (Beutel 2007). Bezunartea et al. (2009) argued, that in addition to pronouncements from AQIM that Spain is a target for violent attacks, the real reason for the organisation’s presence in the country is for use as a logistics hub; ‘fundraising and the recruitment of persons willing to fight in Iraq and Afghanistan. Their operations revolve around phone centres but they have no roots or relationships with the religious communities’ (Bezunartea et al., 2009: 19). In spite of AQIM’s growing presence in Spain from the mid-1990s, the Spanish Government focused the vast majority of its counter-terrorist resources on ETA (Bobbitt, 2008). However, the terrorist attacks on 11 March 2004 in Madrid indelibly changed the focus of national security in Spain. 11-M indicated a new type of al-Qaeda attack in which operations were not only carried out by direct members of the organisation, but also outsourced to loosely connected individuals and groups inspired by the ideologies purported by the group. At this point, Spain recognised that al-Qaeda was more than a traditional terrorist organisation with a classical hierarchical structure. It had, in fact evolved into a far more dangerous organisation; ‘a hardcore network of co-opted groups and an ideology’ (Burke, 2004: 25), capable of affecting people from the mountains of Peshawar to the digital portals of online discussion forums and video-sharing sites (Burke, 2005, Celso, 2008). The 11 March attacks led the Government to realise that the emerging terrorist threat facing Spain, and Europe at large, emanated from elements within the immigrant Muslim community and that measures had to be taken to actively engage with them (Celso, 2005, El Mundo, 2006, Jordán, 2003, 2009). When the incumbent Prime Minister José Luis Rodríguez Zapatero assumed office directly after the 11 March attacks on 17 April 2004, he drafted his counter-terrorism strategy on the understanding that terrorism was borne from social injustice and that the situation could be ameliorated by relieving the conditions which, in his perception, led to radicalisation and terrorism within communities (Celso, 2009). The investigation into the 11 March attacks by the 11-M Commission (Administración de Justicia, 2004), revealed that they were perpetrated by a group of men who, according to the prominent judge, Juan del Olmo, were not part of the al-Qaeda organisation (Brótons & Espósito, 2002). Rather, they were inspired by al-Qaeda propaganda located online and had formed a group to perform the attacks in the name of al-Qaeda. The Madrid attacks, therefore, represented a “home-grown phenomenon”, in which second generation Spanish citizens of Moroccan descent had detonated bombs, killing 191 people. This was similar to the terrorist attacks committed in London on 7 July 2005 by second generation UK nationals of Muslim descent, which killed 52 people. Collectively, the 11-M and 7/7 attacks collectively compelled Zapatero to adopt a radically different strategy to that in place, one that focused on engagement with local and foreign communities in Spain. Zapatero, therefore, proposed the creation of a counter-terrorism strategy that provided incentives to members of Spain’s Muslim community to engage more in Spanish society. As discussed in Chapter Two, this approach led the Government to implement a wide range of counter-terrorism programmes and policies to better engage with Muslim communities. One of these measures was a bilateral agreement with Morocco to help counter illegal immigration to Spain (BBC News, 2005). The Government also launched, in close cooperation with the United Nations and the Turkish Prime Minister, Recep Tayyip Erdogan, the Alianza de Civilizaciones (Alliance of Civilisations). This initiative was created to foster global understanding and cooperation through an online portal and offline events. Zapatero, who introduced this idea through the United Nations, believed that the threat of radicalisation could be significantly assuaged through the use of online tools to engage young people around the world. Intelligence from the security services also gave weight to Zapatero’s belief that the environments that foster radicalisation and sympathy for terrorism, such as poverty and lack of access to education, needed to be eliminated for the successful integration of the Muslim community (Celso, 2009). Following the 11 March 2004 attacks, the Spanish security services investigated the Jihadist terrorist groups operating in the country and reported that the terror infrastructure relied on criminal organisations, community centres and groups that focus on unassimilated neighbourhoods (Celso 2006). In addition, some community centres and mosques emerged as complicit in providing the financial support for terrorist groups such as the ‘Algerian Armed Islamic Group, Abu Hafs al Masri Brigade, and the Moroccan Salfist Group for Preaching and Combat’ (Celso, 2006: 125). This evidence supported the importance of the Government’s focus on community engagement. The strong linkage of Islam and the Muslim community to international and 21st century “home-grown terrorism” in Spain was based on comments from Osama bin Laden and from the revealed identities of the suicide bombers in the US and Madrid. However, in addition, terrorism scholars have sought to analyse the Muslim community and terrorism link through other perspectives, most notably the demographic of people involved in Jihadist terrorism offences in the country. As mentioned previously, Fernando Reinares conducted a small-scale study on the population of those incarcerated in Spain on suspicion of involvement in Jihadist terrorism in the hope of creating a ‘tentative sociological profile of those linked (in Spain) to cells, groups and organisations associated or aligned with al-Qaeda’ (Reinares, 2006: 1). Reinares based his study on a total sample of 188 people arrested in connection with Jihadist terrorism. He concluded, amongst other things, that 69 people involved in Jihadist terrorism (37%) were of Moroccan descent, and 66 of them were legally registered to reside in Spain (Reinares, 2006). Spain’s experience of immigration, analysed in Chapter Four, is a relatively new phenomenon occurring mainly over the past ten years.85 Its effect on the country has been significant with the Spanish National Statistics Institute claiming that immigration increased GDP by 50% between 2001 and 2006. In 2009, the immigrant Muslim community in Spain numbered approximately one million, lower than the Latin American community at 2,273,324 (Bezunartea et al., 2009, Instituto Nacional de Estadística, 2010). According to the Spanish National Institute of Statistics in 2008, the largest immigrant community in Spain is from Morocco (676,405), with the Algerian community ranking second (55,042). Senegalese and Nigerian communities complete Africa’s largest migrant populations in Spain. In addition, immigrants from Pakistan, India and Bangladesh form a sizeable community in Spain (Bezunartea et al., 2009, Instituto Nacional de Estadística, 2010). Concerns that discord between and amongst Spain’s communities could be a sign of the long-term potential for difficulties was evinced in concerns that, since the 11 September 2001 attacks, the Muslim community in Spain finds it difficult to fully integrate into the wider Spanish society. Elena Sánchez from the Spain-based think tank Centre d’Informació i Documentació Internacionals a Barcelona (CIDOB) claimed that certain communities have integrated well into Spanish societies, such as the Sub-Saharan African and Chinese communities, but that the Muslim community, for a wide variety of reasons, had not integrated as well as others. In his analysis of Spain’s dual security dilemma, the scholar Anthony Celso commented that while Muslim communities have been attracted to Europe because of the post-Cold War economic boom, Government concerns about integration have been on the increase, especially since 9/11. A number of new immigrants to Spain ‘have pronounced Islamic identities that have deepened as a result of their exposure to European society’. According to Celso, these profound Islamic identities form immigrants who were susceptible to the advances of Jihadist extremist communities, which had been extremely active in Europe, facilitating the development of terrorist organisations on the continent; providing ‘money, [recruitment, indoctrination, and training of] potential terrorists’ (Celso, 2004: 5). In May 2005, the Spanish Government awarded residency status to almost 700,000 illegal immigrants. This was designed to help illegal immigrants, who could not attain legal employment or enter into the education system. Without residency status, Zapatero believed, marginalised immigrant communities were potentially at risk of becoming susceptible to radical indoctrination from some elements of their communities (Tremlett, 2005 cited in Yale Global, 2005). In addition, the Government elected to negotiate a peaceful settlement with ETA in 2005, in the hope that such talks indicated to ETA that the Zapatero administration represented a true departure from the approach to counter-terrorism employed by Aznar (Selway, 2006). It was believed that bringing about the end of ETA’s violent campaign would lessen the risk to other Spanish communities of the threat of violence and also further exposure to ETA’s propaganda and rhetoric (Veres, 2004). The approach taken by Zapatero to counter terrorism was dispelled when a breakdown in negotiations with ETA led to the organisation bombing Madrid’s Barajas Airport in December 2006, killing two people. In addition, Operación Nova, which incorporated the Spanish and Moroccan security services, averted major terrorist attacks on the National Court in Madrid in November 2005, and on Barcelona’s Twin Towers and underground transport system in 2008. The focus of the counter-terrorism operations on immigrants once again shifted the focus of policymakers and the general public back on Muslim communities. Hitherto seeking reconciliation and dialogue with terrorist organisations and immigrant communities alike, Zapatero added to this a more realist undercurrent. Arrests of prominent ETA members and people suspected of involvement in Jihadist terrorism increased sharply following the failed terrorist attacks. In addition, as discussed in Chapter Two, Spain has employed a variety of public diplomacy techniques as part of its national and international counter-terrorism programmes, which are designed to engage communities and dissuade them from radicalising discourse. One of the most important initiatives for this is the Government’s commitment to interfaith dialogue through civil society. The use of interfaith dialogue is seen as a critical pillar of counter-radicalisation programmes and, by implication, counter-terrorism. This stems from the country’s experience of international Jihadi-inspired terrorism, and the Government assertion that faith diplomacy can positively engage the country’s large Muslim population away from radicalising discourse. The use of Faith Diplomacy as part of a wider public diplomacy programme, has been supported by prominent proponents, such as Tim Livesey from the office of the Archbishop of Canterbury, as an effective medium to achieve strategic objectives (Wilton Park, 2010). The Spanish Government empowers civil society organisations to play a key role in effectively delivering on this mandate. Organisations such as the UNESCO Centre of Catalonia (Unescocat) create and deliver religious diversity programmes which seek to promote understanding and tolerance amongst the general population through inter-religious understanding. This section has surveyed the different motivations of Spain’s counter-terrorism policies towards communities. The success of community-focused strategies is crucial if radical elements of the immigrant Muslim communities are to integrate successfully into Spanish society. The terrorism scholar Marc Sageman supported this by arguing that a deep sense of belonging needs to be cultivated in immigrant Muslim communities because if a person does not have a clear identity in relation to the society in which they live, this identity may be sought in “virtual Islam” (Sageman, 2004: 191). Virtual Islam is the term given by Sageman to describe communities of Muslims meeting online. He writes: ‘the Internet creates a seemingly concrete bond between the individual and a virtual Muslim community. This virtual community plays the same role that “imagined communities” played in the development of the feeling of nationalism, which made people love and die for their nations as well as hate and kill for them…Because of its virtual nature, the Internet community has no earthly counterpart and becomes idealised in the mind of surfers. This community is just, egalitarian, full of opportunity, unified in Islam purged of national peculiarities, and devoid of corruption, and persecution’ (Sageman, 2004: 191). Sageman’s argument concerning “virtual Islam” is important as the internet has emerged as a prominent space for people to express themselves. This chapter will now focus on the role of online communities in engaging with terrorist-inspired messages both implicitly and explicitly. Directory: portal -> files -> 4733003 files -> Impact case study (ref3b) files -> Ethics and Factual Television: a short history files -> P. O. Box 27, 00014 University of Helsinki, Finland tel. 358-9-191 58080 / 22216; fax 358-9-191 58096 / 23008 files -> The impact of a pledge campaign and the promise of publicity: a randomized controlled trial of charitable donations files -> Diversity and Voice: the Political Participation of Young People in the European Union files -> Chapter 15 a voice in Decision Making: young children in Denmark Stig Broström Introduction Download 1.29 Mb. Share with your friends:
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