Thirty years ago, in 1975, Beirut began its process of self-destruction and hundreds of thousands of Arabs moved to London and made it the capital of the Middle East. The deep recession of the mid 70s found London welcoming, the Arabs were needed to prop up the sagging property and consumer markets.
Whether this happening has been good or bad has been the subject of heated debate. What is not debatable is the existence of a Beirut-on-Thames, an Arab London within London of expatriates and visitor who respond – lately violently – to political developments of the Middle East. Judged historically, the recent bombings in the London are the work of disenfranchised Muslims, an expression of the historical hate they have for their governments and the Western governments which support them.
At 7 a.m., the three Qatari teenage girls stand in front of the South Kensington mansion block. Heads are in Muslim white; their full-length dresses are a riot of bright colours. They are shouting with animation. Short English words sneak in, ‘Okay’ and ‘see you’ and others with no conclusive Arab equivalents. Manifestly overdressed, the girls have nowhere to go. They hold a Qatari girls meeting in front of the building for hours, oblivious to the looks of amused passers by.
Two hours later a black limousine disgorges four hefty women in Arab black in front of Bradley’s knicker shop in Knightsbridge. The colourful kickers, slips and bras on display are much too small for them and too frilly to be admired openly. What they want is inside. Bradley’s has satisfied Arab tastes since the mid-70s.
Bayswater is an ethnic ghetto, a transplanted Arab town. Its cafes and small groceries come to life between 10 and 11 in the morning. Speaking Arabic dozens of men sit in cafes, slurping Turkish coffee with piles of newspapers in front of them. They spend whole mornings exchanging political views, discussing the latest Middle East crisis. Meanwhile Arab women visit the nearby grocery stores to buy pitta bread, foul (fava bean), kashkavan cheese, olives and other Middle East goodies.
By midday the signs of Arab presence in London multiply. Many travel miles to Dajani’s pharmacy in Old Brompton Road because the attendants speak Arabic. Nearby, though vendors can’t identify publications and buyers have to point them out, news kiosks do a brisk business in Arabic language dailies and weeklies.
This is the innocent face of Arab London, what the great majority of the Arabs who live here or visit during the spring and summer months are all about. A community of 400,000 in the winter and near 700,000 in the summer, they live in accordance with a benign cultural ethos in total isolation from London’s Anglo-Saxon soul.
But there is more to Beirut-on-Thames than meets the eye. There is an invisible Arab presence made up of participants in Arab politics, journalism, the arms trade, and of espionage. Their most open activity is operating radio and TV stations which broadcast to the Middle East. They send revolutionary coded messages to hundreds of thousands of email addresses, telex special messages to preachers on Friday, and they occasionally indulge in levity as in when they transmit unfriendly personal messages to Saudi princes, the presidents of the various Arab countries and to ‘brothers’ in Iraq, Pakistan, Afghanistan and other places.
Members of the Beirut-on-Thames community include sophisticated bankers and businessmen who don’t slurp their coffee and whose multilingual wives frequent health clubs and fit into the tiniest undies; political activists with an eye on the big time, arms dealers who speak in whispers and journalists who sell out to the highest bidder. The combined influence of these people and the infectious nature of their activities have transformed the private and public institutions of the perennial civilised city.
To trace what residents of Beirut-on-Thames do during a typical day is to experience a real life Casablanca. The register of the posh Dorchester Hotel shows a Dr. Marwan occupying on of their largest suites. In reality, this is a pseudonym; the man is the chief political advisor to the King of Saudi Arabia. Dr. Marwan is here for a week, to bribe into silence writers and journalists who have lately criticised the Kingdom. He succeeds in silencing 6 critics at a cost of over $5 million.
According to Detective Inspector Thomasz Dorantt of The National Criminal Intelligence Service (NCIS) people with “antecedent history”, a record of having been imprisoned or detained n their countries without being sentenced, are subject to special police attention.
Far from the posh centre of London, in the austere surroundings of the Deep Pan Pizza somewhere near Kilburn tube station, Dr. Mohammed Al Mas’ari, a leader of the Saudi opposition in exile is being interviewed for the fourth time in a day. Speaking impeccable English and flashing an engaging smile, the bearded Mas’ari, a Ph.D in Physics, is trying and succeeding in convincing the journalist listener, the Middle East correspondent of a major American daily, that revolution is on the way in his country. Nearby, Dr. Sa’ad Al Faqih, leader of the Committee of the Legitimate Rights (of the Saudi people) for Defence is meeting with a Spanish journalist. A soft spoken surgeon who speaks with deliberateness and cool, Faqih is explaining why the succession process in his country will eventually destroy the House of Saud.
Further afield, Khalid Aswad, the London representative of the Advice and Reformation committee (ARC) is meeting with a television producer who wants to meet Osama bin Ladn in Afghanistan. A hefty man in full Arab garb, Khalid is trying to convince the television man that bin Laden is not the sole leader of ARC but a member of a five-man committee.
These are samples of everyday happenings which took place in London 5 years ago and which confirm London’s position as the centre of what is good and bad in the Middle East. These activities endangered London the way they did Beirut in the 1950s and 60s. But this held no interest for Scotland Yard. Following its government its main concern is to make money. The permissive attitude of the British government in allowing these groups to reside here implied a belief that London would tame them. This did not happen and cannot have happened, when, in the words of Article 19s Said Essoulami, “Unlike France, there is no cultural interaction with the host country.” Essoulami is right; the public London failed to change its guests.
This is the beginning of the problem. The governments who imprison and detain and deal with NCIS are the Arab and Muslim dictatorships which are at the root of the problems racking the Arab and Muslim worlds. Pavez Musharraf of Pakistan and Hasni Mubarak of Egypt, among others; have tried to pervert the course of justice and punish innocent people. By accepting what they do, the British government becomes ally and the enemy of their enemies.
London’s Arabic language dailies and weeklies, including a number of scandal sheets number somewhere around 50, greater than the number published in Cairo or Beirut. But the greater freedom enjoyed by the Arab London press has not produced healthy results. Though views of all factions in the Middle East can be aired, discussed and disseminated, this has not happened. The Arab press of London mainly collects news from the Middle East and sends it back directly or by word of mouth – which means it wouldn’t exist had the press there been free. Still, what exists in London is nothing except an arena for pamphleteers, blackmailers and purveyors of shallow, sponsored opinion.
According to the editor of the leading independent daily Al Quds Al Arabi, Abdel Bar Atwan, “Most Arab journalists would like to own their own publications, not to solve the problems of the Middle East, but to drive Rolls Royce’s, own houses in the South of France or villas in Marbella.” The attractive exaggeration has a great deal to it. The lavish lifestyle many Arab journalists live is a reflection more of who sponsors them than of their talents. Many enhance their meagre journalistic talents by occasional classy pimping or spying for princes and sheiks or both. Except for Al Quds Al Arabi and few publications, the Arab press obey the people who own or sponsor them, the Arab establishment.
Beyond newspapers and weekly publications, there are some television stations and they have Saudi connections. Sometimes newspapers and magazines have and had dual sponsors. The PLO, Libya, Saudi Arabia, Iraq, Islamic fundamentalist groups, and British corporations working in the Middle East have sponsored their own mouthpieces, and so have wealthy businessmen with grudges against competitors. Adds Al Quds Atwan, “The Saudis have tried to buy every writer on Middle East Affairs, Arab or outsider, and have tried to put independents like us out of business. We cannot afford the salaries the pro-Saudis pay, and companies selling advertising space don’t use us for far of angering them.
In fact the situation is more serious. Not only are the opponents of today’s Arab and Muslim dictatorship denied a political voice at home, their voice is blocked when they go into exile. They can’t compete because they don’t have the money to do it and in London the government is more likely to license a pro-House of Saud newspaper, magazine and television station than it is to license anything by their opponents. And there are British journalists willing to succumb to the lure of Saudi money.
For years there was little about the emergence of a strong Islamic movement and the staggering level of unemployment (over 25 per cent) among recent college graduates, the problems racking Saudi Arabia. Sponsored journalism overlooks the problems of their sponsors; thy practice “self-censorship”.
Unlike corrupt, irresponsible or blindly partisan journalism, the arms trade offers no built-in hope. It is corrupt and corrupting by nature and the only way to reform it I to eliminate it. But this is not possible while the buyer and seller governments condone it and participate in it, not unless we change the British,; Saudi, Kuwaiti, Emirates, Brazilian, Chinese, American, Chilean and Argentine and other governments who see and use London as a centre for this unwholesome activity. Surprising as it may sound, the Khashoggis, Sam Cummings, Gerhard Mertins, Robert Jarmans and even Matrix Churchill do not matter. The governments behind them or the ones granting them implicit approval do.
The complex nature of the arms trade requires a brief on who operates from and what happens in Beirut-on-Thames. London is the home for an unknown but considerable number od Middle East arms dealers, Saudis, Jordanians, Lebanese, Palestinians and – until the Second Gulf War – Iraqis. In addition to British sales, there are no fewer than 20 countries, including the United States, Russia, Spain and China, which directly or through companies, maintain arms sales offices here. Furthermore, African and other countries sell End User Certificates (EUCs) in London. These are the legal documents designating buyer countries. African and other countries sell them to countries which can’t buy under their own name, when there is a ban on selling to the real buyer. (For example, Iraq uses Jordanian and Egyptian End User Certificates to buy arms it couldn’t buy directly).
However elastic the rules governing them, the sales of British arms are subject to governmental approval and controls. But when Chile used London to sell cluster bombs to Iraq and Spain and Portugal did the same with heavy artillery shells it was nothing more than a paper transaction about which the British could do nothing. The buyer and seller used London to trade, but the lethal goods were shipped from somewhere else and not subject to British law or controls.
The presence of “extra-territorial” buyer and sellers, the laxity governing their use of London and the British government’s desire to sell military hardware combine to produce the biggest hardware bazaar of them all. Once again, Beirut of old comes to mind.
British military sales were subject to vague rules. Government approval is needed, friendly countries are favoured and the sale of “lethal weapons”, subject to interpretation, merited close security. In the 1970s Iraq, then the largest Arab purchaser of arms, tried to buy Jaguar fighter bombers from British Aerospace and Lynx helicopters from Westland, all these elements come into play. The final decision was political. Fear of Saddam was set aside. Britain decided to deal in the line because they wanted to pull him away from the USSR, until then his sale arms suppliers.
During the Iran-Iraq war, while pretending it was neutral and against the sale of “lethal weapons” to either party, the British government approved the sale to Iraq by the electronic company by Plessey of a sophisticated electronic command centre. The sale enhanced Iraq’s military capability and gave it an edge against Iran. Another cynical example of the flouting of the government’s own rules was an offer to sell 4000 British Leyland-made Jeeps to Iran, perhaps to balance the Plessey deal.
But, despite the inherent corruption and cynicism involved, it is only natural the London is the centre for selling British military hardware. It is in its role a centre for other countries trying to sell arms to the idle East that London resembles old Beirut most. Beirut was service centre and so is London. Says Jotta Simon, the attractive female arms dealer who knows and uses London openly, “It’s a convenience problem and it’s a language problem. People from the Middle East are comfortable here and the Europeans and others feel at ease here. I know the laws of Britain, but what matters is to clear the laws of the partners (the buyer and seller) concerned.”
Certainly Canterbury Commercial Corporation of Panama, Aviall Airstocks of Hong Kong, Rhinemetall of Germany, Orlikon Machine tool Works of Switzerland and other suppliers of military didn’t think the laws of the UK mattered. In 1988, Canterbury used London to make offers to Iran to sell 106mm ammunition made in Spain. Earlier, Rhinemetall, using a Palestinian arms dealer, sold training ammunition to the United Arab Republics. Even a US company, Air Alaska, offered to sell C-130 transport planes through a London-based Armenian dealer. And Swiss Orlikon’s early 80s agent for the sale to Iraq of a multi-billion dollar air defence system, another female dealer, moved to London to finalise the deal.
The negotiations of these offers and transactions were no more secret than a regular business deal. It is true that Iranian buyers pretended they were dealing in pistachio nuts and caviar and that Iraqi arms dealers wore conspicuous sun glasses and arrived here as cultural attaches, but there was no British attempt to control, influence or – if necessary – intercept what was happening. Colonel Mohammed Abdullah, a Jordanian officer briefly seconded to the Iraqis explains, “If the buyer and seller are in agreement, there is no way to stop it.”
Judged by the character and determination of some of the people allowed to operate in London, Jotta Simon and Mohammed Abdallah are both right. On practical terms, maintaining London’s position and controlling what happens here is a two edged sword; in moral terms principle has been sacrificed to expediency every step of the way.
Late in 1991, seven Palestinian multi-millionaires met in the Kensington house of a construction tycoon to plan the removal of the PLO’s Yasser Arafat. The PLO’s pro Saddam Gulf War stand had endangered their business in Saudi Arabia and other gulf states.
It was an empty threat. The powerless cabal of “cocktail party Palestinians with little stomach for combat” is symptomatic of wealthy, out-of-touch Arabs groups who want to manipulate the fate of their countries from the safety of posh London. While Saddam was in power, most Iraqi exiles, educated, well-spoken, civilised members of the ancient regime or the ancient ancient regime, belonged o this category. They hold lavish dinner parties where even their women drink ‘whaiskie”. They recited Saddam’s crimes with relish and wished him gone but did little else. And the Lebanese were worse. Always overdressed and bejewelled, they identified their enemy and settled into moaning about “the mountains, the sea and the cedars” in a French accent. This was the soft face of Arab politics known to the world.
But there is a harder aspect of to Arab politics which arrived here with the press and the arms trade. It consisted of the adjustments of the nomad??? Arabs, their servants and hangers on and others who set up independently ‘to serve the ????? people’. Years ago Saddam Hussein used the Iraqi cultural centre in Tottenham Court Road to conduct intelligence against dissident Iraqis and to eliminate political opponents. London is where King Hussein held secret meetings with Israel’s Shimon Perez and Itshaq Rabin. Kuwait helped precipitate the Gulf War by trying to sell Iraqi debt notes for 20% of the value. Even the dozens of Saudi princes who ran for king promote themselves from London. In all cases, the British government relations with any country determined its response. Saddam’s violence against opponents produced a muted reaction because he was a friend.
In fairness, controlling what leads up to Middle East violence is easier said than done. Taking what is happening today, how does the government stop Al Qaeda from sending a one-word order to an Islamic cell under deep cover, ‘go’ when the technology to decipher the encoded message isn’t available? How does the government which ignored the Islamic presence for years penetrate the Muslim groups? Israeli attempts to intercept secret Iranian arms deals? Hat will happen if the government of Saudi Arabia decides to use the present conditions to eliminate its London-based opponents?
The 7th of July exposed the least desirable manifestations of Beirut-on-Thames. But the ever-present prospect of violence has always been wider and it was underpinned by the presence in London of dozens of organizations and groups who very existence is a threat to friendly and unfriendly countries.
Human Rights and freedom of speech groups such as Liberty, Article 19, Middle East Watch and Arab Organisation for Human Rights are staffed by gentle, well-meaning people. Over the years they have vouched for many dissidents with nowhere to go. According to Liberty’s Sultan Azzam, “We feel no pressure here.” Indeed I myself appeared in court as an expert witness when the British government tried to deport Mohammed Al Mas’ari in 1998.
But the Human Rights situation in the Middle East means every country was against them. Time was when we expected these countries to move against the trouble makers Says Carmal Bedford of Article 19, “when we issued the Silent Kingdom, our report on Saudi Arabia, we received strange calls from former British officer types objecting to it, strenuously. “Whether the Saudis take their objections further us unlikely, but it depends on how threatened they feel.”
The work of ethnic groups fighting for independence including the pro-West Kurdish PKK and the Sudanese Popular Liberation Army was another likely source of violence. These groups represent a serious threat to the Turkish and Sudanese governments, and both governments resent their presence in London and would like to see them disappear.
The Iraqi National Council (INC) sponsored by the CIA, tried to overthrow Saddam from London. It not only issued information and press releases to maintain the anti-Saddam mood of the Western press, it shuttled brave people who were willing to battle his forces in and out of Iraq. Saudi CDLR used modern technology to spread a moderate though solidly anti-House of Saud message throughout the closed kingdom. It faxed bulletins to dozens of stations which refax it to hundreds of others and so on down the line until its message reaches hundreds of thousands of people. The Islamic Front for the Liberation of Bahrain formed mutual cooperation agreements with Shia and other sympathetic groups. Hamas representatives were forging similar alliances and they appeal to all who oppose the peace process for help.
None of these groups advocated violence and some, notably CDLR and the Bahrainis, appeared dead set against it. For many years. There were reports of Saudi hit squads planning to eliminate the opponents of the beleaguered House of Saud and Bahrain, an unknown quantity, wasn’t likely to stand still had its opposition begun tot represent a serious threat. The chances of Hams and the PLO having it out in the streets on London, unlikely most of the time, as never ruled out.
The Home Office is reluctant to discuss the presence of past and current political groups and what it means. Its spokesman, interviewed on no-attribution basis, insisted “character, conduct and association” figure in allowing people into the UK but “political affiliation is not a factor” in granting asylum. Either this is manifestly false or the Home Office is dangerously uninformed.
Except for Khalid Fawaz and ARC radical Islamic fundamentals have always operated underground. They obeyed the rules which allowed the non-violent groups and the pro-West groups to locate in London. The replicated the presence of the anti-Saddam INC, which advocated Saddam’s ???? openly. The difference between them and the perpetrator of the 7th July bombings is technical, one are pro-West terrorists and the others are anti West.
But the British government was caught in a web of its own cynicism. Not only has it failed in applying selective morality (Mas’ari won the right to remain here after an agonising hearing), some of the groups it favoured were a more likely source of trouble than ones it opposed. London will continue to be the primary centre for political and subsidiary activities for the whole Middle East.
In fact, the history of Beirut-on-Thames confirms that political violence was near unavoidable. In 1986, the Palestinian cartoonist Naji Al Ali was murdered in Fulham in broad daylight and the case remains unsolved. In 1989 a would be Salman Rushdie assassin blew himself up along with most of the Paddington hotel where he was staying while assembling the bomb he intended for the author. Despite several arrests, the news about the bombing of the Israeli embassy was confused and contradictory and for a while nobody was charged. And, in addition to the already mentioned, the assassination of the ex-premier Al Nayyef of Iraq, PLO representative said Hammami was killed in his Mayfair office and WPC Yvonne Fletcher was shot dead by a Libyan diplomat in St. James’s Square.
This partial list of political crimes was behind Scotland Yard’s refusal to discuss the Arab presence in London and the prospects of future violence or past incidents. The National Criminal Intelligence Service (NCIS), a 2 year old off-shoot of the Yard concerned with international criminality, tries to explain the restrictions which undoubtedly dog Scotland Yard. Detective Inspector Thomasz Dorantt speaks of having to be careful about “crimes of political nature”, of being hindered by states wishing “to protect their citizens” and of “having no coercive powers”.
The interviews with the police and the Home Office and the refusal of Scotland Yard officers to speak on or off the record amount to a confirmation that, in dealing with Beirut-on-Thames, the various departments and law enforcements arms of the British government had been near helpless. Policy rather than the work of government offices and the application of the letter of the law is what matters. And although a British Government and people committed to living in a tolerant society, 7 July made it more and more difficult to accept the types of activities which have become commonplace in Beirut-on-Thames.
Admittedly it will be difficult to control some of the dirty business which goes on. However a higher standard of probity in public life would be a first step. Recent events demonstrate that it was public officials who did nothing to stop the negative influence of Beirut-on-Thames.
© Said K Aburish
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