Britain can be a very cruel country. One current example of this is the continued incarceration of Julian Assange, about whom I have blogged at length in the past; based partly on my expertise in secret service history, and partly on my familiarity with Sweden, where one crucial event in his recent career took place. (My last post on this was https://bernardjporter.com/2019/06/05/assanges-extraditions/. Search ‘Assange’ for the others.) A court is still deliberating on whether he should be extradited to the USA on ‘treason’ charges. In the meantime he is still languishing – it’s been five years now – in a British gaol.

A worse cruelty, however, in my view, is the one being meted out to Shamima Begum: originally a British citizen, who at the age of fifteen fled abroad from the East End of London to join ISIS, and was provided with ‘husbands’, to whom she bore at least three babies, all of whom died. Seeing – we presume – the error of her ways, and more immediately and clearly the awful conditions in which she was forced to live in a Syrian refugee camp, she tried to get back to her home; only to be refused entry by the Home Secretary of the day (no, it wasn’t Cruella Braverman, although I’m sure she would have approved), and then to have her British nationality taken from her; which meant that effectively she had no nationality at all. That is forbidden by international law; but the government argued that as her parents had come from Bangladesh, she still had the option of taking on Bangladeshi citizenship. Unfortunately Bangladesh wouldn’t allow her in; so she is still stuck in Syria, while her lawyers continue fighting her case in the UK. Today the last of their appeals was turned down by the Supreme Court; leaving only the European Court of Human Rights left to her. (Yes; that’s the Court that the Brexiters in the Tory party want Britain to withdraw from.) She has made it clear that she would accept a sentence of imprisonment in Britain. I imagine that, unlike Assange, she would love to languish in a British gaol. But there’s no chance of that, as things stand.

Of course we don’t know on what precise grounds the British government bases its case that she would be a danger to the country if she had her nationality restored. MI5/6 might have information we don’t. On the surface, however, it must be unlikely. She was a fifteen year-old girl, for pity’s sake, when she absconded: maybe attracted by the romance which ‘Arabia’ has long held for juveniles ever since TE Lawrence – the flowing robes, pure-white horses, shining scimitars, and all the rest – which must have put the cockney stallholders in rainy Bethnal Green in the shade. Alternatively, she could have been essentially sex-trafficked by unscrupulous Middle Easterners, to service those brave male terrorists, while her mind was barely formed. (You know what fifteen year-old girls are often like.) Or maybe she really did fall for the religion. Whatever it was, it’s clearly uncharitable, to say the least, not to say un-Christian, to visit these sins of adolescence on a grown-up young woman, and leave her little hope of escaping from their repercussions, ever. Or was it simply meant as a warning to other fifteen-year olds? 

It so happens that I know a woman who went through what must have been many of the same experiences as Ms Begum; but was welcomed back into Sweden afterwards, and has been a fine and productive citizen ever since. (She even published a book about it: see https://www.bokus.com/bok/9789113075556/alskade-terrorist-16-ar-med-militanta-islamister/.) That, I think, says more for my adopted country of Sweden, than you could say about Tory Britain just now.