Newsletter No. 791
Editorial-Opinion
November 1, 2007

 

LATEST “ANTITERRORISM” MEASURES UNDER FIRE

Reading the headlines today, I’ve been pleased to discover that I am not the only person outraged over the latest so-called “antiterrorism” measures in Japan, nor the only one calling for Justice Minister Kunio Hatoyama to be replaced.

Photo: Protestor in Tokyo
Source: Mainichi Daily News

 

There is a pretty brutal (and hilarious) article in the Economist. This article reveals that the only reason that Hatoyama provided his disastrous little anecdote about his Al-Qaida contact was because he was on the defensive before a hostile crowd of foreign reporters who were upset over the fingerprinting issue. As the Economist put it: “The expats are up in arms.” They continued: “Like so many security measures since 9/11, this one threatens to be more of an inconvenience than an effective deterrent -- and counterproductive in other ways. Japan vies to be an international financial centre, yet here it is making travel more difficult. It wants to boost the number of foreign tourists, yet treats visitors like criminals.”

But the Economist is not the only one on this riff today. Below are three different opinion pieces hovering around these very same issues.

I’m glad people are finally waking up a little!

Fingerprinting Foreigners: Not So Welcome Anymore
By Kevin Rafferty
Japan Times, November 1, 2007

HONG KONG -- Japan is still purporting to celebrate "Yokoso Japan" or Welcome to Japan -- just as it is preparing to inflict on every foreign visitor measures that are harassing, time-consuming, unnecessary, and would be illegal if done to Japanese citizens in Japan.

The measures have been condemned by Amnesty International as "a violation of basic human rights" and by the Japan Federation of Bar Associations, but the justice ministry is determined to press ahead and fingerprint and photograph every foreign visitor to Japan every time he or she arrives in the country. The new scheme will start from November 20.

Japan is the only country apart from the United States to resort to fingerprinting foreigners, but Tokyo is carrying it further and targeting almost everyone, including people with permanent, work or spouse visas, as well as short-term visitors. In the US, all permanent residents are exempt. In Japan, only children under 16, diplomats and special-status, mainly Korean, permanent residents will escape the lines and the tedious procedures.

In a statement that was smug and arrogant, and either dishonest or dangerously deluded, Naoto Nikai, an immigration bureau official, declared that the fingerprinting and photographing of foreigners "will greatly contribute to preventing international terrorist activities on our soil."

If the immigration bureau or the justice ministry believes that fingerprinting will achieve anything other than get money to buy expensive high-tech toys and annoy queues of visitors, it needs a reality check. It is time for foreign diplomats to protest that the fingerprinting is discriminatory. The claim has been made that this is an internal matter for Japan to decide. But if a new policy applies only to foreigners, and if it is a treatment that local citizens stubbornly resist as illegal if applied to them, then it is also an external matter. Japanese jealously resist fingerprinting, and only criminals or suspects are forced to provide fingerprints.

The main argument that supporters of fingerprinting deploy to shut up critics is that it is to make the world safer from terrorists, something that few people dare speak out against.

If fingerprinting and photographing would make us safe, then go for it. Fingerprint the whole world, including Japanese. But there is no easy identity between fingerprinting and catching terrorists. Fingerprints and photographs establish identity only. It would be a rare and incompetent terrorist who leaves prints marked "terrorist" at all, let alone before doing his or her deadly work. These days terrorist kingpins do things through lieutenants and foot soldiers whose prints are irrelevant because they will probably be dead by the time they have accomplished their fanatical mission, and there may not be enough left of them to take a clean fingerprint. Had the perpetrators of 9/11 been fingerprinted on arrival in the US, they would not have been stopped: They entered legally. The failures on 9/11 were sloppy intelligence in not sharing highly relevant information, and lax security that allowed the terrorists to get onto flights with deadly box cutters and force their way through flimsy doors to the flight decks.

It would be a one in a billion chance if a real terrorist boss with a known record were to join the immigration queues at Narita or Kansai or even Fukuoka airport. Would Japanese immigration be able to recognize Osama bin Laden if, disguised in a burqa, he dared to test the efficiency of Japan's new system? Does immigration even have his prints on file?

In the case of the US, President George W. Bush's minions were able to get away with naive thinking inspiring fingerprinting because America had been a victim of foreign terrorists.

Yes, Japan has had a terrorist problem, but the fingerprinting of foreigners would have been irrelevant to prevent the Aum Shinrikyo sarin attacks or the growth of the infamous Red Army because they were all homegrown terrorists.

Foreigners do have a legitimate fear about what use may be used of their fingerprints. Take the case of a murder, say of a European bar hostess, who may have had both Japanese clients and European friends. The police check out her apartment and -- hey presto! -- the only prints they can match with their records are those of one of her European friends obtained via immigration. Japan's police do have an awesome reputation of winning confessions through forceful interrogation and claim an incredible 98 percent success rate in solving crime.

Is Japan's immigration bureau so shallow and stupid, as well as xenophobic, to go to all the hassle of taking seven million sets of fingerprints a year for the sake of -- how many -- ten, twenty, fifty suspicious people who may be on an Interpol watch-list for money-laundering or other criminal, but not necessarily terrorist, activity?

Apparently yes: Further light was thrown on the bizarrely sloppy thinking inside Japan Inc. by Kunio Hatoyama, the justice minister. He claimed this week that he has an acquaintance who was a friend of an al-Qaida terrorist involved in the October 2002 bombing in Bali. The justice minister said the alleged al-Qaida man "seems to have entered Japan so often two or three years ago by using various passports and wearing mustaches." This experience made him feel the need to tighten immigration controls. Immigration authorities, however, said they could not confirm that the alleged al-Qaida person had been to Japan. In a further attempt to clarify the issue, Hatayama held another press conference and issued a statement denying that he knows the al-Qaida member personally.

Instead of intervening to bring some logic or common sense to the debate, Prime Minister Yasuo Fukuda dismissed criticism that his minister's remarks were careless, saying that if there is a possibility that such a suspicious person could enter the country, "I would like him to deal firmly with immigration control and other issues as justice minister."

My most astute Japanese friend expressed, "great sadness about the decision to inflict fingerprinting on foreign friends. In the 19th century, Japan had a reputation for mimicking other countries, but we chose what was best to mimic and copy for Japan's benefit. But now we are mimicking only the control freaks of Washington. It is a great pity that our bureaucrats and politicians have thrown away their brains and can no longer think for themselves or for Japan."

The decision to fingerprint foreigners points to failures of the Japanese system. Yes, there was a period for suggestions to be made, but these all had to be offered in Japanese. The way that the law was passed virtually without rational debate, and inspired by the justice minister's logic, is a failure of clear thinking, a failure of the political process, and yet again a failure of Japan Inc. to give a damn about what the rest of the world thinks of it.

Kevin Rafferty was bureau chief in Japan for The Guardian from 1992 to 1996.

A Trumped Up War on Terrorism
By Gregory Clark
Japan Times, November 1, 2007

My French aunt died the other day. She was lovely woman. But sadly she was also a terrorist.

Born British, she had married a member of the French World War II Resistance forces fighting the Nazi occupation of their country. He had been betrayed by another Resistance fighter under Nazi torture, himself tortured and then killed. She had survived the next three years in a German slave-labor camp.

At the war's end, she was brought back to France as a heroine. But the fact remains that she and others in the Resistance had used violent, undercover force against the established authorities. By today's standards that is "terrorism." And that is what the Nazis thought too.

The world was not always so mixed up. In the past the right of people to use force to oppose perceived injustices by oppressive regimes was generally recognized. Even if they opposed regimes we liked, we at least called them insurgents or guerrillas. Now they are automatically called "terrorists" unless, of course, they oppose regimes we dislike, in which case they are called "freedom fighters."

Afghanistan used to be the classic example, with the former Taliban anti-Soviet "freedom fighters" transformed into "terrorists" the moment they became anti-US. Today we have an even more extreme example in northern Iraq where, as the New York Times points out, the US condemns the PKK Kurdish guerrillas there fighting against Turkey as terrorists at exactly the same moment as it quietly supports the same guerrillas when they are fighting against Iran.

The damage is not just linguistic. Once you denounce people as "terrorists" you do not have to consider their motives. By definition they become crazed fanatics deserving cruel suppression. Even torture is permitted. The idea that they may include people of genuine conscience and bravery, like my aunt, can be dismissed.

Japanese media are probably the worst offenders.

Currently they talk endlessly about something called the “antiterror law.” In fact, much of the debate is over whether fuel supplied to US warships in the Indian Ocean was once diverted from Afghanistan for use in Iraq. There is almost no mention of the "antiterror" results in Afghanistan -- villages bombed with heavy losses of civilian life that even the pro-US Afghanistan regime deplores.

True the Japanese can be excused if they do not realize the pejorative "have you stopped beating your wife" implications of the word "terror." But we English-speakers have less excuse. By denouncing as "terror" the resort to force by Northern Ireland's Catholic minority seeking justices, London managed to delay for more than twenty years the negotiations needed to resolve the situation.

Violence by the authorities against the IRA "terrorists" simply led to increased IRA violence against the authorities. A typical vicious circle got under way, similar to what we have seen repeatedly in a host of tragic guerrilla war situations everywhere from Aceh and Sri Lanka to Chechnya and Colombia, and which the authorities invariably denounce as "terrorism."

Ironically, one of the few examples of genuine terrorism in recent years was in Japan -- the sarin gas attacks by Aum fanatics. Before that we had the wartime Japanese bombing attacks on Chinese cities and the US fire-bombing attacks on Japanese cities, both of which came close to the true definition of terror -- indiscriminate destruction of civilian life and facilities for no purpose other than hatred and revenge.

Al-Qaida attacks on the United States are described as terror. In fact they were a new form of global guerrilla war with a clear purpose -- removal of the US presence from the Middle East to allow the creation of a unified Islamic state. If this fact was properly realized it is quite likely the US could have come up with effective countermeasures. Instead the crudely emotional US backlash to so-called 9-11 "terror" has already begun the global escalation needed to help the "terrorists" reach their objective.

The biases continue. The world is right to be upset over Darfur, though there are also elements of a civil war situation there. In Somalia today far worse is happening. But since the hundreds of thousands of starving refugee victims of indiscriminate US-backed air attacks are described as Islamic "terrorists," few care. Yet those so-called Somalia "terrorists" enjoyed far more popular support than the rival US-backed warlord regimes. They were the only people who could provide Somalis with desperately needed law and order, non-corrupt government and social services. Their only sin was that they were strict Islamists.

In Lebanon and Gaza, the pro-Islamist forces -- Hezbollah and Hamas -- have enjoyed similar popular support and for much the same reasons. But they too are designated as "terrorists" because, as in Northern Ireland, they too have felt they had no choice but to resort sometimes to force against perceived injustices. Israel's attempts to retaliate in Gaza by starving Hamas into submission hardly seem appropriate for a nation whose own people suffered similar treatment from the Nazis in the 1945 Warsaw Ghetto.

In the past, when might was right, we could ignore the rights and wrongs of these kinds of disputes. But today the people who believe they are wronged have the technologies to retaliate. To describe their often self-sacrificing attacks as cowardly terrorism while the people who drop 227-kg bombs, white phosphorous and cluster bombs on them are brave warriors in the war against "terror" is less than convincing.

Gregory Clark is a former Australian diplomat and foreign affairs commentator.

Hatoyama and Al-Qaida
Asahi Shinbun Editorial
November 1, 2007

"A friend of my friend is an al-Qaida member. I have never met him. I heard that the person often came to Japan two or three years ago. He was involved in the bombing in central parts of Bali," Hatoyama said. He went on to say he had been warned about the bombing in central Bali and was advised to stay away from there.

Hatoyama made his speech at the Foreign Correspondents' Club of Japan (FCCJ) in Tokyo on Monday. The journalists who listened to him should not be criticized for thinking that Japan's top judicial official had links with the notorious terrorist organization and had known in advance about the devastating terrorist attack in Bali five years ago. The natural question was why the politician had not tried to prevent the attack, which killed more than 200 people. His remarks were immediately reported around the world.

Hatoyama surprised us again by correcting and partly retracting his remarks after the speech. According to Hatoyama's explanation, his original remarks were based on stories he had heard from his friend. He has not confirmed the truth of those accounts, which he now claims he heard three or four months after the Bali bombing. While he was told that the person in question was an al-Qaida member, it may be someone supporting an extremist group, the justice minister added. These corrections have made his narrative so vague that we cannot help but wonder how much truth it contains. Hatoyama admitted some of his remarks were insufficient and could produce misunderstanding. But that is not the problem. The justice minister spoke about the serious issue of terrorism by referring to uncertain information as if it was true. As the person responsible for public security, he should be criticized for his careless behavior.

Hatoyama talked about this "al-Qaida member" while explaining the new immigration control system, which will require all foreign visitors to Japan 16 years old and over to be fingerprinted and photographed as they enter the country. The system, designed as a counterterrorism measure, is scheduled to be put into force on November 20. There are, however, critics who argue the system could arouse prejudice since it treats all foreigners as potential security threats to the nation. Hatoyama may have wanted to convince the foreign media of the need for the system. But his attempt was counterproductive because he used unconfirmed information to support his argument. His actions can only be described as thoughtless.

This was not the first time Hatoyama has made imprudent remarks.

Hatoyama earlier spoke of the Japanese legal system that requires an order from the justice minister before a death sentence can be carried out. He asked if there was a way to "automatically" execute a prisoner without the justice minister's involvement. His remarks suggested that he takes lightly the fact that the death penalty is a punishment that can never be reversed.

A person who makes inconsiderate comments on important issues like anti-terrorism measures, capital punishment and judicial reform cannot be regarded as qualified to serve as justice minister.