Shamima Begum - Justice and Revenge

 

Well, I must begin by owning up to a mistake. Back in February, 2019, I was waffling away confidently about how sure I was that Shamima Begum (pictured above) would eventually return to Britain. I confidently declared that: 

"...no person can be made stateless. This, together with her family's impassioned appeals for her return, some sympathetic voices in Parliament and some of the media surely points to the probability of her return in the near future".

Well, I got that wrong. As we know, the Supreme Court has ruled that her human rights were not breached when she was refused entry to the United Kingdom and that she cannot return to fight her citizenship case. The president of the Supreme Court, Lord Reed, said: 

"The Supreme Court unanimously allows all of the home secretary's appeals and dismisses Ms Begum's cross-appeal."

Commenting upon the Court of Appeal's verdict allowing her return, he further said, according to the BBC: 

"He said the Court of Appeal's judgment "did not give the home secretary's assessment the respect which it should have received" given the role's "responsibility for making such assessments" and accountability to parliament".

So, for the time being, and perhaps for the rest of her life, Shamima Begum and her child remain in a Syrian detention camp. Now, I am well aware that many people will welcome the Supreme Court's ruling. However, to my surprise, I have found that there is a cross-section of political opinion from Right to Left that is disturbed by the court's verdict. Amanda Platell, the Daily Mail columnist , showed surprising compassion when she said: 

"Begum has now lost three babies to starvation and pneumonia. She is living under armed guard, in conditions far more squalid than she would face in any British prison. Her husband — an equally idiotic Dutch-born jihadi — is in jail. Her family cannot see her.
Lord alive, what kind of risk does this 21-year-old — who would surely be watched closely by the authorities and the country at large were she ever to come home — pose?"

Quite right - but I never expected to agree with a Daily Mail columnist! Even David Davis, M.P. (no liberal) was quoted in the Hull Daily Mail as saying on Twitter:

"Disappointing verdict in the Supreme Court. Regardless of what individuals like Shamima Begum have done, the UK cannot simply wash our hands of Brits in the Syrian camps. The correct approach would be to return them to the UK to answer for their crimes".

That statement came as another surprise to me. Perceptively, The Guardian commented:

"While the UK government believes that Ms Begum’s return would go against the public interest, the opposite is true. To prevent similar things from happening in the future, it is important to understand how a schoolgirl became radicalised..."

If Begum has violated UK law, she should be tried here. It is immoral to expect other countries to take responsibility for our criminals. In future, when we try to deport foreign criminals, their countries of origin would be perfectly entitled to deny them entry, quoting the Shamima Begum case as a precedent.

But to return to the public interest - if we refuse entry to Shamima Begum, she must go somewhere. She could rot in a refugee camp - or she could escape, as so many others have done, to rejoin ISIS and serve their vile cause once again. Her child, and others that she might have, could grow up hating Britain and actively seek revenge - as terrorists. So much for public safety being protected.

To revisit what I said two years ago, I must point out that at that time, 400 former Jihadis were thought to have returned to the UK already. I have no current figures. I also pointed out that, at the end of WW2, the UK rehabilitated 57 former traitors who had fought for Germany in what was called "The British Free Corps" (BFC). The most odious of these fascist turncoats was one Thomas Cooper. who, before joining the BFC, had actually served in the SS on the Eastern Front. In 1941, libcom.org says:

"Finishing his training in May he was posted to SS Totenkopf Wachtbatallion Oranienburg stationed near Krakow, it was here that he would later boast that he participated in massacring both Polish Jews and Russian Prisoners of War."

To be exact, he bragged of murdering 200 Poles and 80 Jews in one day in Warsaw. And yet, after being tried for treason after the war, his death sentence was commuted and he was released in 1953. Most of the BFC never faced treason charges and were allowed back into British society.

The question, then, is obvious: if we can rehabilitate an avowed murderer and war criminal like Thomas Cooper, together with his fascist comrades, why can we not do the same for Shamima Begum, whose alleged crimes bear no comparison?