Scoop NEWS by TOPIC For one thing, the terrorist threat that they see facing New Zealand is almost entirely Islamic staying out of the Iraq apparently did us no good whatsoever - and local or not, the threat still appears wedded to the Bin Laden style of leadership. Domestic Islamic extremism does not grow in a vacuum, the SIS warned in its annual report for 2005. It needs leaders and instigators who attempt to radicalise people ; organisers who play a key role in the development of operational cells (but who may themselves not become involved in terrorist operations); and lastly, a committed cadre of extremists who are willing to engage in violent jihad.
Not accidentally, this is the kind of threat that Ahmed Zaoui is alleged to pose. Islamic to the core. Charismatic leadership material and cunning enough to let others do the dirty work from a plausible distance.
Is he, could this man become, the inspirational mastermind for acts of jihad committed within New Zealand or launched from our safe haven by his shadowy associates ? Assuming of course, we were ever foolish enough to let him stay in New Zealand. For the next few weeks, the SIS Inspector General will be reviewing in secret that the so called open evidence against Zaoui that is already out in the public domain.
After a recess and more negotiations about what is and isn t to be kept secret, the classified evidence part of the case will then begin. The Inspector-General s review decision is set to be in the hands of Immigration Minister David Cunliffe by Christmas. The timetable, seems to be being driven by no loftier goal than ensuring Labour do not have to take the major amount of flak from the Zaoui verdict during an election year because stay or go, Zaoui s fate is bound to offend at least some potential Labour voters.
To win its case, the SIS needs to be able to successfully portray Ahmed Zaoui as a one man walking madrassah a leader, instigator and magnet for budding jihadi. Someone whose presence here would damage our international reputation standing with our traditional allies, who may take a Zaoui in our midst as a sign of us being soft on terrorism. While it is certainly possible to conceive of a radical Islamic mastermind we ve all seen the movies - it is far harder to cast this particular individual in the role, for reasons I will try to explain.
For one thing, Zaoui is virtually an accidental politician. He joined the opposition Islamic Salvation Front (FIS) in mid 1991, barely six months before the FIS won the election that triggered the coup that drove him into exile. One of ten children from a Sunni Muslim family, young Ahmed studied religion as a young man in Saudi Arabia before returning to Algeria in the mid 1980s, and becoming briefly caught up in the mounting opposition to the ruling FLN party.
By 1991 though, he was both an imam at a mosque and a teacher in religious law both at, and beyond the University of Algiers. Zaoui s religious background is as a religious moderate, from three generations of Sufism on his paternal line. Politically, Zaoui and his colleagues at Algiers University were of a generation heavily influenced by the writings of the Algerian sociologist Malek Bennabi ( 1907-1973) who had sought to create a modern fusion between Islam and democracy grounded in Algerian culture.
In the very first conversation I had with Zaoui in prison, he urged me to read Bennabi, as the best avenue to understanding his own beliefs. Taken overall, it would be hard to think of an Islamic background that had less in common with radical Islamic fundamentalism. In addition, one could point to Zaoui gregarious personality and sense of humour - nothing about him fits the mould of the dogmatic Muslim fanatic.
The mosque at which Zaoui taught was in a heavily Berber area and this indigenous minority dominated the constituency in which he won election to Parliament in 1991. Conceiving himself to be primarily a FIS adviser on religious matters, Zaoui had kept his distance from political campaigning, but won convincingly anyway. Then came the coup, and exile, and his life changed forever.
The SIS of course, doesn t need to engage with Zaoui as a person. What it has to do is build a plausible structure and invoke the credibility of the security agencies overseas that supplied it with the relevant bricks and mortar. At worst, that is all that some Inspectors - General would care to consider.
Truth being more of a bonus in the review context, than a strict necessity. As the investigating judge in the Mahjoub security case in Canada said a few years ago, all that needed to be proven was whether there existed reasonable grounds to believe certain things, as opposed to the existence of the facts themselves. Luckily for Zaoui, the New Zealand courts have set our own Inspector-General a much higher standard.
As I mentioned yesterday, I don t think that Zaoui s European convictions provide the SIS with a knockdown argument in favour of confirming the certificate, and gave some reasons why. Somehow though, I can t believe that a retired judge such as Neazor wouldn t be feeling some level of annoyance at the RSAA s dismissal of those convictions, either. Certainly, the RSAA did not dismiss the European convictions out of hand as Helen Clark once stupidly asserted.
True the RSAA were clearly unimpressed with the palpable flaws in the way the cases were conducted, and fair enough. The RSAA would also have noted the relatively light sentences imposed. First and foremost though the RSAA and by extension, Neazor - could be looking at Zaoui s particular role in these offences because that goes to the heart of their analysis.
The relevant factor in determining refugee status being not the headline conviction, but what acts that Zaoui himself committed in the process because that is what will or won t trigger the exclusionary clauses in the Refugee Convention. Neazor might therefore feel a little less tetchy if he could see the similarities ( and not the differences) between his procedures and that of the RSAA. It is not that the RSAA doesn t respect what happens in foreign jurisdictions.
It is about whether an individual has personally done things of such a heinous nature as to absolve us of our obligation not to send him back to almost certain torture and death. Does Zaoui being related to - but not committing actions that earned only a suspended sentence, and for which France has never ever bothered to ask anyone for his extradition, really pass such a test? I don t think so, and neither did the RSAA.
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