It Could Be Said #18 Let The ISIS Bride Come Home
Shamima Begum should never have lost her citizenship and should be allowed to return to the UK
For someone who works in equality and diversity I’m unusually ambivalent about the idea of unconscious bias, indeed I have a whole training presentation that explores the limitations of the concept. But it’s impossible to deny that this week we didn’t see a classic example of how unconscious biases can warp people’s perceptions, when Shegum Begum appeared on Good Morning Britain.
Begum is infamous as the “ISIS Bride” that left London at the age of fifteen to marry and raise children in the short-lived Islamic State of Iraq and Syria, with lurid accusations about her sewing bombs into the vests of suicide bombers and equally lurid statements from her welcoming terrorist attacks in the UK making Begum yet more infamous. Such was the controversy surrounding her that the Home Office stripped her of her citizenship, something that has trapped her in Syria long after the caliphate imploded.
With the legal avenues seemingly blocked. Begum was forced to throw herself at the mercy of the media, in a desperate attempt to earn a fresh hearing. And it was undeniably striking to see her in a baseball cap, tank top, and red lipstick. Whether this was an earnest expression of how her views have evolved as her involvement in ISIS soured, or an attempt to appeal to the basest elements of the British public1, it was a sad spectacle. Whatever your personal views on the hijab, surely we’re at a point where we don’t include or exclude Muslim women from Britishness based on whether they wear it? I mean its six years since Nadiya Hussain captured the hearts of Middle Britain by winning the Great British Bake Off due to her love of baking traditional English cakes; something she managed to do without showing her hair or body.
But we’re not there, are we? Because whatever backlash GMB got for interviewing Begum, would have been much greater if she was wearing a hijab. And whatever traction Begum gained for her quest to regain her citizenship would be much less if she didn’t look like a twentysomething Brit on holiday.
But the issues that surround this case are far broader than many people think. You may not know it, but Begum’s case has cast doubt on the equal citizenship of almost every Briton who belongs to an ethnic or national minority.
Casting Unreasonable Doubt
According to both British and International Law you cannot render someone stateless by withdrawing their citizenship. The rationale for this is blindingly obvious; in a world where emmigration has become ever more difficult, everyone needs a bolt hole to return to if the worst happens. A stateless person risks being trapped in a country that doesn’t want them and they can do nothing in.
Yes, you do get a no-prize if you’ve spotted that this is exactly what has happened to Begum in Syria.
The so-called problem the British Government faced was this. Begum had defected to an entity that was claiming it was a new country. But the British Government didn’t want to recognise ISIS as a state, so they couldn’t claim she had formally defected to another country to justify stripping Begum of her citizenship. Worse, by never recognising ISIS, Britain could never declare war on it even whilst dropping many bombs on the caliphate’s sand to make us feel like a important country whose government could never be led by sandal-wearing hippies such as Ed Miliband or Jeremy Corbyn. So you couldn’t even charge her with treason.
But never let it be said that the Home Office is a bunch of narrow minded bigots; when they really want to nail someone they’ll broaden their minds. When it came to Begum they came up with an ingenious pretext to bar her from reentering Britain – that through her parents she had a claim to Bangladesh citizenship. That she had never lived in Bangladesh and the government there was promising to execute her if she set foot in the country, didn’t matter. If she could be Bangladeshi, then stripping her of her British citizenship didn’t render her stateless. And this isn’t the Home Office going rogue – the Supreme Court engaged in bad faith sophistry to avoid overturning the decision.
I’m not sure if its widespread Islamophobia or craven deference to the security services that explains why this utter bullshit didn’t provoke a bigger outcry. Probably a bit of both. But the results for millions of Britons is that they have become less of a citizen than me. It is no exaggeration to say that this is our Dred Scott; the notorious American Supreme Court ruling that twisted their constitution to say that Black people were three fifths a person2.
Because step back from the issue at hand, and think through the implications. This means that anybody who has claim to citizenship of another country can be stripped of their British citizenship by the Home Secretary. That’s millions upon millions of Britons; every Northern Irish person3, every naturalised citizen, every Briton with non-British-born parents, every Briton with some theoretical claim to foreign citizenship through their grandparents. What the decision to remove Begum’s citizenship means is that exile has become a super punishment that can be arbitrarily applied to a large minority of Britons.
And yes this is personal, because that large minority includes my ex-wife who earnt her citizenship by serving in the British Army. It also includes my stepson who has never lived anywhere other than Ministry of Defence housing or private schools partially funded by them. It also includes my son, who is yet to set foot in the land of his mother’s birth. Based on the precedent set by the Begum case, all of them could be exiled by the Home Secretary to Zimbabwe, whereas I couldn’t.
Begun is desperate to get back to Britain, so nobody can blame her for pandering. But we have to hold a clear line on a point of principle; she deserves her British citizenship because she’s British. Yes she was aligned with ISIS, but nobody demanded Mark Thatcher’s passport when he tried to launch a coup in Equatorial Guinea. Likewise, nobody tried to exile IRA members to Ireland during The Troubles.
If Shamima Begum committed crimes under British law, then she should be prosecuted and tried before a jury of her fellow countrymen, rather than vague accusations being thrown around to justify her exile. Anything less is a dagger at the heart of the idea that Britain is country whose citizenship is inclusive of people of all ethnic and national orgins.
It is of course an open question whether those basest instincts are an Islamophobic refusal to engage with somebody wearing an hijab or letchery towards a young woman who had suddenly became “conventionally” telegenic?
Bizarrely the bit of the US Constitution that Dred Scott was based on was actually insisted upon by anti-slavery states - it was a compromise about how to count slaves when considering congressional apportionment to reduce the power of slave states.
Since the Belfast Agreement, everyone in Northern Ireland has the right to Irish citizenship