January 29, 2003	Wednesday	Ziqa’ad 25,1423

LONDON: The asylum seekers and illegal migrants pouring into Britain are generating public anger, consternation in the authorities and concern at a backlash among civil rights groups.

Some 22,500 are officially reported to have entered Britain in the quarter of last year, most of them from Iraq, Somalia and Zimbabwe. Many more have got in illegally, driving the total for the year to around 100,000, according to some estimates.

“This sea of humanity is polluted with terrorism and disease and threatens our way of life,” Britain’s largest mass-circulation daily, The Sun, said in its Monday editorial.

Home Secretary David Blunkett immediately condemned the sentiments as “horrifying” and characterized as “racist” an accompanying article by the paper’s influential political editor, Trevor Kavanagh.

But the government is worried. Prime Minister Tony Blair set alarm bells ringing among human rights groups with a single comment in a wide-ranging TV interview on Sunday.

“The present situation is unacceptable, and we have to deal with it. I’m under no doubt about that at all,” Blair told the BBC’s Breakfast with Frost, in answer to a question on refugees.

“But if the measures don’t work, then we will have to consider further measures, including fundamentally looking at the obligations we have under the Convention on Human Rights,” Blair said.

The passing of the European Convention on Human Rights into British law in 2001 has always been a bone of contention with traditionalists who do not believe European constitutionalism has anything to teach the British system, where parliament is sovereign.

And the tabloid press has in recent weeks inflamed popular opinion with tales of asylum seekers who have lived for years off the state, while at the same time seeking to undermine British society.

One such is Omar Bakri Muhammed, a 43-year-old Syrian who has allegedly lived with his children off the state for years, all the while using his position as a “sheikh” to inveigh against Britain in particular and the West in general.

In 1991, he openly advocated the assassination of then prime minister John Major.

Even better known is Egyptian-born Abu Hamza, aged 45, who has preached at the same north London mosque. Hamza, who lost both hands and an eye while in Afghanistan against the Soviets, has expressed admiration for Al Qaeda and welcomed the September 11 attacks.

Now a British subject, he too is reported to have lived off the state for years.

Tales like these are grist to the mill of the popular papers, as are police reports that Kurdish and Turkish gangs now run the heroin trade and are waging deadly armed warfare on London’s streets.

Albanians are said to control the vice racket in London’s Soho. British society appeared able to cope with these strains, but revelations in recent weeks of an “Algerian connection” linked to the discovery this month of the deadly poison ricin in a north London flat has tipped the balance.

In a follow-up raid in Manchester, a police officer was knifed to death, allegedly by one of the ringleaders of the group, provoking a furious public response.

Blunkett used the small-circulation but influential leftwing weekly New Statesman last week to outline his fears.

“I’m worried about tension and frustration spilling over into the disintegration of community relations and social cohesion. I’m worried about people taking the law into their own hands. We are as a society like a coiled spring,” he said.

As if on cue, the racist British National Party won a local ward election in northern England as Blunkett’s words were published. The victory, the party’s fifth, took observers by surprise.

Something is stirring in Middle Britain, and the government is uncertain how to deal with it.

Many in government acknowledge that the vast majority of those coming to Britain are merely seeking a better life, and believe the energetic new migrants are essential to reinvigorate a greying society. Public services are often completely dependent on them.

But there is also concern that the twilight world that illegal migrants and rejected asylum seekers slip into provides an ideal environment for those that mean Britain only harm.

Blair believes the threats from terrorism and from rogue states like Iraq are inextricably linked. Now, with war looming ever closer in the Gulf, many Britons are taking him at his word.—dpa