February 02, 2007	Friday	Muharram 13, 1428

BIRMINGHAM: The arrest of nine suspects in an anti-terror raid in Birmingham has lifted the lid off racial tensions in what has long been viewed as one of Britain’s most well-integrated cities.

Muslim community leaders say Wednesday’s raids in the city’s Alum Rock and Sparkhill neighbourhoods, where most people are of Pakistani origin, have dealt a severe body blow to race relations.

Allah Ditta, founding member of Alum Rock Islamic Centre, said he feared the community would be picking up the pieces of the arrests for years to come, affecting business and public perception of the area.

“Community leaders work hard together to build relationships and then raids like this take things back years,” he said.

Ethnic minorities make up about one-third of Birmingham’s one million-strong population, which includes 104,000 Muslims.

Amid growing immigrant numbers, analysts predict the West Midlands city will be Britain’s first with a non-white majority – a prospect that appalls some white residents.

Not far from Jackson Road, where the police raids took place, Carol, 58, stood on Thursday holding a placard which, in bold, black letters on a white background, declared: “I am offended.” By what? By Muslim extremism in Birmingham, she says.

“I lived in Small Heath all my life but was forced to move out because I was marginalised. We do not live in harmony. I do not know anyone in Birmingham that lives in harmony.” Tariq Abbas, director of the Centre for the Study of Ethnicity and Culture at Birmingham University, believes there may be some truth to Carol’s argument.

“There’s something in it in terms of the overall dynamic and the nature of the city and these poorer inner city areas,” he told.

“But it’s incumbent on us all to say, you shouldn’t have to feel like that. We should be caring better for your needs.” Just north of the city centre, there are pockets of majority African-Caribbean districts while further out in the south, some suburbs are almost exclusively white and working-class.

Racial tensions and community discontent have exploded before in Birmingham: in 1985 two days of rioting followed the arrest of a black man during a police stop and search in the Handsworth area of the city.

Twenty years later in 2005, African-Caribbean and south Asian youth clashed after false claims that a black girl had been raped in an Asian hairdressing facility. Two people were killed.

The head of Britain’s race watchdog, Trevor Phillips, has warned that Britain is at risk of “sleepwalking” into segregation, with some areas turning into “fully-fledged ghettos” along US-style economic and racial dividing lines.

For Abbas, the current focus in Britain on Muslim and non-Muslim, religion versus secularism has sharpened the tensions between ethnic groups, despite many areas suffering similar problems in housing, health, education and jobs.

Others see it as a reason why the far-right British National Party is making inroads in traditionally “white” areas, including in the West Midlands and other former industrial towns and cities towards England’s north-west.

In Alum Rock, amidst the anger at perceived police heavy-handedness, Muslim leaders also sense splits emerging, both with other communities and within their own as suspicions grow of neighbours and even relatives.—AFP