DAC Peter Clarke
Metropolitan Police, SO13
Broadway
London SW1H OBG
England


humanitarian hijacking

In June I wrote to you about the ethics of terrorism, and about the way racism shapes your attitude to terrorist actions. Humanitarian aircraft hijackings are a good example of the issues involved. I recently asked the Netherlands security service AIVD about this issue: they referred it to the Justice Ministry. A copy of the correspondence is enclosed.

[...  http://web.inter.nl.net/users/Paul.Treanor/kaping.html ...]

The question was: is it legal to hijack an aircraft in Europe, fly it to a region where people are starving to death, and fly them back to Europe for medical treatment? The answer is, it might be. It is at the discretion of the individual public prosecutors whether they prosecute anyone for such actions. (In the Netherlands that would normally be the anti-terrorism prosecutor Marc van Erve).

There are two ethical issues here. The first relates to the justification of the hijack, which endangers innocent people to save the lives of other innocent people, and breaks immigration law. Obviously there is a moral justification from 'greater need'. Who is in most need of the aircraft - passengers on a weekend binge trip to Amsterdam, or people who are in acute danger of death and require immediate access to an intensive care unit? If people in such a condition were lying on the streets of London, bystanders would immediately call an ambulance, and they would go straight to hospital. But so long as they starve elsewhere, in remote regions of Africa, no-one cares.

This is the whole point of the hijack: if EU governments treated Africans with the same respect als their own citizens, there would be no need for a hijack. If these governments ( and their voters) had a conscience, they would provide sufficient aid and medical services. But they don't - the fact that people are starving is evidence that they don't. The much-publicised aid is either insufficient, or it is siphoned off.

So children are dying of hunger, they need to get a hospital, and there are hospitals enough in the EU. But 'we' - the citizens of the rich EU countries - won't let them in. A starving child with no living relatives, dying on the ground in an African refugee camp, can come to the Netherlands for medical treatment. But only if the child first reports to a Netherlands embassy, applies for a visa, and produces a return ticket, and a bank guarantee to cover treatment costs and living expenses. Or the child could apply as an immigrant, in which case it will need to go to the embassy, and take a computer test in proficiency in spoken Dutch (and get the accent right, because the computer is programmed to reject foreign accents). Governments know that such impossible conditions close the door in the face of the dying.

Immigration law is claimed to preserve national culture, but it is also about refusing to share the national wealth with the world's poor. The rich EU states refuse to give sufficient aid for acute emergencies, let alone the massive long-term structural wealth transfers that would be necessary to end poverty and disease in the poorest countries. The voters sit in their comfortable houses, eat their meals, look at the starving poor on television, and then vote for people like Pim Fortuyn or Robert Kilroy-Silk, to keep the starving poor away from their prosperity. That selfish greed extends to letting children starve. Under such circumstances the immigration law is a form of mass murder. It is the law which is wrong, there is nothing wrong with breaking it. And that's where the hijack comes in, because some form of force or evasion will be necessary, to get the patients to the hospital, while the government is doing its best to keep them out.

I know you will say it is wrong, that humanitarian motives can never justify the use of force. And that's the second issue I referred to, because that's not what I hear from the government which you serve. On the contrary, Prime Minister Tony Blair is one of the most fervent advocates of humanitarian force. He has repeatedly said that humanitarian motives justify armed force - he even claimed that God alone could judge him, for his use of such force. Your rejection of humanitarian force is not consistent with its use by your government. Sooner or later, someone was going to suggest a 'humanitarian terrorism', to match the humanitarian interventions of western governments. If you didn't know such a category existed, you do now. Governments which promoted the idea, that troops are the appropriate response to humanitarian emergencies, should not be surprised if armed groups fill the gap, when they themselves fail to act.

There are many possible examples of humanitarian terrorism, but the humanitarian hijacking described here, to bring acutely ill people to a hospital, is probably the clearest in ethical terms. It is hard to see what moral justification you could have for trying to stop it. If, as the reaction of the Netherlands Justice Ministry suggests, it might be legal (or at least non-prosecutable), then police officers would have no formal grounds to stop it.

So what would you do, if you knew such a hijacking was planned - allow it to go ahead, or stop it, and leave 150 or 200 people to starve to death in miserable conditions?


Paul Treanor