Immediate release of the North West 10! No deportations!

Partisan Defence Committee

We reprint below a 27 May letter sent to the Home Secretary by the Partisan Defence Committee, a class-struggle non-sectarian legal and social defence organisation associated with the Spartacist League.

We demand the immediate release of the Pakistani students arrested on 8 April in draconian “anti-terror” raids in northwest England. The police outrageously seized and arrested twelve men — one British and eleven Pakistani — with the usual justification of thwarting a gigantic and sinister “terror plot”. But there was never any plot; thirteen days of cop searches predictably unearthed no “bomb factory”, no “Al Qaeda links”, no evidence of anything, merely photos the students had taken of one another at public locations such as the Trafford Centre. Finally released without charge on 21 April, eleven of the men were immediately incarcerated by the UK Border Agency under immigration legislation, and slated for deportation on bogus “national security” grounds. Ten are still being held pending their appeal against the deportation order.

Like other cases — including 15 Muslim men rounded up and interned as suspected “terrorists” after 9/11, whose lives have been ravaged by government “control orders” for fictional unnamed crimes — these arrests and intended deportations amount to British state terror aimed at justifying the ever expanding repressive powers of the capitalist state. The Labour government currently wields these powers against “terror suspects”, which in the state’s racist lexicon today means first and foremost Muslims. The “war on terror” is the domestic corollary to the British and US bloody imperialist wars and occupations of Iraq and Afghanistan. Now as the US has broadened its killing fields to bombing Pakistan, the British government rails against that country’s “insufficient” actions against terrorism.

Release the North West 10! No deportations! Down with the racist “war on terror”!