The Police State and Safety

[Ivo Skoric]

The Police State and Safety

In March 2001 I visited Bosnia. I was in Sarajevo for roughly five days, 
staying at my US citizen friend, who was working on some research 
project there. I came for my own research project: finding snowboarders 
on both side of the inter-entity barrier, which ended up with one day 
jump-building and snowboarding on Mt. Jahorina in Republika Srpska. 
(Http://balkansnet.org/bosnow.html and /bosnow2.html)

On my way back, at the border, I was taken off the bus by the customs 
officer. That crossing was in the Republika Srpska entity, and the officer 
had cyrillic Serbian insignia - only one BiH flag at the border suggested 
that this border crossing is actually a part of Bosnia.

It was Friday evening, and he was contemplating of holding me at a local 
jail until Monday. A couple of American backpackers, that I met on the 
bus, offered to call and e-mail my friends for me. The bus driver, a Croat, 
suggested, rather openly, that I should give the officer a couple of 
Deutschmarks, "which usually works well," he said.

Eventually, however, the officer let me go, sighing at the thought of 
paperwork he would have to do, if he would hold me. The reason for this 
event was in the requirement for non-Bosnian citizens to register with 
Bosnian authorities upon entry. Usually, this ‘special registration’ is 
done by the hotels in which non-citizens stay (and leave their passports 
at).

But I was staying with a friend. Also, being a citizen of former 
Yugoslavia, I tend to forget the changed situation in the region when I 
travel through. True, the requirement for foreign visitors to register with 
the police was present in former Yugoslavia, as well, and it was carried 
over to the Bosnian legal code. 

But the requirement was not vigorously enforced in the late former 
Yugoslavia to my best knowledge. And I thought it was dropped in the 
new emerging democracies. Besides, what would a Republika Srpska 
police officer give a damn whether I registered with police in Sarajevo, or 
not?

Ultimately, I didn’t have time for that nonsense during my short stay. 
And, fortunately, I got away with it. Now, what strikes me as an 
important issue is, that the requirement for the foreign visitors to register 
with the authorities at the place of their stay, once they already entered 
the country, did neither make former Yugoslavia, nor does it make Bosnia 
and Hercegovina a safer place.

Former Yugoslavia still became “former” and Bosnia and Hercegovina is 
still not really a self-sustainable state, that despite their police state 
pedantry. Based on that experience I wonder what would make 
somebody think that “special registration” of Arab Muslim males in the 
U.S. would make the U.S. a safer place.

U.S. government now requires all males aged 16 and older that were born 
in 1 of 20 Arab countries to “register” with the INS, specially, on top of 
the usual visa procedures and change of address forms. They also need 
to be photographed and finger-printed.

In a recent “special registration” in L.A., thousand of registrants, got 
arrested on mostly minor violations of INS rules. The sheer number of 
sudden arrestees caused the authorities, still sloppy at attempts to build 
a proper police state, to run out of plastic handcuffs used for processing.

On one hand, this signals INS zealous resolve and will probably 
significantly reduce the number of people who would volunteer for 
“special registration” in other places, when their due date comes up. On 
the other hand, what makes US authorities believe that those determined 
to carry on acts of terrorism in the US, would come to the registration 
voluntarily in the first place?

Of course, keeping track of Arab Muslim males in the U.S. is a good 
police work, or so it seems. All September 11 terror perpetrators were 
Arab Muslim males. However, Al Qaeda, Osama Bin Laden, or whatever 
other evil ‘ogre from the tunnel’ is behind the terror spree around the 
world, already had shown that the terrorists that act in the name of their 
cause are and will not always necessarily be Arab and/or Muslim.

In fact, they may already be training blond, Christian, Californian girls, 
kind of a crew that Charles Manson had to do dirty work for him, for all 
that we know. If September 11 taught people anything, it was to expect 
the unexpected and the extraordinary. “Special registration” of Arab men 
is an expected and ordinary procedural action, and it is, probably, a dead 
end road in the war against terrorism.

On top of that, it draws negative historic connotations, which may work 
counter-productive to the “image” that the U.S. wants to propagate 
about itself as the land of the free. And the image of the U.S. as a 
benevolent giant open to everybody of a good will, still tenuously 
believed in by many Americans and non-Americans alike, is the best 
possible long term tool against terrorism. 

But the ‘special registration’ threatens it. The holocaust begun as a 
rather ‘innocent’ requirement for Jews to register with the State. Then 
they were issued yellow stars to wear on their clothes. New laws were 
passed to limit their employment, to seize their property, and, eventually, 
to round them up, load them on trains, and gas them in concentration 
camps.

It was a gradual process of industrial destruction of an entire 
ethnoreligious group. And at the time nobody believed that a Western, 
civilized, nation that was a home to so many artists, scientists and 
philosophers, like Germany, would stand by the mass slaughter of their 
special neighbors. The important lesson that we learned is that it 
happened.

That lesson should move us to urge the Bush administration to change 
its course, because it may lead to unintended, yet dramatic 
consequences, which are inconsistent with the fundamental principles of 
this society and its Constitution. And, on top of that, it would not 
improve our safety, not a bit. Ashcroft virtually plays in the hands of Bin 
Laden.

Just recently I had an argument with a friend of mine about the post-
September 11 New York city. He wrote: “In the days after the attacks 
everyone – understandably – wanted increased security.” I disagreed 
with that, telling him, that while many people, indeed, wanted increased 
security, I was not one of them. Why?

Because no amount of security will prevent a determined suicide bomber 
from completing their mission. Israel is a particularly good example for 
that claim. The U.S. would need decades to build the ‘security state’ that 
Israel has. Still, suicide bombers explode in Israel on a monthly basis. I 
apologize for the fatalism, but there really is no short-term solution.

Western Europe had to live with terrorism in the seventies. Naturally, 
they increased their security levels. And that did not stop terrorists. 
Eventually, the terrorists died, grew old, and more importantly no new 
terrorists appeared. The anger and hate that would find their realization 
in the acts of terror, either dissipated or found some other socially more 
acceptable outlets.

This is likely to happen in the U.S., as well. Therefore, it is most 
important to concentrate on the conditions that produce suicide 
terrorists. And those conditions are best suppressed by benevolence 
and good will, not by the police state and handcuffs. This shall include 
re-arrangement of U.S. policies towards Israel and towards the oil-
producing Arab world, which is difficult and abominable to many people, 
but necessary. 

While the U.S. government acknowledged the importance of this long-
term measures, it did not move an inch to implement any of them, 
meanwhile concentrating on short-term band-aid measures like the 
‘special registration’.

Anybody who lived in the communist Eastern Europe can tell you that a 
police state does not improve citizens security. It increases prison 
population, which in the U.S. is already way too large. It installs fear in 
citizens, that makes them less productive and less flexible, making the 
entire society less capable of responding and adapting to changes. And, 
it projects a particularly wrong, confrontational message to those that 
may wish harm to this society.

Even before the ‘special registration’ regulation, the mutual fear between 
Arabs in the U.S. and the others in the U.S. was already so deep, that an 
Arab-American notary public refused to notarize my translation from 
Serbian to English at one point this Fall. As I told him that the translation 
was for an INS application, he became scared to death.

So far, the new measures did nothing to improve our safety - a black 
Muslim homeless incarnation of Grand Theft Auto sniper in Washington 
DC suburbia was a vivid proof to that. They only served to increase fear 
of immigrants from the U.S. and to increase powers of the immigration 
officials.

Even that it concerns only non-Americans, can an American citizen 
tolerate an oppressive institution with so much unchecked power, like 
the INS, operating on the American soil? What if its officers become 
corrupt and/or spiteful? What do we make of the attempt by the INS to 
exclude Roger Calero at the U.S. border, a journalist for Perspectiva 
Mundial and Militant, after his trip to Havana?

Calero is a legal resident of this country since 1989. He had a 1988 
conviction for trying to sell marijuana to an undercover cop while he was 
still a high school student. That conviction was waived when he applied 
for the green card. But the INS dug it out NOW, and used it as an excuse 
to exclude him at the border. Of course, the INS action had nothing to do 
with Calero writing for a paper called Militant and with him coming back 
from Cuba, hadn’t it?

If it had, then the INS became a tool of suppressing political opposition 
in the U.S. Perhaps, an unintended consequence of giving it too much 
unchecked power, but a dangerous precedent. Because, as that story 
goes: first they came for Arabs, then they took the Muslims, then the 
other immigrants, then their sympathizers, and finally when they come for 
ordinary middle class white American suburban housewives, there would 
be no one left to protest.

There is a lot more than Lott that needs to be changed. But, building a 
police state for immigrants is not a change in the right direction.

Ivo


Ivo Skoric
1773 Lexington Ave
New York NY 10029
212.369.9197
ivo at balkansnet.org
http://balkansnet.org