Commonwealth soldiers serving in the UK armed forces are not often in the news these days, but when they are, the occasion is invariably prompted by immigration issues. Most recently it has been in connection with individuals who have served in the army for years but, after leaving, been refused settlement in the UK or even UK citizenship, for a variety of reasons. These situations routinely point to the contradictions inherent in their fraught position as soldiers (patriotic citizens!) and migrants (unwanted scroungers!).

The latest episode to attract media attention – although minimal by comparison – concerns a private members bill currently going through parliament. Its aim is to fix a clause in the 1981 Nationality Act that effectively disadvantages members of the armed forces applying for UK citizenship. The 1981 act ruled that those applying for citizenship must show that they were physically present in the country five years to the day before the application is made. For those Commonwealth citizens in the armed forces, either based outside the country or deployed in Iraq, Afghanistan or elsewhere, this presents an obstacle that was not officially recognized until 2010 when the coalition government was forced to consider the legal implications of the military covenant.

This private member’s bill, proposed by Woking Tory MP Jonathan Lord, Citizenship (Armed Forces) Bill has romped through the House of Commons with minimal objections from those who stayed in to debate it. Having established that it only affects around 200 service people in all, and won’t herald a new flood of migrants demanding to live in the UK, the bill has now begun the process through the House of Lords. A transcript of the Commons debates can be found here and gives a vivid, though utterly predictable, account of how these issues are treated by our leaders.

Map showing home countries of Commonwealth recruits at the Infantry Training Centre, Catterick, in 2010.

Can you have Muslim soldiers? Diversity as a martial value

This piece was written for a book called The State of Race (Palgrave 2012) edited by Nisha Kapoor, Virinda S. Kalra and James Rhodes. I am currently writing an updated version which will consider two subsequent developments: the impact of the Woolwich killing and the preparations to commemorate the centenary of WW1.

On July 11^th 2013 the MoD announced that it was all over. No more Commonwealth citizens would be recruited into the armed forces unless they had lived in the UK for five years. The practice of recruiting Commonwealth soldiers, often directly in their own countries, has been consigned to history. Who knows how this interlude from 1998 to 2013 will be narrated in future accounts of Britain’s disastrous wars in Iraq and Afghanistan?

The announcement by the MoD was brief: ‘Commonwealth recruits who wish to join the Armed Forces (Regulars) will need to demonstrate they have lived in the UK for the last 5 years’. Since no other information was provided, it is necessary to speculate on the reasons behind this decision.

There are two possible explanations. The first is that the ‘British jobs for British workers’ mantra, uttered memorably by Gordon Brown in 2009 but amplified over and over through the anti-immigration politics of the coalition government, finally won the day. We can only imagine that there were elements in the Home Office who insisted that it was unfeasible for the country’s national military institutions to employ migrants from outside the EU. It was well known that the UKBA were not keen on making concessions for military migrants and balked at having to do so in the face of logistical and ideological problems. The fact that hundreds of soldiers are being made redundant as part of the cuts to the regular army must have made it harder to defend the practice of recruiting from outside the country and therefore easier to argue for changing the rules.

A second explanation is that equality and diversity no longer means what it used to. The imperative to recruit a certain proportion of minority ethnic soldiers has given way to an emphasis on removing disadvantage for individuals based on their race, sex, sexuality, disability, religion or any other factor recognised in law. The recruitment of Commonwealth soldiers from 1998 on enabled the army to increase its proportion of ethnic minorities from almost zilch in the late 1990s to a respectable ten per cent a decade later. By 2011 only one third of these were born in the UK which suggests that strategies to persuade young British citizens from minority backgrounds to join the army were not going very well.

With the privatisation of army recruitment in March this year, and the disbandment of outreach work like the army’s Diversity Action Recruiting Group, it will be some time before we see the impact of this decision to reinstate the five-year residency rule. Meanwhile, for those like Henry from St Lucia who were encouraged to buy expensive one-way tickets to the UK to complete their qualifying process for the army, only to find out that they were no longer eligible, this was a devastating blow.

Considering the volume of words expended on Thatcher’s legacy following her death, it was shocking how few people addressed the question of racism in the period immediately following her election in 1979.
Daniel Trilling recalled the infamous ‘swamping speech’ from 1978 but there really hasn’t been much else. Reading some of the reflections on the 20th anniversary of Stephen Lawrence’s murder made me go back and root out this edition of Searchlight from 1982.
As the first paragraph in the article reveals, one response from the Met to the riots of 1981 was to insert a course on ‘multiculturalism’ in the curriculum for young police cadets.
John Fernandes, the instructor given this task, was so distressed by the cadets’ level of bigoted ignorance that he passed them on to us at Searchlight, as well as to Channel Four.
It might come as a shock to some people that the idea of institutional racism (or institutionalised racism as we used to call it) goes way back and was not invented by the Macpherson report in 1998.
I had actually forgotten this episode – and what it meant to publish this material – but went back to look at it when I was researching the army’s record of (not) dealing with racism throughout the 1990s.

The significance of Muslims serving in the UK military has been highlighted several times in the last few days, both times in relation to the killing of a soldier in Woolwich. The first was by Paul Goodman on the conservativehome website. In a longer piece on the implications of a terror attack committed by Islamists in the UK he said:

Islam is compatible with democracy, Islamism is not – but politicians have neither the knowledge nor the mandate to help shape “a British Islam”.  Perhaps all they can do is run an effective security strategy, and make limited political progress.  The latter would include recruiting more Muslims into the armed forces – there were about 600 in 2010: one of the biggest barriers to recruitment, according to Shiraz Maher’s Ties That Bind, is that young Muslims are unaware that the opportunity to join is there at all.  (Maher’s pamphlet for Policy Exchange tells the story of how hundreds of thousands of Muslims fought for Britain in two world wars.)

Here we note that offering young British Muslims the chance to join the armed forces would constitute ‘limited political progress’.

The second piece approached the subject of Muslims in the armed forces head on, and from the perspective of an ex-army officer and member of the Armed Forces Muslim Association. Afzal Amin’s article, published in the Guardian comment is free section, was entitled: ‘Extremists will not divide our armed forces’. Amongst other things he wrote:

As we witness this brutality in Woolwich, more than 600 Muslim personnel are deployed in Afghanistan, Mali, Somalia and elsewhere, contributing to our collective security. This attack is not connected to them, nor the armed forces, who have helped so many Muslims in Iraq and Afghanistan – two theatres in which the principal beneficiaries of military intervention have been Muslim civilians and their governments. 

So in addition to contributing to a functioning diverse and cohesive military, he claimed, Muslim soldiers can also perform useful security functions while they are at it – symbolically as well as practically in terms of culture and language.

Amin’s pitch, overtly politicised by virtue of the fact that he is a Tory parliamentary candidate, was subsequently reiterated in an interview in the Independent. Under the headline: “Terror in Woolwich – a soldier’s tale: UK Muslims – your country needs you” he said:

The Prophet Mohamed said: ‘Love for one’s nation is part of faith’; ‘Who serves a people is the best of them’, and that ‘the Muslim is the one from whose hands and tongue others are safe’. The motto of Sandhurst is ‘Serve to Lead’. These are all British values and Islamic values,” he says.

Having left the army in April he is now free to claim that in his last deployment in Afghanistan in 2012 he acted as “a strategist advising US generals on conflict termination strategy through civil society engagement and empowerment”.

So how did that go? Clearly the mundane practice of “diversity” in this secretive and defensive institution entails something more than vague notions of inclusion and representativeness.

While there are indeed important things to say about this, there are underlying questions about how and why the military has come to dominate national public life, and why military service now carries such weight as a profession unlike any other.

This short piece below briefly outlines the significance of Muslims serving in the British military today. (However, it summarises a much longer discussion in the book which looks at racism inside the armed forces as well as the the concept of “militarised multiculture”.)

Muslims and Military Service

In 2006 Jabron Hashmi, 24, became the first British Muslim soldier to die in Afghanistan. His older brother, Zeeshan, who had also worked in the British Army, said at the time: ‘Jabron was a committed soldier and a committed Muslim. He was fiercely proud of his Islamic background and he was equally proud of being British and was very proud to live in Britain.’

The death in service of this avowedly Muslim patriot was acknowledged as a significant event at the highest levels. The following year members of Hashmi’s family, who lived in Birmingham and were originally from Pakistan, were asked to lay the foundation stone for the new National Memorial Arboretum in Staffordshire. However, although Jabron’s death was commemorated as a form of sacrifice for the nation, it was also perceived as an act of betrayal by many other Muslims.

In a BBC report entitled ‘UK’s Muslim soldiers “fighting extremists not Muslims”’, Zeeshan Hashmi subsequently revealed that, following Jabron’s death, the family had received many letters from ‘well-wishers of all faith and backgrounds’, which had a great source of comfort. But they had also experienced hostility on the grounds that Jabron was considered a traitor.

These divergent responses help to illustrate why the figure of the Muslim performing military service is so significant. At one extreme, as a British soldier, Jabron Hashmi was hailed as a hero who gave his life for his country. For others, as a Muslim, he was accused of betraying his faith by fighting in a war that demonised Islam as the enemy of western civilisation. Yet it is not often that we hear about the experience of minorities, particularly those who are Muslims, who decide to work in the armed forces.

The most recent statistics published by the Ministry of Defence (MoD) indicate that there are 650 Muslims serving in the UK armed services.[ii] Of these, 550 are in the British Army, constituting 0.5% of the total. In common with other faith groups, Muslim servicemen and women maintain a network of mutual support known as the Armed Forces Muslim Association (AFMA). So what does this tell us about the conditions of diversity in the army?

A modern multicultural military?

Within the past decade the MoD has been able to claim that, in terms of numbers, the proportion of black and minority ethnic personnel in all three services has risen from just over one per cent to more than seven per cent. In the British Army, the figure currently hovers around ten per cent.

This rise can partly be explained by the fact that residency regulations for Commonwealth citizens were dropped in 1998, partly in response to a documented levels of racism and the virtual absence of diversity in the workforce. Today, two thirds of BME personnel are classified as ‘foreign and Commonwealth’, and this figure does not include Gurkhas who are recruited from Nepal.[iii] The employment of soldiers from outside the UK has had a significant impact on the institution’s progression towards becoming a multicultural  (and multi-faith) employer. But this process of modernisation has also been mandated by law.

In 2003 the religion and belief elements of the European Employment Framework Directive were incorporated into the UK Employment Equality Regulations. Two years later the appointment of Buddhist, Muslim, Sikh and Hindu chaplains replaced a system whereby religious leaders were engaged simply as advisers. For Muslims, as for other faith groups, this reform meant the possibility of a support network for individuals scattered across the institution.

Diversity as a martial asset

When Imam Asim Hafiz took up the post of first Muslim chaplain in 2005, it was unclear how many Muslims were serving since comprehensive statistics were only collected from 2007. By 2009, there were 500 Muslims in the regular armed forces. Over four hundred of these were in the army, and a significant proportion were citizens of countries such as The Gambia, Ghana, Nigeria and Pakistan. It was at this point that AFMA was set up with the licence to explore the wider issue of Muslims serving in the military.

In the first newsletter, Imam Hafiz explained how the group hoped to persuade civilians about the significance of their work:

“Unfortunately there is a huge … ignorance in some parts of the Muslim community and I hope that AFMA will be able to bridge the gap between the Armed Forces and the Muslim community and be a reminder that HM Forces are as integral to British society as are other British institutions such as the Police Force, the fire service and the NHS that are here to serve this nation as whole including the Muslim community.”[iv]

The Imam was supported by the Muslim Council of Britain (MCB) in his expressed aims to educate the Muslim community about the opportunities provided by military service. The MCB issued a report entitled Remembering the Brave: The Muslim Contribution to Britain’s Armed Forces in which they confront the issue, not just of ignorance about what it might mean to serve in the military, but also the depth of hostility towards the government’s foreign policy. The report asserts that ‘Loyalty does not mean the suspension of our critical faculties and failure to question our contested national engagements.’[v]

In an oblique reference to documented war crimes, such as the murder of civilian Baha Mousa in September 2003, committed by British soldiers in Iraq, the report ventures into more controversial territory: ‘We should ensure that the actions of a few does not diminish the overall expectations of our armed forces to abide by international laws of war and uphold fundamental human rights.’

While these arguments are addressed to UK citizens at home, the organization of Muslims inside the armed forces has been acknowledged by sections of the military leadership too. In 2009 the then Chief of the General Staff, General Sir David Richards, the first patron of the AFMA, commented publicly that Britain ‘had a commitment to … all those Muslims with whom we have a natural identity, given our own core values reflect very strongly to those of Muslim faith.[vi]

The raised profile of Muslim personnel – including the Imam – has also been utilised as a strategic asset in Afghanistan. This could be seen in news reports emphasising the participation of Muslims, whether joining forces with Afghan security personnel to celebrate Eid or acting as intermediaries with Afghan civilians.[vii] Seen in this light, the pragmatic tools of counter-insurgency warfare intersect with the symbolic aspects of soldiering on the domestic front.

Leaving aside the implications of what Harry Wales actually said on his return from Afghanistan, the publicity his comments have generated have, once again, pointed to aspects of military work that are often hidden in the carefully managed Newspeak about life in the armed forces.

Everyone remembers the Las Vegas pictures earlier in the summer and his sporting of a Nazi armband when he was in his teens. This is an extract from Military MIgrants recalling what happened when the young ‘warrior-prince‘ was heard calling his fellow officer a ‘Paki’.

From chapter 5, Keeping the Faith.

A royal scandal           

In January 2009 the News of the World published a story based on a leaked video diary made by Prince Harry while training at Sandhurst. The paper revealed that Harry had referred to his fellow officer cadet, Ahmed Raza Khan, as ‘our little Paki friend, Ahmed’ and told a friend wearing a camouflaged hood that he looked like a ‘raghead.’

When celebrities or public figures are caught being racist or anti-semitic on camera their employers are normally obliged to act swiftly to distance themselves or risk damage to their brand by association. Whether the culprit works for the BBC, a fashion house or even the government, he or she faces public shaming in the national media in a show of practised outrage that has its own momentum. Since he was a member of the royal family, the choice of words used by the prince might be thought to reflect negatively on the institution of the monarchy itself.

In addition, Harry was not merely a soldier when he made the video, he was also in the process of training to become an officer. When the story broke he was working as a junior manager charged with responsibility to set an example. As well as his family, he had managed to drag his employer into the spotlight of negative publicity.

The fact that it was a uniformed prince caught uttering such casually racist terms meant that the monarchy, the government and the armed forces were obliged to take a stand on the limits of acceptable speech. In other words, the British military ethos stood in danger of being compromised if there was no official criticism of the prince’s remarks. In the event, Harry’s behaviour was more readily dismissed by his family as a youthful indiscretion as the incident had occurred three years earlier.

The quick apology issued by St James’ Palace also sought to condone the use of the term, ‘Paki’, stressing that it was a ‘nickname about a very popular member of the platoon’, and ‘used without malice’.

By the time the video diary was leaked, Prince Harry, who had once caused a scandal by attending a fancy dress party in Nazi uniform, was already on the road to rehabilitation after his stint in Helmand Province had been revealed to the world’s attendant media. At least, this was the basis on which Prime Minister Gordon Brown was ready to downplay the incident. ‘I think the British people are good enough to give someone who has actually been a role model for young people … the benefit of the doubt,’ he said.

Cabinet minister John Denham gave him a qualified knuckle rap, saying: ‘This sort of language can be seen as offensive, is offensive, is gradually going out of use in our society, and he’s apologised for it.’ The opposition also took the opportunity to criticise Harry’s use of language. From the sidelines, Tory leader David Cameron it was ‘completely unacceptable’ and Liberal Democrat leader Nick Clegg said the comment had caused ‘considerable offence.’

The Daily Mail was less ready to be forgiving, saying that Harry’s apology was insufficient for his ‘incredible crassness’ especially since Khan, an award-winning cadet at Sandhurst, by then was serving in the Pakistan Army where he had a ‘captain’s role in the war on terror’. Seen in this context, Harry’s use of the racist terms ‘Paki’ and ‘raghead’ had more severe implications than a casual example of army banter.

It represented an example of behaviour that could, in theory, lead to far more serious breach of the law if it was not publicly condemned. Pakistan was one of the UK’s strategic allies in the global counter-insurgency and this was a potential blow for the cause of defence diplomacy, an aspect of foreign policy in which the RMAS plays a pivotal role.

The episode, trivial in some lights yet potentially explosive, can be made useful precisely because it brought all these issues together: the British military ethos, defence diplomacy, racism directed at Muslims. In the next chapter we look at the harm that racism does inside the organization.

How far have the reforms ushered in by a commitment to cultural diversity managed to create an environment where abuse and discrimination are confronted, not for reasons of political correctness but as obstacles to functional working relationships?

A clip from The Sun on 12.12.12

The image of a Sikh soldier used to illustrate the increasing diversity of British society this week ought not to pass without comment. The turbaned Scots Guardsman Jatenderpal Singh Bhullar was photographed both on his own and with his colleagues in their trademark bearskins in a carefully placed intervention intended to demonstrate two crucial points: first, that the UK has successfully weathered the integration of postcolonial minorities into its most symbolic institutions; secondly, that faith and culture are no barrier to inclusion within the armed forces themselves.

The bearskin headgear worn by troops in ceremonial dress attending to the Queen is, along with black taxis, double decker buses and punks, one of the chief emblems of brand UK. The scarlet coat, gold braids and tall black fluffy hat are instantly recognizable as British ‘tradition’, nectar to the tourists who flock to the capital the whole year round. The striking visual image of a dark-skinned face under the iconic black fur makes it an obvious opportunity for showcasing London’s happy multicultural face.

But Gdsmn Bhullar is not a member of the elite Household Cavalry normally associated with this role, which explains why he is wearing a long grey overcoat and not the red jacket. As a member of the Scots Guards he belongs to a regular infantry regiment, the only difference being that as part of his training he would be required to carry out public duties as a guard at Buckingham Palace, St James’s Palace, the Tower of London and Windsor Castle.

While there are several black soldiers in the Household Cavalry who could have been photographed to illustrate Britain’s modern military, the key details in this latest version of militarized multiculture are not skin colour, but the turban and the beard.

The fact that these items are on show in army uniform, in whatever role or regiment, speak less of a natural process of enlightenment than the effect of progressive laws on discrimination. There is a chapter in Military Migrants that documents this process. The Employment Equality Regulations, which came into force in December 2003, incorporated the religion and belief elements of the European Employment Framework Directive into UK legislation. The ‘Guide on Religion and Belief’ published by the Ministry of Defence explained that this new legal obligation made it unlawful to discriminate against personnel on the grounds of religion or belief:

“The Armed Forces and MOD Civil Service have been practising policies that respect individuals’ religion or belief for some time. However, it is important to understand that, where in the past MOD as a matter of policy aimed not to discriminate, the new Regulations make discrimination on the grounds of religion or belief unlawful and give individuals a right to bring Employment Tribunal claims for breaches of the Regulations.”

This step towards becoming an official multi-faith employer was thus mandated by law, reflecting the extent to which, as a national institution, the armed forces were simply conforming to an expanded HR agenda and the demands of a corporate multiculturalist script. The fact that a soldier can wear a turban is a sign of the successful campaigns by Indian bus conductors and drivers in the 1960s, at least two generations ago. It ought not to be front page news in 2012.

But there is another aspect of this recent history that cannot be explained in such simple terms. Young men and women of South Asian descent in the UK form an important pool for army recruiters for demographic reasons alone. There has been a great deal of time and resources spent on targeting gurdwaras and mosques in an attempt to encourage communities to see the armed forces as a respectable and attractive profession. This is where it gets contentious.

A recent video made specially for the recruitment of young Sikhs places great emphasis on the martial tradition of Sikhs in the British Empire up to the end of WW2. Young would-be recruits are shown round Sandhurst by a Sikh officer who proudly points out the artifacts and memorials to the British Indian Army, indicating that membership of the UK armed forces is part of their ethno-cultural heritage.

Historically Punjabi Muslims played a parallel role in the British Indian Army, which was famously run on ethnically divided lines after the Uprising in 1857. But it is hard to imagine a recruiting pitch aimed at young Muslims stressing their military heritage in the same way. For British Muslims there is unease at the way Sikhs are singled out for their military prowess with the implication that other ethno-cultural groups from South Asia who took part in Europe’s global conflicts were not appreciated or valued to the same extent.

The young Sikh guardsman in his ill-fitting overcoat does not provide proof of the successful integration of Britain’s postcolonial settlers. Instead he offers a reminder of the country’s imperial heritage which continues to transmit divisive and deep-running conflicts into the heart of contemporary political and cultural life.