Immigration police picked wrong person to profile
WHEN Nahed Abou-Zeid was stopped, held for 90 minutes and aggressively questioned by UK border police in December 2007 he decided to even the score in the most positive way he could – by teaching them how not to discriminate against people with Arabic names.
It was at the Folkestone Eurotunnel check-in that he was detained on his way out of Britain to France, and it was to the Border Agency police station there that he returned in February to talk to a dozen trainee officers on an induction course, at the police’s invitation.
As a journalist at the BBC Arabic Service – where he is Father of the NUJ Chapel – he had done stories on the process known as “security profiling”, a method, according to an official description, “for identifying illegal travellers, criminals and terrorists by behavioural analysis and expert questioning techniques.”
So he knew what he was in for when they stopped him. “Are we being profiled?” he asked. “Yes, I am afraid you are.”
“I see that we are the only ones. Is it that we look different?”
“As a journalist,” the woman officer said, “you of all people should understand what we do.”
“I don’t appreciate being left stranded for almost an hour without a word from anybody.”
“What can we do,” she said, “if your people are trying to bomb my people?” And so it went on. “I noticed that you have had a number of visits abroad to places including Algeria and Morocco ...”
“Don’t you agree that this is what journalists/reporters do, travel?”
“You do go to the mosque, do you not?”
Nahed Abou-Zeid does not go to the mosque. He is a Christian and an Australian citizen. His family are Lebanese Catholics and emigrated to Australia, where he began his journalistic career.
Through the NUJ he put in a formal complaint and an inspector came to interview him. “How would like to see this matter resolved?” he asked. The journalist replied that he would like to talk to the officers.
“It’s not blood spilling that I was after,” he says. “I would hate to see someone getting hurt only because they were trying to do their job, even if they got it wrong.
“So I decided to ‘do’ something instead. I offered to share with them my experience as a journalist about my culture and the cultures I have come across.”
The police responded positively. “I could not have hoped for a better outcome,” he says.