Copenhagen
DANES ARE KNOWN for many things, but religious zealotry is not one of them. It therefore came as a surprise to newsreaders some two-and-a-half years ago when they learned that there was a Danish citizen among the holy warriors being held as illegal combatants at the U.S. base in Guantanamo Bay, Cuba. The man was in Afghanistan to attend an al Qaeda training camp when the United States attacked the Taliban in October 2001, and he was caught heavily armed on the Pakistani border, fleeing the American forces.
The man’s name is Slimane Hadj Abderrahmane, which may not strike the reader as a typical Danish name. Abderrahmane is the 31-year-old son of a Danish mother and an Algerian father. Over the past weeks, he has again been dominating the headlines here, calling for attacks on the Danish government–“Denmark is the only country that hasn’t realized that a country’s leaders are legitimate targets of war in a war situation”–and forcing the Danes to reexamine their traditional notions of tolerance and open-mindedness.
Abderrahmane’s is a story of integration gone spectacularly wrong. Born in 1973, he spent his first seven years in Denmark before the family moved to Algeria. He returned to Denmark and in 1997 enrolled at a Danish university, studying mathematics. But his commitment to his studies was half-hearted, and he was living the life of an aimless hedonist existing on the fringes of the techno- milieu, when he got caught up in the Islamist cause in a Danish mosque.
The television footage from Grozny in Chechnya, which was being leveled by Russian forces, was the turning point. The mosque was preaching jihad against the Russian infidels. Abderrahmane dumped the techno music in favor of male voices reciting verses from the Koran, and began adhering to the strict rituals of the true believer.
From the Danish mosque he made connections with the European terrorist network. He visited London’s notorious Finsbury Park mosque, the stronghold of the one-armed cleric Abu Hamza el-Masri, dubbed “Captain Hook” by the tabloids, who was the brains behind the bombings in Yemen and is now in prison awaiting extradition to the United States. Abderrahmane is suspected of having served as a money courier in Algeria for the rebel movement GSPC before ending up in an al Qaeda training camp in Afghanistan.
When news first came out that a Dane was in American hands at Guantanamo, the Danish left-wing opposition, who are highly critical of the allied efforts in Afghanistan and Iraq, made him a cause célèbre, casting him as an idealist and a victim, as did the daily Politiken, which accused the Danish government of passivity in securing his release. Abderrahmane’s case was taken up by organizations like Amnesty International, which concluded in its annual report that the Danish government was failing to uphold his human rights.
The conservative government, sensitive to the left’s human rights arguments, started pressing for his release, and because of the Danish military contribution to the reconstruction of postwar Iraq, the Americans met the Danish demands. Having signed a document stating that he would abstain from terrorism, would not conspire against the United States and its allies, and would not engage in holy war, Abderrahmane was released in February of this year–the first European to be released from Guantanamo. He was flown home, given a new identity and a secret address by Danish intelligence, and advised to keep a low profile.
He didn’t take the advice. Since his return, rather than lying low, he has been giving interviews right and left, and a flattering book, The Dane at Guantanamo, has been written about him, so that his fellow Danes have gotten to know him all too well. Abderrahmane displays a curious mindset: a combination of hardened holy warrior and true product of the welfare state, who fully expects that state to help him wage war on itself.
Abderrahmane describes himself as a “good terrorist,” who would never harm civilians. He denies having had contact with al Qaeda, and he carefully avoids the standard anti- Jewish rhetoric. Apart from that, he is as hardline as they come: “I do not identify myself as a Dane or an Algerian. I identify myself as a Muslim, and I will shoot anybody who fights against the cause of Allah on the battlefield.” He regards democracy as incompatible with Islam and wants sharia law in Denmark, including the stoning of women for infidelity and the cutting off of hands of criminals, which is clearly out of step with the usual ideas of the Scandinavian criminal justice system.
As for his imprisonment, he claims to have been roughed up and humiliated by American soldiers in Kandahar (who he complains made fun of the size of his genitals). Significantly, he does not claim to have suffered torture in Guantanamo, and in fact gives a rather idyllic impression of life in the camp. When a man is taken to interrogation during his prayers, an act which causes an uproar among the inmates, the camp leadership apologizes; guards are not even permitted to say “shut up” to the prisoners. He quotes one of his interrogators as saying, “We do not do torture. We let time do the work.”
Abderrahmane lost no time in letting it be known that he expected the Danish government to help him in a possible lawsuit against the U.S. government for having kept him imprisoned for two years in violation of international law. In this he was immediately supported by the Rehabilitation and Research Center for Torture Victims in Copenhagen. Its founder, Inge Genefke, has announced that she regards torture as a bigger problem in the world than terrorism.
But then Abderrahmane seems to have overplayed his hand. Last week, in an interview on DR2 Deadline, an evening news show, he stated that he regards the Danish troops in Iraq as legitimate targets of attack, including troops who are currently training in Denmark before being sent off to Iraq. And not only that: He also regards the Danish prime minister, foreign minister, and defense minister as legitimate targets. The pronouncements caused a sensation. Even to tolerant Danes, it seemed somewhat ungrateful to want to bump off the government that has just secured his freedom.
The government is now trying to determine if Abderrahmane can be prosecuted for incitement to terrorism under the country’s new anti-terrorism laws. He denies having issued direct threats, stating that he was being “purely informative” as regards Islamic attitudes to war.
After the latest furor, he announced that since he did not feel welcome in Denmark, he would go and fight on behalf of the Chechen rebels, and that the Americans could use the contract he had signed about not engaging in holy war as “toilet paper.” The Russian ambassador to Denmark has asked the Danish authorities to make sure that he would not be permitted to leave the country. His passport is now deposited with the police.
The Abderrahmane farce has raised uncomfortable questions concerning Islamists in Denmark. How many more radicals of his kind are in the country? Over the past decades significant numbers of Middle Easterners have been granted asylum in Denmark, many of them of Palestinian origin. Until recently, the intelligence services were only intermittently consulted by the Immigration Service, as they were regarded as too “unempathetic” towards asylum-seekers. Intelligence sources will unofficially admit they have no idea who is in the country.
The beneficial effect of Abderrahmane’s openness has been that of a reality check. It has given the Danes a firsthand look into how the mind of a terrorist operates. Suddenly it is dawning on the Danes that the detainees at Guantanamo are there for a reason. Now letters to the editor are asking if the Americans would by any chance like him back. Perhaps with a few more thrown in for good measure.
Henrik Bering is a journalist and critic.
