[This interview was conducted in Montreal by Ahmer Qadeer and Azim Hussain. Asad Rehman is an Officer with the British Chapter of Amnesty International.] ed.

ASAD: Nothing. A lot of people on the ground have been keen to have a national umbrella, not a national organization, that would bring our collective voices together, to campaign and also allow us to support each other when it comes to particular issues. Following what was taking place in the anti-fascist movement, people said that it was now time to start a broader anti-fascist/anti-racist movement. One grouping that was based in the Labor Party saw an opportunity for political gain, and suddenly announced they had formed a national organization. So most of the groups on the ground said that we don't want to get into this kind of battle, we don't care as long as everyone is part and parcel and that it works on the basis of supporting the grassroots. So everyone joined but within a year and a half every single group left completely disillusioned and said that the group wasn't interested in supporting grassroots initiatives; it was more interested in supporting people's careers on a national platform and not seeing itself as taking the message from the ground to the establishment and getting resources from the establishment and bringing them back to the ground. It was our experiences that were being used to sell the movement to the establishment, but nothing was coming back to us. So the people on the ground still remained unfunded, unresourced, coming together in very small groupings. The national organization, the Anti-Racist Alliance, was getting thousands and thousands of pounds from the National Trade Union, and so when you went to them they would say that they're doing their bit for the anti-racist movement because they're supporting this national organization; "that's your Black organization," they would say.

The Anti-Racist Alliance split and a number of other groupings left and formed another organization. At the same time the SWP suddenly realized that race was becoming an issue so they formed the Anti-Nazi League. So you had three national organizations all hating each other and competing with each other, and the grassroots saying that we've lost another opportunity. There were a number of very high-profile campaigns on the ground, and for the first time racial violence really came into the political agenda in a major way. The murder of Stephen Lawrence and Roland Adams had suddenly raised the consciousness of the people, combined with the fact that the British National Party was setting up its headquarters, organizing; all these things and the experience of police violence were coming together. We were no longer mad people. More and more people were saying, "hey, maybe there is something here."

The police had always said that the number of racial incidents were always low, a few thousand in the country, but then the British Crown Survey came out and said that there are probably 130,000 incidents which have taken place. When the Home Office Committee looked at it, it said that it could be as high as 330,000, which is an incredible amount when you consider that the Black community in this country is only 4.9% of the population.

ASAD: For the core of grassroots organizations, like Newham Monitoring Project (NMP), we've always believed in the concept of Black. NMP didn't see itself as Asian or Caribbean, it saw itself as Black. We drew on the experiences of the Black community. We said that there was a very similar experience when it came to racial violence. Maybe some communities had a particular, individual experience of something, but that was due to certain factors. For example, people say that the Bangladeshi community is suffering racial violence because they are the most recent of the immigration waves, but unlike the rest of the communities they have no self-organized structure within the community. They came into the worst and poorest area of Tower Hamlets, so clearly they were going to suffer racial violence. People in the '80s were saying that racial violence is an Asian issue, policing is a Black issue; we said that they're two sides of the same coin. You can't deal with one without looking at the other. You can't look at the state in terms of policing without looking at racism. Ironically, when you got to the late '80s and '90s, there were so many people who said that Black is no longer the issue, Black is not what binds us together, and suddenly started talking about identity politics and saying we need to organize not as an Asian or Caribbean community, but as a Pakistani, or Indian, or Punjabi community, and the Afro-Caribbean community as a Caribbean one or an African one. While that was going on, the actual experiences of the Black community were converging. The deaths from racial violence of Stephen Lawrence and Roland Adams, both Afro-Caribbean men, sparked most attention. When you talked about police racism, there were (Asian) people who tape-recorded the racial abuse they were getting from the police, so there were very similar experiences. Particularly for young Asians and young Afro-Caribbean people who had very similar experiences on the street.

ASAD: While there is some factual truth in that, I would say that there's a historical reason for why that is so. Obviously, there is the factor of language and culture and the fact that Caribbean culture has more similarities with UK culture, so it's easier to bring over reggae, ska. But also, the Afro-Caribbean community was the first community here; it was here 10-20 years before the Asian community arrived, so culturally it had longer to establish itself and to have that influence. But now, you see a very similar growth in Asian music. What are the big bands in this country? Echobelly: Asian lead singer, Babylon Zoo. There's a lot of Asian fusion music, world music, Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan, so there's this new form of music which is also as hip. You go clubbing now, and you see Asian kids who are involved in youth culture, setting new trends. Also, there's a fusion of street culture between Asians and Blacks. If you go into Tower Hamlets, you see Bengali kids with baggy trousers, and you see the same dress styles in Brixton.

ASAD: Fine, but people find things in their own cultural identity and mix that match with existing street culture. Now, two very popular things are Outcaste and Anokha, which is Asian fusion music, and there's Joy Bangla coming out of the young Bengali community. They're scratching and mixing, but they're using their own music culturally as street music. So yes, people are using hip hop, but they see hip hop as international, not as purely Afro-Caribbean. If you look at the US, rap music has many Latino artists.

So things may have started off in the Afro-Caribbean community, but that hasn't meant that other cultures haven't been able to add their bit. Nobody is saying that there is one Black culture. Black culture is made up of a myriad of different cultures. Take the Somali community; culturally they're seen as African, but there's no way that they're close to the Afro-Caribbean community in terms of street culture like the Bengalis. So you're actually seeing Somalis taking on a different street culture. AZIM: In that vein of identity politics, we have the rise of Islamism. How do you deal with that on the ground? How do groups like Newham Monitoring Project deal with young Muslims who are saying that we're the targets now? ASAD: Look, quite clearly there is a crisis. There are political reasons for why these issues have come together, why it is that identity politics has come to hold sway. Partly it's because conservative forces have managed to establish itself in the community.

ASAD: No, not at all. Our movement has always left room for people's cultural identities, and no one is arguing that it's not important, but what has happened is that these Islamic groups are attacking the progressive movement. The orthodox were arguing, "Pakistani." When they couldn't argue that anymore, they started arguing "Islam." It's easier to wrap yourself in Islam and relate to young people. Also, things happened internationally. When you had the Golden Temple incident in Amritsar, you had a lot of Sikhs saying, "I'm Sikh!" With Muslims, you have Palestine, Kashmir . . .

ASAD: I have an extensive feeling for the Islamic civilization. I will say clearly that I'm a Marxist, a revolutionary socialist, but I'm a Muslim as well, and I see no contradiction. What the Right is trying to do is say that you could only have a particular version of Islam. They would like to dominate the political and ideological interpretation of Islam. There's room for people's religious and cultural identities, but one's isn't more important that anyone else's, and that's what is actually taking place. Before, we had an alliance with other communities for the sake of survival. Now reactionary forces are trying to break that alliance because they see their own political gain in the short-term range of organizing on their own and going ahead individually.

Also, as we've been 30-40 years in this country, the class system has had an impact: you have the middle classes moving out, and they don't want to talk about experiences on the street. They have different experiences from the working-class communities, and they want to align themselves with the establishment.

ASAD: No, no. Two things are happening. One, Islamic rhetoric clearly has an 'affinity' with working-class people, particularly the young and across the gender divide, but predominantly male. This has been because of British society's rejection of Asian identity, which has meant that people have to turn to something; Islam has given them a way of saying "that's my identity." So religion has become a new identity for people. I don't think that this is a long-term issue. Politics is always changing. I think the international dimension plays a large role. The fact that racism is being talked about as anti-Islamic rhetoric, anti-Arabism, all these issues have allowed the Right to set-up. And I think it was a failure of the Left not to have recognized and countered that. It saw itself as a secular force, and saw religion as having nothing to do with anything, and so they allowed this flame to catch, and by the time they turned around, the fire was out of control and they didn't know what to do. People are starting to deal with it now. They're saying that "we accept your right to be a Muslim, but as a Muslim it's your duty to fight for everybody's rights." So they are trying to break the hold of the Right on the Islamic, Hindu or any other religious experience.

ASAD: International issues affect our community very greatly. Human rights is a big issue in the Indian subcontinent, and we're related to that because of our connections back home. We don't see human rights as an abstract idea; it's something that our parents' generation fought for, and people are still fighting for. What progressive people in Amnesty are saying is that the message you're putting forward strikes a chord with the Black community but it has to be our experiences that shape Amnesty rather than Amnesty shaping our experiences. So that's why I came into Amnesty: to take that experience of organizing on the ground and take Amnesty's message back to the ground, and to also develop the human-rights movement within our own communities, both nationally and internationally.

I look at two issues, religion and the non-white communities. Since so many of these issues overlap, it was quite an easy thing to do. I plan to run progressive campaigns around Palestine and Kashmir, and challenge the power of the Right. The Islamic forces seem to be the only people concerned about Kashmir, as if the Sikh fundamentalists are the only people concerned about Punjab.

ASAD: Hopefully, as part of that process, people will deal with national issues as well. That very process of bringing people together means that, for example, if you bring Afro-Caribbean, Sikh and other parts of the Asian community together around the issue of the death penalty in the US, the very fact that they came together on that means that there's a network for other things locally or nationally that are outside the Amnesty mandate, but the mechanism (precedent) is now there. I see myself as a facilitator of that spirit of the 1970s of communities coming together and trying to address some of the issues on which we've moved apart.

ASAD: It's difficult to say. I think there is a lot of ignorance. From their perspective they saw it as very white and liberal, and then they suddenly saw themselves with 125,000 members in this country alone, a leading human-rights organization and no Black people! So they decided to bring someone in and increase the number of Black people in Amnesty. I came in and said "if you actually want to increase the number of Black people in Amnesty, sorry I'm not the person for you. But if you want to raise the profile of Amnesty and human rights in the Black community, I can do that. But that doesn't mean that you'll get Black people joining Amnesty, that's a very long process." So it's not resistance as much as it is ignorance. Also, Amnesty has a very set way of working which is very suited to the White, Judeo-Christian experience in this country, and on a class basis as well. Things like letter-writing etc, these were things that just didn't appeal to Black people because we are used to collective or community action, like picketing.

ASAD: Maybe they would do a little bit. But what I would call the gray area, they would shy away from because they didn't know what to do. But it's the gray area where the Black community wanted someone to say something. It's no good to say that the death penalty in the US is wrong; we actually said the judicial system is racist. The fact that Black people are on death row isn't about crime, it's about Black people being more likely to be sent to death. By bringing the race issue into it, then you could get the Black community mobilizing around it. When we talk about Punjab and Kashmir, you need to draw their experiences and bring over people from there and put them on a platform where you can see that the experiences of people in the Punjab aren't different from those in Bangladesh, or Pakistan. It's actually something which is going on day-to-day, the majority of people in the Indian subcontinent -- the poor, the disadvantaged -- they're the ones who are being tortured. I was actually trying to bring campaigning from a high level to a real grassroots level where people related to it because of their community, political, religious and cultural experiences.

Amnesty always liked to see itself as neutral, middle-of-the-road. But it was never neutral. It was Judeo-Christian, and we had to break that and find other ways of saying the same message. And now they're beginning to accept that there are other ways of speaking the human-rights language other than reciting the Universal Declaration of Human Rights; for most people it means nothing.

ASAD: Yes, partly as Amnesty gets more involved in the southern hemisphere, Black, Asian, Middle Eastern people are pushing it to have stronger links there. So it's been a process both inside and outside. You can act like a firefighter all your life, but eventually you have to build a movement so that people everywhere are supporting human rights and see it as part of their everyday lives.

ASAD: Yes, sometimes. But people have come to learn what perspective I represent, so it's ok. They also know we've had the same experiences. For example, in the Sikh community, with the whole Punjab thing, Muslims are seen as allies at the moment. There are some difficulties with the Hindu community but that doesn't have anything to do with me individually. They see the criticism of India as the criticism of their Hindu identity or Indian culture. So that's been more of an obstacle rather than me as an individual.