Someone had seen hooded armed men going into the community centre and the police, forgetting the advance notification they had of the rehearsal, assumed the Kurds were engaged in terrorist violence. Fortunately for the Kurds, on this occasion at least the police didn't shoot first and ask questions later. When the IRA announced a ceasefire on 31 August 1994, there was a general expectation that the emergency and anti-terrorist laws allowing the police to cordon off whole areas and stop and search vehicles, to detain people incommunicado for up to a week and to banish them into internal exile, would not be renewed. But it was not to be. And the police stop and search powers under the PTA were even extended in April 1996 to pedestrians within designated areas, who can now be stopped and searched at random.
Different communities come in for special targeting in different European countries.
In Britain it tends to be Middle Eastern people, from Palestine, Lebanon or the Gulf states, and Sikhs from the Punjab who are given the full anti-terrorist treatment, although in recent times, and under pressure from France and Germany, Kurds and north Africans have come under scrutiny too. Reem Abdelhadi, a Palestinian arrested twice under the PTA, describes her experiences overleaf. Karamjit Singh Chahal is treated as a terrorist suspect despite his acquittal on criminal charges, and has been in prison for over five years awaiting deportation to India, where he is likely to be tortured to death, on evidence he is not allowed to know, let alone challenge. In France, the main suspect community is the Algerians. Others were put on a charter flight to Burkina Faso, where they remain stranded, unable to return to France or to Algeria.