Last week, Jack Letts’ (aka Jihadi Jack) parents, John Letts and Sally Lane, were found guilty of funding terrorism because they sent their son money while he was in Syria as a member of ISIS. This verdict has opened up a plethora of discussions, but the focus has turned to why notions of citizenship and belonging have not been brought up vis-a-vis the Letts case. Many have compared his situation to that of Begum’s and have noticed a glaring difference in treatment. In fact, Letts is a dual citizen: British and Canadian. The deprivation of citizenship power has been used for those with dual/multiple citizenship or in cases of naturalisation because of statelessness provisions, however, this appears not to apply to Jack Letts.
Shamima Begum left for Syria as a 15 year old in 2015 with two of her friends from Bethnal Green, Tower Hamlets. They were dubbed the three ‘Bethnal Green girls’ and their cctv shots from a London airport and a Turkish border crossing were plastered across Britain’s front pages for days on end. Much was explored about their identities and their potential reasons for leaving their ‘comfortable’ homes in the UK. I put comfortable in quotations marks because journalists’ use of it suggests the girls should have been grateful for their life here – a discourse highly racialised in itself.
Now, a few years later, Shamima Begum has gained renewed attention after doing an interview for The Times where she spoke to the world, and the UK in particular, about why she wanted to return home to London. The only home she has ever known. The discussions that ensued following her plea ranged from utter disgust, feigning indifference and/or dismissal. She was heavily pregnant when she gave her first interview. After giving birth, she made the same plea to return home to raise her son, away from the refugee camp. It was during this interview that the disdain became even more evident. The cameras hovered over her face and the new-born baby in her lap. Much of the indignation focussed on whether she should be allowed back into the UK or not, but more particularly her very humanity was dissected.
Unsurprisingly, her right to return to the UK centred her Muslimness and her Bengali identity. She was spoken of as if she was not of Britain but was here as a mere guest and she has overstayed her welcome. Her actions were seen as a transgression, which brought her citizenship into question. Fernandez and Johnson eloquently express this in their piece: ‘In setting her citizenship up for debate and her body as a potential security threat to Britain, Shamima is automatically positioned as not of Britain.’
Shamima Begum’s case and the stripping of her citizenship came as a shock and as a stark reminder to those racialised as people of colour and/or Muslims about their precarious status as British citizens. The ambiguity of one’s status is ever-present, as the country witnessed with the Windrush scandal. In Begum’s case, the Home Secretary Sajid Javid’s decision to strip Shamima Begum of her citizenship was possible because of the assumption that she qualified for Bangladeshi citizenship. This is true for Bangladeshis in the diaspora who can apply and qualify to apply for Bangladeshi citizenship until the age of 21. This argument further enabled her dehumanisation and her othering precisely because she was not seen as a product of our society. Her actions were easily explained away as belonging to her other identities.
Javid’s decision led to a strongly worded letter by the state minister of foreign affairs of Bangladesh, Shahriar Alam. He asserted in his letter that Begum was not a citizen of Bangladesh and would be denied entry to the country. Britain’s attempt to dump Begum onto another country she had never stepped foot in came as no surprise. This was possible simply because of who Begum was and the most obvious fact that she is a British Bangladeshi Muslim. The lesson we can take away from this is that her case merely represents the continuation of a range of policies, in this regard policies around citizenship, which work to create a two-tier system. This system has allowed for the state to disaggregate the ‘British’, into those who look like ‘Jihadi Jack’ and those who look like Shamima Begum. Jack Letts is not being allowed back into the UK, and is reported to be in conversations with the Canadian authorities about an alternative but, despite this possible alternative, and despite having fought on the front line in a way that Shamima Begum did not, he remains a British citizen.