The unpleasant stench of racism

An internal investigation launched at Feltham Young Offenders' Institution, in west London, after the murder of Zahid Mubarek, has produced "very, very troubling findings". This is not the least surprising. In a prison where a 19-year-old Asian, sentenced for very minor offences, is placed in a cell with a violent self-styled Nazi and is beaten to death hours before his release, any findings are bound to be troubling.

An internal investigation launched at Feltham Young Offenders' Institution, in west London, after the murder of Zahid Mubarek, has produced "very, very troubling findings". This is not the least surprising. In a prison where a 19-year-old Asian, sentenced for very minor offences, is placed in a cell with a violent self-styled Nazi and is beaten to death hours before his release, any findings are bound to be troubling.

This report confirms the obvious, that there is a substantial degree of racism among the staff at Feltham, which finds an outlet not just in the treatment of prisoners, but also in the attitude to the minority of ethnic staff. The report by the senior investigating officer, Ted Butts, says: "Evidence found by the team suggests that a small number of staff sustained and promoted overtly racist behaviour, as well as more subtle methods, and that there are issues surrounding both staff and prisoners.

"Staff from all ethnic groups told of an underlying culture that suggests the only way minority ethnic group staff can be accepted as part of the team of Feltham is by enduring racist comments and racist banter/jokes... Senior managers know what they should be doing but have not done it. This leads the enquiry team to form the conclusion that Feltham is institutionally racist."

And if this is what the staff have to put up with, what - apart from being murdered in their beds - do the prisoners have to endure? Half of the institution's 717 inmates are of Asian or Afro-Caribbean backgrounds, as are 11 per cent of its 654 staff. Prisoners from minority backgrounds are twice as likely to be put in the segregation unit, and twice as likely to have restraint force used against them.

The report also condemns the prison's complaints system, and highlights the fact that inmates' families tend to complain to the board of visitors rather than Feltham's management about racism. The board of visitors, in turn, alleges that prisoners are intimidated into staying quiet.

The report is confidential, and there are no plans to publish it. Robert Stewart, the 20-year-old murderer of Mr Mubarek, has already been convicted of murder and jailed for life. Mr Mubarek's uncle, Imtiaz Mubarek, has called for a full public inquiry into his nephew's death. The Commission for Racial Equality is due to investigate racism in Britain's jails, following the murder, while the Metropolitan Police is investigating whether prison managers should face charges of corporate manslaughter.

It is the latter course of action that seems most important to the Mubarek family lawyer, Imran Khan. The 36-year-old made his reputation as the man who finally won a full public inquiry into the murder of Stephen Lawrence, a case he took on while working for an East End law firm, JR Jones, only 18 months after qualifying. Now he has launched his own firm, Imran Khan and partners, which specialises in "cases that are dead and buried, resurrecting them and trying to make an impact with them".

The fact that no public inquiry has yet been launched into Mr Mubarek's death certainly suggests that there are those who would like this case to be "dead and buried". But the leaked report from Feltham is so damaging that this now seems impossible.

Meanwhile, Khan has become involved in another case that authorities are keen to see "dead and buried", this time on the other side of the border. This case concerns Surjit Singh Chhokar, 32, a Scots Asian who was stabbed to death outside his home in Lanarkshire in 1998. His girlfriend, Elizabeth Bryce, witnessed the stabbing from the window of their council flat, and was able to identify Mr Chhokar's attackers as they were neighbours in the same block.

Police at first denied that the killing had a racist dimension. The three attackers had stolen Mr Chhokar's Giro cheque a few days before, and the attack was considered as part of a chain of events set off by the theft. They pointed instead to the general atmosphere of lawlessness on the estate - and Gowkthrapple is indeed a place with its problems, unless things have changed a lot more than they look to have since I went to secondary school there. One of its problems, though, is indeed racism.

However, despite the fact that a man was dead, that witnesses could identify his three attackers, that other witnesses told of a confession that stated "I killed the black bastard", and that all three men, when questioned, blamed the others for the fatal blow, only one man was initially put on trial.

The Chhokar family were not even told of this initial trial, in which Ronnie Coulter was found innocent of murder but guilty of assault. After campaigning from pressure groups, the other two men were eventually put separately on trial. The two were cleared of murder, while Andrew Coulter, the nephew of Ronnie, was found guilty of a reduced assault charge.

Despite the questions in this case, officials are hostile to the work of the Chhokar Family Justice Campaign, which is demanding a public inquiry into the handling of the case.

They say that campaigners are hi-jacking the case to push forward an anti-racist agenda because of the failure of their campaign to highlight the case of another Imran Khan, this one an Asian schoolboy who died in hospital seven days after being stabbed in a gang-fight in Glasgow. A youth was detained for seven years in this case, for attempted murder, after the trial in 1998. Families of the white accused made openly racist comments. But the case somehow never broke through to highlight Scotland's racism problems.

The family has now been told that it will have to make do with two private enquiries, one into the treatment of the Chhokar family by the police and the criminal justice system, the other into the handling of the two criminal trials. Imran Khan and Michael Mansfield are helping the family to launch a campaign for a full public enquiry to be launched.

These two cases each have obvious implications in the wake of the Macpherson report, and strongly suggest that the problems uncovered by it of "institutional racism" have not been dealt with at all. The murder at Feltham and the killing in Gowkthrapple, and the secrecy with which the mistakes surrounding the two cases have been investigated, both stink of cover-up. As Mr Khan says himself: "The problem has not been the report itself, but the failure of the police in implementing the recommendations."

The Chhokar case has been dubbed "the Scottish Lawrence case". Campaigners present a compelling case when they list the similarities. Both men were attacked by a group of white men in a white area. In both cases, claims that there was a racist motive for the attack were dismissed by police. Police and prosecutors failed at every level to keep the dead man's family informed.

Perhaps the Chhokar case will also, eventually, win its own public inquiry. What a tragedy it would be if, within less than a couple of years of the report being published, it too was being rubbished in the name of party politics, just at a time when it was becoming abundantly clear that, in actual fact, its lessons have not been learned at all.

d.orr@independent.co.uk

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