THE siege on December 15th in the Lindt Chocolate Café in Martin Place, in the heart of Sydney’s business district, was the first terrorist act in Australia based on a political message about Islam. The morning had started with regulars queuing for coffee on their way to work. Shortly before 10am the doors were locked from the inside. For the next 16 hours, a gunman held 17 staff and customers hostage, forcing them to display a black flag with an Islamic creed against the window. Some but not all managed to slip out. In the early hours of the following morning, police stormed the café, apparently responding to shots inside. In a heavy exchange of gunfire, the gunman and two hostages died. For some time Australian authorities have warned of a possible terrorist event. Islam has been a fast-growing religion. The number of Muslims in the country grew by two-thirds in the decade to 2011. Muslims now account for just over 2% of the country’s population of 23m, many of them in the outer suburbs of Sydney and Melbourne. In a recent speech to journalists David Irvine, a former head of the Australian Security Intelligence Organisation (ASIO), the country’s domestic spy agency, insisted that violent extremists comprise a tiny minority—“a few hundred aberrant souls”.
ASIO and police, he claimed, have thwarted plans for “a number of mass-casualty attacks on our soil”. But his “recurring nightmare” had always been an attack by a “lone wolf”: someone who had failed to come “across our radar”. As it happened, the gunman in the Sydney siege was well-known to the authorities—who nevertheless underestimated his danger to society. Man Haron Monis, aged 50, was born in Iran and moved to Australia after receiving political asylum more than a decade ago. Via a website, Mr Monis had recently announced his conversion from Shia to Sunni Islam. Greg Barton, a terrorism expert at Monash University in Melbourne, believes Mr Monis was attracted by the way Islamic State (IS), the jihadist group in Iraq and Syria, encourages lone-wolf attacks against Westerners. But he doubts that IS would have recruited such a lost, disturbed individual. Mr Monis was facing charges of sexual and indecent assault, and of being an accessory to the murder of his former wife last year, for which he was out on bail. He had also been convicted of sending offensive letters to the families of Australian soldiers who had died in Afghanistan; a few days before the siege Australia’s High Court had refused his bid to appeal against the conviction. For many Australians absorbing the shock of the siege, questions may centre less on Mr Monis’s jihadism and more on how he was out on bail for his various charges, as well as how he had access to weapons. The prime minister,
Tony Abbott, says it will take time to find out exactly what happened at Martin Place, and why. Political debate is certain to be stirred about tough anti-terror laws that the conservative coalition government has passed, as well as about its hard approach towards asylum-seekers making for Australia by boat. The anti-terror laws expand ASIO’s powers, including its ability to demand access to computers, while journalists disclosing intelligence operations face up to ten years in prison. Constitutional and human-rights lawyers are uneasy over the laws. Others will question the impact of the siege on disaffected young Muslims, some of whom may see themselves as targets of the tougher security laws. But with Mr Monis’s refugee background, the Sydney siege is also likely to entrench some Australians in their views that asylum policy is bound up with security. ASIO has identified about 60 Australians fighting with IS and Jabhat-al-Nusra, another extremist group, in Iraq and Syria; another 100 people in Australia are said to be supporting them and recruiting new fighters. Whether by a lone wolf or not, another attack in broad daylight is now a new worry for Sydneysiders.
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