Editorial»
Keeping terrorism in perspective
NOV 28 - We have to stop looking at terrorism as if it is the end of the world. It is for the people who die from it. But the rest of us have a duty to ourselves and to the equilibrium of our countries to keep it in perspective.
We can gain some clarity by putting Al Qaeda to one side for a moment. Before Osama bin Laden’s organization came on the scene and gathered speed in the late 1990’s, there was a decline in terrorist action all over the world.
In fact, the main terrorist hot spot was Sri Lanka. The Tamil Tigers, who after 20 terrifying years of civil war have now begun to negotiate, can teach us a lot. In particular, they show that the most brutal variants of terrorism can evolve for no good reason other than a peculiarly successful kind of charismatic leadership. In Sri Lanka, this came from the Tiger leader, Prabhakaran. The Tamils in neighboring India, who are also a minority, are poorer and live in a more unequal society than their kin, but have shown little desire to emulate their struggle. Indeed the Tigers do not seem to have been motivated by either religious or social issues, and as a minority they have a better status than most minorities elsewhere in Asia. One suspects that if the Sri Lankan authorities had done a better job of tracking down and apprehending the Tiger’s remarkable leader, negotiations would have come about long ago.
We can also learn from modern history that terrorist movements, like many other human endeavors, enjoy success for a while and then can wither rather quickly away. Sometimes this is because of sophisticated negotiations leading to subtle compromises - as with the IRA and Britain; or Libya with Britain, France and the United States; and indeed with the Palestinian terrorists of the 1980’s, who massacred athletes and blew up planes. Sometimes success comes about through police work, as with the Baader-Meinhof gang of West Germany. Sometimes, it is because repression works - as with many of the military regimes in Latin America in the 1970’s and 80’s, though at great cost to the well-being of society.
We should also realize that it is not enough to explain terrorism in terms of poverty, lack of opportunity or even ethnic and religious strife. We should look at where terrorism does not occur - the 240 million “untouchables” in India, for example, who have every reason to rebel, have never engaged in terrorism.
In Europe, while the Catholics of Ulster, the Basques of Spain and the Chechens of Russia have taken to terrorism, there are many minorities whose causes are similar, yet who never have.
Which brings us to Al Qaeda. Yes, most of today’s worst terrorism is led by angry Muslims. But while there is some truth in the notion of the “clash of civilizations,” it is not the whole of it. Many reasons have been given, from poverty to Palestinian rights to religious fervor. Yet without the incubation of the mujahedeen resistance to the Soviet occupation in Afghanistan, aided and abetted in crucial ways by the CIA and the Saudi and Pakistani intelligence services, these freelance terrorists would never have built up the confidence, the knowledge, the discipline and the expertise to embark on a worldwide jihad.
One of the most remarkable of contemporary developments is the decline of terrorism in Muslim Egypt even though the problems in society have not much changed. There is no doubt the much of the inspiration for Al Qaeda came from Egyptian writers and the organizational prowess of the Muslim Brotherhood. Yet at the very time that Al Qaeda was growing, terrorism in Egypt, after a long and bitter struggle that took the lives of thousands of innocents and of President Anwar Sadat, came to an end in 1999. Last year the imprisoned leaders of the Gamaa, as the terrorist movement was called, published a sensational series of books in which they argued that their actions had not been in accordance with Muslim law and said they had forbidden their members to join Al Qaeda. Al Qaeda is the most virulent terrorist virus the world has ever known. Yet to date, apart from Sept. 11, 2001, the fatalities it has caused are less than that of the Tamil Tigers or the Gamaa in their heyday. There is no reason why a combination of sophisticated politics and clever policing cannot make a lot of progress in defeating it. We don’t have to initiate more wars or sacrifice our standards of justice to combat it.Posted on: 2003-11-27 10:41
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