Terrorism: who's to define it?

By M. Sher Khan
Dawn (Opinion)

IT WOULD be recalled that some years ago, US President Bill Clinton had declared a complete American economic and trade embargo on Iran "for sponsoring international terrorism." Significantly, the announcement came at a Jewish function, and as is too well known, the Jewish lobby carries a lot of clout in each and every sphere of activity in the US.

To his dismay, while he also called upon his European allies to join the US-imposed embargo, he found himself totally isolated when they all declined to follow suit, for two reasons - they found no convincing evidence for the US charges against Iran, and more importantly, they did not want to lose lucrative business, trade and economic opportunities in Iran.

True to form, with its bully-on-the-block approach to world problems, the US has always needed a whipping boy, a target to vent its aggression, a scapegoat, or just about any convenient target to flex its muscles and prove its virility as the sole superpower of the world. Much too frequently it has had to eat the humble pie. First it was China and the Soviet Union in the heyday of the cold war, then Fidel Castro and Ho Chi Minh, then Qadhafi, Yasser Arafat and his PLO, followed by Iran after Imam Khomeini overthrew its surrogate "policeman of the Gulf', i.e. the Shah.

Then came the turn of Saddam Hussein, the Frankenstein created by the US and the Arabs to counterbalance the "Iranian threat". Yet, when he seemed to have got out of control or too big for his boots in the American eyes, or perhaps to get a hold of the oilfields of the Middle East, he had to be taught a lesson and cut down to size. The invasion of Kuwait, and the Gulf War to "liberate" it from Saddam's possession, were engineered, during which period Iran again became a "good boy" in the eyes of the US and the Arab states in the Gulf region.

Pakistan too has been a victim of US perfidy: having served the US's purpose in driving out the Soviets from Afghanistan and the subsequent break-up of the Soviet Union, it got discarded overnight and became a target on the US hit list when it was threatened with being declared a "terrorist state" for supposedly supporting international terrorism.

Now several years later, the Indian government is beating the same old drum to have Pakistan declared a "terrorist state" in the aftermath of the recent hijacking of the Indian Airlines Airbus. Luckily, this time at least, no one is paying any heed to this ridiculous demand of the Indian leadership. Not to be forgotten is the fact that it was the same Indian leadership which, when faced with reverses in Kargil last year, had declared that Pakistani political leadership had come under the sway of a "rogue army". It was not for the first time, nor will it be the last, that Indian politicians have unsuccessfully tried to pass the blame for their internal troubles on to Pakistan.

In the convoluted mind of the West, "terrorism" has become more or less synonymous with Muslims, particularly of Arab and Iranian origin, but any other Muslim will do, irrespective of his race, colour or country of origin. Recall how immediately after the Oklahoma bombing a few years ago, the first reaction in the US was that it was the work of some Arabs. To their utter dismay, it turned out that the bombing was the handiwork of a White Caucasian, American-born native.

Then again, the finger of accusation for the sarin and cyanide gas attacks in Tokyo subways a few years ago was immediately pointed at Muslim "fundamentalists"; it was then discovered to be the work of some crazy sects of Japanese origin, and no Muslim of any nationality was even remotely involved.

In his excellent book, "The Arabs", David Lamb, a US reporter who spent several years in the Middle East, has carried out an in-depth study of terrorism. Some excerpts:

"Terrorism, which derives from a Greek word meaning 'to tremble' is virtually as old as civilization itself and is by no means unique to the Middle East. State-sponsored terrorism is also an old weapon (of European, not Arab, origin), dating in its present form back to 1793-94, when in the midst of the French Revolution, as the English statesman Edmund Burke wrote 'thousands of those hell hounds called terrorists were turned loose by the state against the populace'. Burke went on to remind people that such evil succeeds only when good men do nothing." (Page 84)

"More recently, when British rule was coming to an end in Palestine, both the Arabs and the Jews practised terrorism against one another and against the British. Jewish terrorists killed 338 British citizens in Palestine during the 1940s. They blew up the King David Hotel, the British headquarters in Jerusalem, in 1946, killing ninety-one persons, and perfected the lethal letter bomb, which later became a favourite weapon of Arab terrorists.

"I have in my files a photostat of a WANTED poster issued by the British colonial authorities about 1943. It shows the mug-shots of ten men hunted as terrorists, pictured in alphabetical order; the first is that of a Polish clerk whose 'peculiarities' are listed as "wears spectacles, flat footed, bad teeth." His name was Menachem Begin, and he and his colleague, Yitzhak Shamir, also a suspected terrorist, were to become future prime ministers of Israel. Begin would also become a winner of the Nobel Peace Prize, sharing the award in 1978 with President Sadat.

"In the Middle East the boundaries of respectability are not clearly defined; today's terrorist is tomorrow's statesman; one man's freedom fighter is another man's common criminal. By the 1970s Begin and Shamir were accusing Yasser Arafat of being a terrorist, although all three men had used the same murderous tactics in their nationalistic fight for the same piece of real estate.

"The important point here, I think, is that the Arabs don't have a patent on terrorism, and the major reason why the world doesn't take a united stand against this scourge is that many people disagree on what constitutes an act of indiscriminate political violence. When the United States shells Muslim villages near Beirut or bombs Libyan terrorist targets, killing civilians in the process, Washington may view the act as one of retribution, but those on the receiving end surely consider it terrorism.

"Israeli air raids that kill innocents in Palestinian villages may be carried out in self-defence, but to the recipients - indeed to the Arabs as a whole - that is just an euphemism for terrorism. Why, they ask, is violence condoned as justified when undertaken by one group and condemned as uncivilized barbarity when committed by another? Terrorism executed at thirty thousand feet may be impersonal, but surely it's just as deadly as an assassin's bullet fired from a speeding car." (Page 85)

Further on he states: "If history teaches any lessons, it might be worth remembering that President George Washington, in his 1796 farewell address, warned against doing precisely what the United States has done in the Middle east. He admonished the young republic to be neutral and to "observe good faith and justice toward all nations", cultivating peace and harmony with each. The United States, he said, should avoid permanent inveterate antipathies towards some nations and passionate attachments to others. "Such attachments", he went on, "engender a variety of evils and lead to the illusion of an imaginary common interest in case where no real common interest exists, and by infusing into one the enmities of the other betrays the former into a participation in the quarrels of the latter, without adequate inducement or justification." (Page 94)

"At some point American leaders are going to have to ask themselves why there is terrorism. What makes a normal teenager pick up a weapon and be willing to die? How can one people's nationalism be admirable and another's unfathomable? When does the exercise of self-defence become an infringement on the rights of others who also want to live within secure borders? (Page 95)

It seems that David Lamb has correctly identified the crux of the Arab, Iranian and Muslim problem right in the introduction to his book:

"I spent my final three months in Washington hounding every expert on the Middle East I could find. I dropped into a shabby office the Palestinians had set up and made an appointment for the following Tuesday with the head of the delegation. He never showed up, and his assistant sidestepped the one question I put to him, "With so much money in the Arab world, why are the Palestinians still living in refugee camps?" He promised to reschedule my meeting with his boss, but my subsequent phone calls never got returned.

"I drove across town to the new Israeli embassy, where the ambassador, military attache and political counsellor spent three hours briefing me and let me go only because I ran out of questions. Public relations, I was to learn, was a concept the Israelis understood and the Arabs didn't, and during my tour of the Middle East I was constantly struck by the Arabs' inability to present to the world a favourable or accurate image of either themselves or their causes. They complained that no one understood them but did little to make themselves understood. As the Sultan of Oman told me, "In many ways we are our own worst enemies." (Page x, Introduction)

The western world, and the US in particular, need to do some hard thinking about the reasons why people and nations are driven to resort to "terrorism".

In most instances, these are final acts of desperation, of drawing the world's attention to past and present neglect and injustices, against continued brutality, repression, a cry in the wilderness of a world driven by self-interest, a desperate attempt to be heard.

What we are seeing in Kashmir is just another example of a once peaceful people finally driven to resort to armed conflict to gain their legitimate rights so long denied to them. The Muslim world, on the other hand, would also do well to learn the importance of public relations, and media manipulation and projection, if it is to make itself heard in today's global village and the communication age, in which sometimes perception is even more important than substance or a just cause alone.