Combating Terrorism: Is Democracy The Answer?

War on Terror

26 Sep 2009, NewAgeIslam.Com

Combating Terrorism: Is Democracy The Answer?

'It's a very powerful ideology — it's not just about bombings and hijackings. It is really about a thesis that once upon a time Muslims were a prosperous, creative power. They lost power and they want to regain power. All ideologies are stories of a glorious past, a miserable present, for which somebody else is responsible, and a glorious future when that person is got rid of. That story has knitted together a variety of local struggles in the Philippines, India and elsewhere.' Prof Desai said that Marx and Engels had called for the workers of the world to unite. There was, in fact, no working class but it had created the idea of the world working class and, in talking about the Umma across the world, Osama bin Laden had created the possibility that people would do things for it. -- David Watts URL of this page: http://newageislam.net/NewAgeIslamArticleDetail.aspx?ArticleID=1801 ------   Combating Terrorism: Is Democracy The Answer? By David Watts Sep 2009   Some leading luminaries express their views at a London seminar on democracy and rule of law being the correct approach to address the grievances of aggrieved communities who take to violence... or is an authoritarian regime better placed at tackling terrorism? Baroness Nicholson is all smiles as she spells her views Professor Lord Desai opened the recent forum examining the question of whether democracy and the rule of law were the best methods of fighting terrorism by declaring that they were the only way that the threat of terrorism could be countered.   With his direct and incisive style the noble lord made it clear that he was somewhat surprised that the question should be asked. He addressed an audience of fellow academics, members of the Indo-British Friendship Forum and interested parties in a House of Lords committee room in London under the sponsorship of Baroness Nicholson of Winterbourne. Other speakers included Dr Annabelle Lever, Fellow, Department of Philosophy, Logic and Scientific Method at the London School of Economics; Judge Robert Henry, Chief Judge, U.S. Court of Appeals for the Tenth Circuit; Foulath Hadid, St Antony's College, Oxford and Dr Mamoun Fandy, Senior Fellow for Gulf Security, International Institute for Strategic Studies.    Lord Desai described how terror generally grew out of the unresolved and legitimate grievances of a minority community who saw no other way of having their demands satisfied than to seize power for themselves.   Noting that there were a large number of democracies that differed from each other in many respects, he wanted to make clear that the task of catching or preventing acts of terrorism was the task of forces of security and law and order and the intelligence services. It was a task which required lots of discipline but which must be carried out within the framework of the rule of law — 'no matter how evil you may think terrorists are they have as many freedoms as anyone else…it must not be presumed that a terrorist, just because he's going to kill people, has no human rights.' Lord Desai said that terrorism had to be seen as a political programme, an ideology; a political programme to capture power. 'Power should be in the hands of the ethnicity that the terrorist represents and their legitimate grievances and claims are such that ordinary procedures should be set aside, with power ceded to the terrorist group.' Many of the terrorist incidents of the last 50 years have arisen from a grievance that a certain group thinks they deserve power and somehow they have been thwarted from achieving it for one reason or another. Often they have a national perspective and nationalist programme.   A case in point was the Tamil Tigers battle for power in Sri Lanka which ended, perhaps temporarily, recently after a bitter 28-year struggle. 'Their grievances arose out of a subversion of the Sri Lankan constitution by the powers that be when they decided that the constitution had to be majoritarian rather than looking after the interests of minorities,' said Prof Desai. 'They (the terrorists) felt that they had exhausted all other democratic forms of protest and they had no alternative but to resort to violent means.' Northern Ireland presented a similar picture: while the Catholics in the north wanted to join with the south; the Protestants did not want to reconcile — the majority denied the human rights and legitimate claims to the minority so we had a 300-year civil war which erupted into the 1968-1998 conflict in both Northern Ireland and the mainland. Prof Desai noted that India had suffered with the class struggle of the naxalites and various sub-national conflicts, such as that in Nagaland, in which the complainants had not 'signed up to the British Empire.' India had largely succeeded in solving these conflicts in much the same way that Northern Ireland had been solved — through force and conciliation — and largely under the rule of law.   'If the grievances of the terrorists are about a share in power then those legitimate claims have to be judged in the context of a democratic framework and then we have to ask ourselves how to deal with the specific conditions… some consensual democracy will help to counter terrorism because violence alone, no matter how severe, does not make the problem go away because the ideas lives on. 'Terrorism is a way of looking at the world, an ideology… because ideology is very powerful it is not possible to find a forced solution to the problem of terrorism and I'm sure that in Sri Lanka there will have to be the next phase of reconciliation of Tamil interests, so that the interests of the minority are reconciled with the majority,' said Prof Desai.   In Northern Ireland the key was that each community within itself agreed to a consensual solution and that sort of approach would probably help solve the Sri Lanka problem brought about by the government's change of the constitution in 1956, which brought disadvantage to the minority community. 'To have a permanent solution you have to consult each community separately and arrive at a solution which gives both the communities' legitimate concerns a way of being expressed and a solution is arrived at by a majority in each community,' he said. In newly independent countries where the force of nationalism is strong care must be taken to ensure that democracy does not legitimise the oppression of the minority. 'Time has a way of solving terrorism through democracy and the rule of law.' Islamic terror was a force which transcends national boundaries but it was, once again, based on a series of legitimate grievances starting from the Balfour Declaration, which laid the foundation for the state of Israel and the Anglo-French Sykes-Picot Agreement, which arbitrarily delineated the boundaries of countries in the Middle East both of which Islam could blame on the West.   'It's a very powerful ideology — it's not just about bombings and hijackings. It is really about a thesis that once upon a time Muslims were a prosperous, creative power. They lost power and they want to regain power. All ideologies are stories of a glorious past, a miserable present, for which somebody else is responsible, and a glorious future when that person is got rid of. That story has knitted together a variety of local struggles in the Philippines, India and elsewhere.' Prof Desai said that Marx and Engels had called for the workers of the world to unite. There was, in fact, no working class but it had created the idea of the world working class and, in talking about the Umma across the world, Osama bin Laden had created the possibility that people would do things for it.   He said that seeing poverty as a root cause of terrorism was a blind alley: 'People don't kill for material reasons, they kill for entirely ideological reasons; people kill perfect strangers because they think that stranger doesn't belong to their religion; they don't know him; they don't know anything about him and they don't care. They think they are serving a higher cause. 'People go through incredible suffering, indeed the whole notion of the suicide bomber is the highest sacrifice you can give to a cause; the fact that somebody could become a suicide bomber shows how powerful an ideology can be.   'Yes, you may have a grievance but the way to alleviate is through a process where power will be shared by you and by me along laid-down procedural lines which we both agree to abide by. If one can convince the adversary that that is the path through which their aspirations could be realised that could be a start.' A lot of people, he said, believed an authoritarian regime is better at tackling terrorism but that presumes that the authoritarian regime respects the will of the people. For example, in the recent unrest in Urumqi in north-west China where the communist party of China believes that it represents the single nationalism of the Han Chinese but 10 percent will disagree that the 90 per cent can arrest the protesters.   'People will not tolerate oppression unless they have agreed, by the rule of law, to accept such laws… Only democracy can set up a structure where everybody can be listened to. We give them a platform and then there is a procedure whereby we can address their grievance and get a foothold in the tent in which power is shared. Dr Lever questioned the exceptionalism of terrorism, whether it was genuinely a greater blight on society rather than other forms of violent crime such as rape and whether, therefore, efforts to combat it should necessarily have to be conducted out of public view.   The degree of exceptionalism was likely to depend on what terrorism was compared to and then it was likely that it would be discovered that its exceptionalism was a matter of degree rather than kind. It was an eye-opener to be told that crime was all about the capture of criminals rather than the prevention of crime — 'I had assumed naively that prevention is to be preferred to redress.' Rape and other crimes destroyed people's lives and societies just as surely as terrorism. She said she was not persuaded that there was a categorical difference between terrorist crime and other evils if one considered the nature of the phenomenon or the tactics used to prevent or punish. Nor were the causes and remedies for terrorism invariably exceptional although crime is often spontaneous and therefore hard to prevent though obviously much of it was complex and pre-planned involving organisations and cooperation to do with drugs, weapons and people.   A democratic approach to terrorism might need to consider how our approach to crime and terrorism fosters rather than inhibits violence. Crime prevention, she said, could exacerbate already deep problems of crime and violence thereby fostering feelings of marginalisation and feelings of bitter grievance, which lead people to see violent solutions to their problems leading to precisely the type of ideology described by Prof Desai. Terror, too, was often exacerbated by development aid — the way the West proffered the assistance often served to discredit the giver not terrorism. The reason was simple: the recipients of the aid were well aware that such aid was not altruistic. She concluded: 'So terror is not exceptional — it is not removed from everyday networks of power, injustice and opportunity.' Dr Lever also warned against the rapid erosion of freedoms that the hunt for terrorists engendered. There was a need for greater openness on the part of government on the policies surrounding terrorism and measures to combat it: there was a need to discuss counter-terrorism policy with the same degree of openness as health or education. Likewise it was very difficult for citizens to enter into the debate on the advisability of using wiretap evidence unless they had access to such evidence.   'Until we have an open, adult debate on counter-terrorism we can expect young men and women as well as middle-aged politicians and journalists to be easily manipulated by the fanatical, the ambitious, the rich, the powerful and the corrupt.' Mr Hadid said that the popular image of terrorism was that of the suicide bomber about to throw a bomb into a crowd but the reality was very different. 'The Middle East political landscape is one where state terrorism as well as the home-grown kind has been inflicted on a populace which has capitulated and no longer cries for freedom, democracy and the rule of law.' The example of American soldiers kicking in the doors of Iraqi homes     and terrorising entire families leaves    far deeper wounds than those perpetrated by Iraqi or even Palestinian terrorists, he said. 'The American invasion of Iraq will emerge as one of the worst examples of state terrorism in history.' It was now clear that the U.S. had gone to war in Iraq with an announced policy that was essentially window-dressing for a plan forged without public support. It was an appalling situation when author Richard Haas could write that he would go to his grave not knowing how President Bush had reached his decision to go to war.   Mr Hadid said that his message was simple: there is no democracy or rule of law in the Middle East. 'Genuinely democratic movements have never been allowed to make the vital leap from opposition to government.' The most recent example was the FIS (Islamic Salvation Front) in Algeria which won elections in 1991 only to see them annulled by the junta. 'So it is pointless to ask how democracy and the rule of law can neutralise terrorism when it doesn't exist and when the population believe suicide bombers are not terrorists but freedom fighters. A poll shows that if Osama bin Laden ran for election in Saudi Arabia he would win by a vast plurality. 'It is indeed a sad day for the Arabs to hang their hopes on such desperados when they could be led by leaders of the calibre of Nelson Mandela who exist but are persistently not allowed to emerge. 'Everywhere today democracy is proving contagious except in the Arab world while the rest of the developing world is making huge strides… The Arab world is mired in violence, election fraud, an absence of civil liberties and an appalling human rights record.' In Iraq, America could not simply walk away. 'The American war has set back the course of democracy because in the eyes of the citizenry, democracy has become associated with discord,' he concluded. Source: http://asianaffairs.in/september2009/combating-terrorism.html URL of this page: http://newageislam.net/NewAgeIslamArticleDetail.aspx?ArticleID=1801