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Understanding Suicide Attacks

By Subhash Gatade

22 July, 2005
Countercurrents.org

‘Over the years, I also learned that in the world of mass media, "truth" is not based on clarity, but on frequency. Repeated hypotheses or suspicions become truth; a three-time-repeated assumption imperceptibly becomes a fact. … When I ask about the source of this information, the response is: this is well known, check the internet. A closer examination reveals that what we have is journalists or intellectuals repeating and reporting what others said yesterday with caveats. Strange truth indeed!’
- Tariq Ramadan, a progressive Muslim scholar

If religion did not motivate them, then what did? The answer was given by five Muslim youth interviewed last Wednesday by the BBC at Leeds. "You have come to ask us how we feel when 50 people have died in London," said one young man just out of his teens. "This should never have happened, but why did you not come to us when thousands of Afghans were being killed and a hundred thousand Iraqis died?"
- Prem Shankar Jha, Outlook, 25 July 2005

A clearcut definition of ‘terrorism’ still eludes us. Can one say that it changes with time and changing power equations. Edward Said, the radical Palestinian American scholar-activist, while debating the Palestinian question had explained this dilemma in a beautiful manner. Contrasting with the present day Palestinian experience where the militants are characterised as ‘terrorist’ by the Zionist regime, he wrote that in the late 20s or early 30s the then Jewish militants who were fighting for a independent Israel were similarly characterised as ‘terrorists’ by the British government.

Ofcourse a workable understanding of ‘terrorism’ is ‘Systematic violence in the furtherance of political aims, often by small guerilla groups’. But any sane person can see that this very definition gives primacy to ‘non state actors’ vis-à-vis ‘state actors’.

Interestingly post 9/11 developments have further complicated the whole debate. Thanks to the dominance of the US regime in world affairs, debate has proceeded in such a manner, that it has acquired antiIslamic overtones. The alleged involvement of Al Queda in the 9/11 attack has evolved into a well spun mythology about the spread of radical Islamic groups the world over ready to explode an IED anywhere or ready to explode themselves in any corner of the world. One can see for oneself that the rightwing orientated media managers and bosses readily joined this ‘war on terror’ and have insidiously transformed the term 'terrorism' with Islam and therefore, the perpetrators (terrorists) are Muslims. Commenting on this overt Islambashing Yamin Zakaria rigthly puts it (Deciphering Terrorism)‘..It seems that 'terrorism' has been even given a date of birth i.e. 9/11.’ (www.informationclearinghouse.com)’. It is clear that not many sincere attempts are on which are ready to question the tragic symmetry of terrorism; when rulers perpetrate injustice, they invite disaster.

Ofcourse one does notice many dissenting notes to this mythology which does not try to go beyond 'terrorism as terrorism’. Two years back in his trip to India, Bulgarian President Georgi Parvanov, had tried to draw a distinction between the oft heard “terrorism is terrorism” position by indicating that there was a social side to the problem as well. It cannot be the case that young people would for the sake of it join any extremist outfit and would be motivated to sacrifice their lives. We all know that a sociological study of the alleged participants in the stray terrorist incidents which occurred inside India in the aftermath of the Gujarat genocide made it clear how the genocide had played an important role in ordinary people getting motivated to do ‘unbelievable acts’. Definitely there is an urgent need to look into the phenomenon in its totality and also know the impact of this and counter violence has on the socio-political situation in the region.

A recent book ‘Dying to Win: The Strategic Logic of Suicide Terrorism’ by Robert Pape is a welcome addition to the ongoing debate which tries to put things in proper perspective. The book which has a 25 year database on suicide attacks tries to dispel the myth that "Islamic fundamentalism is the primary driver of suicide terrorism,". According to Pape, who is an associate professor of political science at the University of Chicago, nearly all suicide terrorist attacks are committed for a secular strategic goal - to compel modern democracies to withdraw military forces from territory the terrorists view as their homeland. Citing suicide terrorism campaigns from Lebanon to Israel, Chechnya and Sri Lanka, where major democracies – the United States, Israel, France, India, Russia - had been the principal targets he emphasises that ,”..presumed connection between suicide attacks and Islamic fundamentalism is misleading and could contribute to policies that worsen the situation.”

Closer home one can see that the world's most prolific militant organization is the Tamil Tigers - a secular, Hindu group in Sri Lanka which invented the "suicide belt". The killing of Rajiv Gandhi, India’s ex Prime minister at Perumbudur by a suicide bomber more than 14 years ago is a tragic reminder of the way it unfolded before us. In a recent interview to ‘American Conservative (7/11/2005) Mr Pape rightly said ‘The world leader in suicide terrorism is a group that you may not be familiar with: the Tamil Tigers in Sri Lanka... a completely secular group that draws from the Hindu families of the Tamil regions of the country. They invented the famous suicide vest for their suicide assassination of Rajiv Ghandi in May 1991. The Palestinians got the idea of the suicide vestfrom the Tamil Tigers.

The ‘Iraq experience’ also emphasises the interconnection between suppression of ‘national identity’ and the ‘emergence of the phenomenon of suicide bombers’. Iraq, can be said to be classic case of strategic terrorism. People still remember one of the first suicide attack on the US led forces came when the illegal invasion had just begun. The attack came when at a military post in South Iraq a Iraqi Shia personnel blew himself up and in the process killed more than four occupant forces. Pape makes it clear that prior to the US-led invasion in March 2003 there was "never in Iraq's history a suicide terrorist attack" but since then they had doubled every year. He also underlines that there has been a sharp escalation in violence since Iraq's new Shia-dominated cabinet was announced in late April. More than 700 Iraqis and 80 US soldiers were killed in bombings and other attacks in May, making it the deadliest month in Iraq since January. He underlines that the failure of the US regime to see suicide terrorism as a response to foreign occupation, not Islamic fundamentalism, and its continuous use of heavy combat forces to transform Muslim dominated societies would further increase the number of suicide attacks.

A vindication of Pape’s hypothesis can be had from a look at the figures provided by the National Counterterrorism Center to the State Department. It reported 625 "significant" terrorist attacks in 2004 as opposed to 175 such incidents in 2003, the highest number in two decades. The statistics didn't include attacks on American troops in Iraq, which President Bush as recently as Tuesday called "a central front in the war on terror." It has been reported that Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice's office ordered "Patterns of Global Terrorism" report eliminated because the 2004 statistics raised disturbing questions about the Bush's administration's frequent claims of progress in the war against terrorism. One can say that this is rather a vindication of what Prof Pape wants to communicate. (Bush administration eliminating 19-year-old international terrorism report, By Jonathan S. Landay, Knight Ridder Newspapers, Posted on Fri, Apr. 15, 2005).

Looking at the overall response of the western powers towards the 7/7 suicide terrorist attack in London which have singularly blamed the ‘perverted and poisonous’ doctrines of Islamic extremism or ‘their attack’ on our ‘way of life’ and the beginnings of political debate on anti-terrorism laws, deportation of foreigners, fingerprinting, and house-trained imams the prospects for Professor Pape’s hypothesis getting integrated in polity seem remote at least at the present juncture.

It is high time voices of sanity in the western world intensify pressure on the Blairs and the Bushes to undertake midcourse correction. It is high time that the ‘civilised world’ while mourning for the 50 plus innocents who died on 7/7 also gets ready to mourn the innocents who are getting killed daily on the streets of Iraq, Afghanistan or for that matter Palestine. It would be inhuman to emphasise the rotten and obsolete doctrine of ‘Hierarchies of Pain’. Planned killing of the innocents in the London tube is condemnable but why does the planned genocide of innocents in mid east is bracketed under collateral damage.

It is not for nothing that the editorial in ‘The Telegraph ( 15 July 2005) definitely no supporter of ‘Islamic extremism’ rightly cautions the powers that be “The official line that Iraq is irrelevant to the London blasts might be a dangerously deluded one to take. This is not simply a domestic crisis, however profound its impact on British civil society. Britain will have to rethink its foreign policy, and its allegiance to the United States of America. Otherwise, why should a city that organized the largest peaceful protest march against the Iraq war be singled out for violent revenge?”

Question naturally arises ‘Can London do a Madrid’ ?

Contact: Subhash Gatade,B2/51, Sector 16, Rohini,Delhi-110085 Ph: 27872835


 

 

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