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, Indias
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
Papes 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 Papes 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