TERRORISM, terrorism, terrorism. The word reverberated around the committee B auditorium of the Bandaranaike Memorial International Conference Hall for three days last week with experts expressing views on how best the world could deal a crushing blow to this menacing phenomenon facing the 21st century.
In the process, as usual, the experts who gathered in Colombo for the International Conference on Countering Terrorism seemed to have missed the wood for the trees. That terrorism does not operate in a vacuum was lost on the experts.
Behind what is generally identified as terrorism is always a political problem. Some experts acknowledged it but only when they talked about the type of terrorism countries like Sri Lanka face – not when they spoke about the West’s war on terror.
All in all, the focus remained on counter-measures by military and legal means. It was largely left to the audience to raise questions of political aspects and root causes of terrorism.
The tone of the conference underscored the Marxist notion that the state is an instrument of oppression with speaker after speaker expressing concern about the challenge to its survival and not about the people who have become victims of state terror.
Judge Jean-Louis Bruguiere, chairman of the French Anti-Terrorist Judges, for instance, said that even at the cost of individual freedom, terrorism had to be eliminated.
“...the combat against terrorism has to be led resolutely, without any weakness or concession; even if it means carrying out measured infringements of individual freedoms if required by circumstances.”
Was the judge approving the Guantanamo Bay, Abu Ghraib, the outsourcing of torture and legislation that deny freedom and privacy?
Groups that resist the oppressive nature of the state turn to violence as a last resort — call it terrorism — when the space for obtaining justice is denied to them. Yet states call themselves democracies. But in a true democracy, there is no place for oppression. A true or ideal democracy is not only founded on popular will but also on justice. The majority can have their way, but the minority must have their say. Besides, there is no international mechanism by which aggrieved groups could obtain justice when they do not find justice in countries they live.
Terrorism is a byproduct of the state’s failure to uphold justice, respect minority views –in certain cases the majority view, too —and be truly democratic.
If Sri Lanka had been a truly democratic country where minority grievances could have been addressed in a just manner, we would not be facing the menace of terrorism today. The policies of successive governments in the post-Independence Sri Lanka made the minority Tamil community feel that they were being discriminated on grounds of race and language. The more the state asserted a Sinhala identity instead of an all-embracing Sri Lankan identity, the more intense the question of the Tamil problem became.
If only our governments had tried to address Tamil grievances in a democratic and just way, instead of sending the army to the north and the east, Sri Lanka would have been a true paradise isle as the country’s tourism brochures even in the midst of a self-destructive war still claim it to be.
But the government, which co-hosted the conference together with the Lakshman Kadirgamar Institute for International Relations, was in no mood to listen to such advice. Blowing its own trumpet, Sri Lanka told the conference that the country stood as showcase for the rest of the world to know that terrorism could be defeated by military means and development plans.
Sri Lanka’a Foreign Minister Rohitha Bogollagama said the main purpose of the conference was to share each other’s experience and strategies at a forum of world experts. But Sri Lanka was also hoping in the process to slam the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam as a ruthless terrorist organisation and get the experts to endorse its policy of solving the ethnic conflict first by military means and then by political means.
But the proceedings of conference did not go that way. Expert after expert told Sri Lanka that the Tamil question could not be solved militarily and stressed the need for a political solution. But these experts, especially those from the west, who saw Sri Lanka’s war on terrorism as one that required a political solution failed to see or recognise that the global war on terrorism was also a political problem and could be solved by political means.
I am not advising a dialogue or peace negotiations with Al Qaeda. But a political solution to international terrorism can be achieved by democratising the international system, by building a just international order, by ensuring that there is no plundering of resources of developing countries by developed countries, by allowing the Third World countries to achieve economic freedom and stand on their feet, by ending illegal military occupation of Iraq and Palestine, and, of course, the United States reforming itself and giving up its dream of empire-building at the cost of the people of West Asia and the rest of the Third World.
Hmm, the call for non-violent response to the question of terrorism often falls on deaf ears in the era of global war on terrorism, which is largely a euphemism for a global campaign to plunder other people’s wealth and resources.
Be that as it may. The conference was in a way a big disappointment to Sri Lanka, because it is largely the terror perpetrated by Al Qaeda and similar groups that dominated the discussions. Moves by some western experts to identify terrorism with Islam and the noble concept of jihad drew fitting responses from academics from Pakistan.
They said Islam had nothing to do with terrorism and in fact it abhorred terrorism and called on the experts not attach an Islamic label to terrorism.