Ways of seeing

By C. Rammanohar Reddy

CAPITALISM IS all powerful. Yet, a few dozen terrorists armed with nothing of consequence can cause human and economic mayhem in the world's biggest financial centre by commandeering four aircraft and ramming two of them into buildings that are a symbol of globalisation. Is this a case of the marginalised getting their revenge against capitalism - even if an insane and cruel manner? In symbol and substance, the events of the past week have been so enormous that for now neither the questions nor the answers can go beyond the trite. One can only venture to offer ways of seeing what has happened and speculate on where the world could go from here.

So far people everwhere other than in North America but especially in the developing countries have had to live in the shadow of state or individual terrorism: Northern Ireland, Spain, Sudan, Egypt, Iraq, Palestine, Israel, India, Philippines and many more. The U.S. was lucky in this respect though it has had its regular experiences of disturbed adolescents and adults spraying bullets on people. But after the World Trade Center, the U.S. too has been brought under the deadly blanket of individual and group terrorism. When the list of missing people in New York (and Washington) is completed, this will likely become the biggest act of individual terrorism that has ever been committed in history. No single event of individual terrorism that has ever happened in London, Madrid, Gaza, Tel Aviv, Nairobi, Srinagar or anywhere else has caused so much human tragedy as the fireballs in the twin towers of the World Trade Center.

There are two roads from here. One is to see all this just as a question of individual terrorism that should be dealt with accordingly. A global war against terrorism has now been talked about. But a techno-military-intelligence approach by the world's most powerful country armed with the most sophisticated technology did not prevent the most horrifying event of individual terrorism. A war against terrorism with the traditional instruments of surveillance, pre-emptive strikes, kidnappings and the like has never fully worked anywhere. There is no reason why it will work now however much money, technology and skills are poured into technological eavesdropping, counter- terrorism and the bombing of presumed homes of terrorism. There will also be the higher expenditure on instruments of prevention and defence, which of course will not prevent terrorism. (Incidentally, the ease with which the terrorists were able to strike New York and Washington demonstrates the futility of the U.S.' grand plans for a National Missile Defence, which India has been so eager to endorse.) Counter-terrorism also treates monsters like Osama bin Laden, who is after all a creation of the CIA's anti-Soviet strategy in Afghanistan. All this will only lead to a cycle of destruction for, as the world saw on television on September 11, it only takes a few handful of men who are driven by insane notions of revenge to strike at concentrations of civilian populations. And there are human costs associated with a pure counter-terrorism approach - in the form of an infringement of civil liberties, arbitrary arrests and closer surveillance of daily life.

The other element and natural corollary of such an approach will be the global demonisation of Islam and the stereotyping of all terrorists as possessed members of the Islamic world, since it now seems certain that September 11 was the handiwork of terrorists from the Islamic world. Many - including unfortunately a fair number of people in India - will be quite pleased with tarring Islam with such a brush. But that would only replace individual terrorism by mass intolerance.

The other route is trying to understand why groups of individuals can be driven to such desperation that they can conduct the cruellest of acts on people who are not even remotely associated with acts of violence. The more difficult task then will be for societies and Governments to grapple with the political, social and economic currents that provide the breeding ground for individual/group terrorism. Prosaic as this sounds, this is the only long-term solution for every single act of terrorism, whether it arises from strife in northern Ireland, the Basque separatism, Israeli terror and Palestinian counter-terrorism or from our own current experiences in Kashmir.

Consider the ferment in Islamic west and south-west Asia stretching from Palestine to Afghanistan. For people of these countries, U.S. military intervention, directly or through proxy regimes, has been a fact of life for decades. But the western world refused to see the anger seething in the area. Insane and horrifying as the events of September 11 were, this likely finally found its expression in the savage attacks of last Tuesday. The mood in the region is perhaps best described in an article written for a British paper on the same day by a western journalist who has been reporting on the area for years:

``I have sat in front of bin Laden as he described how his men helped to destroy the Russian army in Afghanistan and thus the Soviet Union. Their boundless confidence allowed them to declare war on America. But this is not the war of democracy vs. terror that the world will be asked to believe in... It is also about American missiles smashing into Palestinian homes and U.S. helicopters firing missiles into a Lebanese ambulance in 1996 and American shells crashing into a village called Qana a few days later and about a Lebanese militia - paid and uniformed by America's Israeli ally - hacking and raping and murdering their way through refugee camps. No, there is no doubting the utter, indescribable evil of what has happened in the United States... Ask an Arab how he responds to 20 or 30 thousand innocent deaths and he or she will respond as good and decent people should, that it is an unspeakable crime. But they will ask why we did not use such words about the sanctions that have destroyed the lives of perhaps half a million children in Iraq, why we did not rage about the 17,500 civilians killed in Israel's 1982 invasion of Lebanon, why we allowed one nation in the Middle East to ignore U.N. Security Council resolutions but bombed and sanctioned all others who did. And those basic reasons why the Middle East caught fire last September - the Israeli occupation of Arab land, the dispossession of Palestinians, the bombardments and state sponsored executions, the Israeli tortures... all these must be obscured lest they provide the smallest fractional reason for yesterday's mass savagery.'' (The awesome cruelty of a doomed people, Robert Fisk, The Independent, September 12)

State terrorism neither justifies counter-terrorism by small groups nor can it be met by acts of savagery on innocent people. This is true of Israelis in Palestine, the Russians in Chechnya, the U.S. in Iraq or even the paramilitary forces in Kashmir. As the coming weeks will show, the terrorists who inflicted so much mayhem on the U.S. will have also caused immense harm to their own countrymen and women, most of whom are as innocent as the dead of the World Trade Center. U.S. retribution for the catastrophe of last week will eventually consume the lives of hundreds and perhaps thousands, on whose behalf the terrorists thought they were waging a war.

The cycle of terror and counter-terror will continue until its roots in political, social and economic disenfranchisement are pulled out. There is so much disenfranchisement in the world but this does not make people completely powerless. The irony is that the same process of globalisation that makes some societies thrive has also yielded technology that individuals, however disenfranchised they may be, can use with great ease to inflict suffering on a catastrophic scale. This is also self-destruction but doomed people do not mind killing themselves and their countrymen in the process.

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