The Hindu : Morality and `new terrorism'

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Saturday, Jul 12, 2003

Opinion

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Morality and `new terrorism'

By Mukund Padmanabhan

One of the defining elements of "new terrorism" as opposed to the more conventional forms is the random nature of the violence that it wreaks... It is largely unmoved by the extent of bloodshed or collateral damage.

EVER SINCE September 11, George W. Bush and Tony Blair have never tired of telling us that all forms of terrorism are equally reprehensible. They speak of terrorism as if it were a completely homogenous phenomenon that admits of no internal differences, of no moral differentiation. Such talk may be politically handy in the context of the so-called ongoing global war against terrorism. But the bald truth is that virtually everyone — including those who genuinely abhor all forms of terrorism — makes significant moral distinctions between one kind of terrorist activity and another.

Such distinctions are often reflected in the very use of language. The term `terrorism' has its origins in the French Revolution, during which it had a positive connotation, being associated with virtue and democracy. But in contemporary usage, terrorism — just as its sister expression, `extremism' — has invariably pejorative connotations. A relatively neutral term for those who use violence and intimidation for political ends is `militant.' In political usage, militancy is a morally ambiguous or ethically detached term for kinds of terrorist activity, the emotive force of the term being usually vague or indeterminate. Finally, of course, there are normatively loaded terms such as `revolutionaries' and `freedom fighters,' which have clearly positive overtones and imply that the methods used by those such labels are applied to are justified or appropriate in the circumstances.

The ethical distinctions we make, either consciously or sub-consciously, between terrorists or between forms of terrorism, are responsible for certain kinds of questions that crop up from time to time. For instance, when two films extolling Bhagat Singh were released almost simultaneously last year, at a time when the world was obsessed with Osama bin Laden, the question was asked: was Bhagat Singh not a terrorist? Did he not, just as Osama did (and probably still does), resort to violence and intimidation to achieve his ends?

Are we not victims of our own political prejudices when we acclaim Bhagat Singh or Chandrashekar Azad, on the one hand, and denigrate Osama bin Laden or Mullah Omar, on the other? Does this not imply that those who claim to abjure political violence are hypocrites who actually subscribe to it in one form or the other?

Such questions are sometimes cultivated to affect a position of total moral relativism. A position that is expressed every so often by the saying that at the end of the day one man's terrorist is another man's freedom fighter. The rescue from such extreme subjectivity, one that assumes that our moral assessment of terrorism is a result of our political prejudices and biases, is effected by two means. First, by arguing that an important basis for using different moral yardsticks to assess political violence lies in the circumstances in which such activity emerges.

Hardly anyone will deny that our attitudes to the Umkhonto We Sizwe, the military wing of the African National Congress, were shaped by the fact it was waging its battle in a political environment of officially sanctioned racism and segregation. The armed organisation, which was born in 1960 as a reaction to the Sharpeville massacres, was locked in guerrilla warfare for three decades against South Africa's apartheid regime. Conditions of occupation, apartheid, oppression, and tyranny are routinely invoked to justify, tacitly or otherwise, the recourse to political violence.

Distinctions are made between forms of political violence also on another and related basis — namely, why such violence is resorted to. The difference between freedom fighters and terrorists is invariably made on the basis of the political legitimacy of what they are fighting for. The Chairman of the Palestinian Liberation Organisation (PLO), Yasser Arafat, directly addressed this issue in his speech to the United Nations General Assembly in 1974. "The difference between the revolutionary and terrorist," he said, "lies in the reason for which each fights. For whoever stands by a just cause and fights for the freedom and liberation of his land from the invaders, the settlers and the colonialists, cannot be possibly called terrorist..." (quoted in Bruce Hoffman's Inside Terrorism, Indigo, 1999).

A thoroughgoing relativist may, of course, still maintain that assessments of just causes are subjectively determined, but that, as it were, is the nature of the beast. However, there is a third way of morally distinguishing between forms of terrorist activity — one that goes beyond either the circumstance in which such activity arises and the legitimacy or illegitimacy of its cause. This differentiation is based on the very nature of the acts of the terrorist activity itself.

One of the defining elements of "new terrorism," as opposed to the more conventional forms, is the random nature of the violence that it wreaks. It is typified by `jehadi' groups such as the Al-Qaeda and the Lakshar-e-Taiba, though, it is by no means confined to Islamic organisations. It is characterised by a Messianism as opposed to a clear political objective, it legitimises killing as an act of worship but above all, it is marked by violent acts against civilians that are totally random and indiscriminate. This kind of terrorism may be distinguished from its more conventional forms represented by such groups as the IRA, the Red Brigades or the Basque ETA.

The September 11 attack is the most widely talked about manifestation of the new terrorism but gory instances occur periodically in Jammu and Kashmir, where groups such as the LeT and the Jaish-e-Mohammed periodically target innocent and unarmed villagers, often women and children. It is no accident that there is a vast difference in the actual pattern of militant activity practised by foreign `jehadi' groups such as the LeT and the JeM, which are motivated by millenarian visions, and the indigenous Hizb-ul-Mujahideen, which functions more or less like a conventional militant group.

Every terrorist group may not neatly fit into either category (new and conventional), but generally acts of terrorism perpetrated by the latter are related to specific political purposes. The best illustration of relating act to purpose was possibly exemplified by the Narodnaya Volya, which challenged the Tsarist rule in the late 19th century. This group of Russian extremists chose its targets with extreme care and was averse to spilling any more blood than what it believed was necessary. A successor organisation was so influenced by this code that it aborted the attempt on the life of the Grand Duke, Serge Alexandrovich, in 1905. The assassins who had prepared to ambush the Duke's coach found that he was accompanied by his children and called off the act rather than risk hurting his family. Compare this with September 11 or the Lockerbie bomb blast. The new terrorism is largely unmoved by the extent of bloodshed or collateral damage.

Judging a group by its professed aims alone can be deceptive. For instance, it took the assassination of Rajiv Gandhi for many Indians to see the true nature of the LTTE, an organisation that (in the 1980s) mouthed `socialism' and professed to stand for liberating the Tamils. But the Tigers' intolerant and tyrannical nature would have been evident much earlier if more attention had been paid to what they were actually doing. In the mid-1980s, the LTTE brutally decimated other Tamil groups, including militant rivals such as PLOTE and TELO; if enough attention was not paid to this savagery, it was because people did not care to square the LTTE's actions with its professed cause or purpose.

The new terrorism, characterised as it is by random killing, is of course neither new nor exclusively Islamic. Millenarian Jewish sects used terror as a strategy to fight the Roman Empire in the first century. The so-called Thugs in India engaged in routine acts of ritual murder in the name of Kali. More recently, the sarin gas attack on the Tokyo subway system in 1995 was carried out by an obscure Japanese religious cult. In the same year, the bombing of the Oklahoma city federal office by the Christian Patriots was inspired by similar ideas of divine duty.

Not every religious terrorist group falls in the new terrorism category — the IRA, for instance, is Catholic but perceives the legitimising force for violence in relation with defined political aims. In today's context, what sets terrorism apart is the willingness to carry out extremely destructive types of terrorist operations and include just about anybody as a legitimate target.

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