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Al-Ahram Weekly 22 - 28 July 1999 Issue No. 439 
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Published in Cairo by AL-AHRAM established in 1875 |
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Al-Ahram Weekly 22 - 28 July 1999 Issue No. 439
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| Published in Cairo by AL-AHRAM established in 1875 |
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Egypt Region International Economy Opinion Culture Profile Features Focus Interview Travel Living Sports Time Out Chronicles People Cartoons Letters Defining terrorism
By Mohamed Sid-Ahmed
At the African summit held in Algiers a few days ago, President Mubarak called for a world summit on terrorism. A conference committed to combating terrorism could well succeed in drawing up a concerted plan of action to confront this modern scourge, but unless it addresses the problem from a political as well as a security perspective, terrorism is here to stay. The fight against terrorism as a mode of political expression is a political issue before being a technical one, and will entail more than police measures, gathering information on terrorist groups, pooling resources with Interpol, or imposing specific disciplinary measures.
Moreover, terrorism is not just a transient aberration, but a basic feature of the present world 'order'. It is organically linked to the process of globalisation, which purports to bringing people closer together but which, in a world where two hundred billionaires are richer than 40 per cent of the world's population, seems to be doing just the opposite. Today we are faced with a new form of bi-polarity very different from the one which marked the cold war era.
In the previous bipolar game, the two poles -- capitalism and communism -- were assumed to enjoy some form of parity. Although they stood at ideological antipodes, each believed that it stood for righteousness and historical legitimacy, in other words, that it represented the movement of history. The administration of a world order based on a dichotomy made up of two mutually exclusive ideologies, two legitimacies, entailed finding a formula for co-existence, which in turn entailed a mutual decision to adhere to a system of checks and balances acceptable to both. That system was the veto system as enshrined in the UN Charter. It was designed to avoid war and, more generally, violence, by ensuring that no political move on the international stage would become valid and legal if it came up against the veto of any of the great powers, regarded as the custodians of this bipolar world order.
Since the collapse of the Soviet Union, the global game is no longer what it was. World order is now represented by one pole under US supremacy. The other pole is an outcast lying outside world order and global legitimacy. Contrary to the situation that prevailed under the previous bipolar game, this second pole does not claim to enjoy any legal status in the present world order. As such, it is not bound by the constraints of the veto system, which under the previous bipolar setup served as an effective safety valve to prevent matters getting out of hand. The veto system is helpless against the growing phenomenon of random violence and terrorism sweeping the world.
Political terrorism is an idiom of despair, the last resort of those with nothing to lose, those who feel they have been deprived of their humanity, of people who are convinced that, no matter what they do, they are in a losing race with death, be it from hunger, thirst, pollution, incurable diseases like AIDS, now even from genetically enhanced food. At the same time, they see new vistas for ever more prosperous and meaningful lives opening up before others. So wide is the chasm between the haves and have-nots in the world of today that the latter feel they have nothing in common with the former, not even a shared humanity. Once this sense of alienation takes hold, the indiscriminate killing of the Other can appear as a way of evening the score.
It is enough to look at any news publication to realise the extent to which terrorism has become an everyday feature of our life. A number of signs indicate that a 'terrorist international' has come into being, describing itself as Islamic Jihad and extending eastwards to the confrontation line in Kashmir between Pakistan and India, and westwards to prominent cities in Europe and America, via Afghanistan, Bosnia, Kosovo, East Africa and Algeria, to mention only a few landmarks. The acts of terrorism allegedly perpetrated by the Kosovo Liberation Army was the pretext used by Milosevic to launch a systematic campaign of ethnic cleansing against the Albanian Kosovars, whose magnitude was revealed by the recent discovery of a hundred or so collective graves in various parts of Kosovo. The Jihad International has become so powerful that it has succeeded in stalling the Middle East peace process each time a turning point seemed to be at hand. The main difficulty facing the release of Palestinian prisoners from Israeli detention camps in accordance with the Oslo agreements is Israel's claim that many among them are terrorists. It should not be forgotten, however, that prominent figures in the Israeli-Palestinian confrontation have been notorious terrorists at one time or another. Everybody knows that Menahem Begin and Itzhak Shamir led the Irgun and Stern terrorist organisations, while Israel accuses the PLO of having been a terrorist organisation.
Turkey has condemned Abdullah Ocalan to death as a terrorist. In the eyes of the Turkish Kurds and much of the civilised world, he is a Kurdish hero. If the Turkish government commutes his sentence, Ocalan could play a key role in bringing about a reconciliation between the Kurdish and Turkish communities in Turkey.
A basic criterion of the present world order is whether a state is regarded as fighting terrorism or conniving with it. The US has compiled a list of 'rogue' states which it denounces as the accomplices of terrorist groups. These comprise Serbia, Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya (notwithstanding Britain's recent reconciliation with Gaddafi), even Syria (despite its status as a partner in the Middle East peace process).
In my article published two weeks ago on restructuring the UN, I mentioned that the Security Council veto should not be the prerogative of only a number of powerful states. Terrorism is an implicit veto emanating from the bottom of the world community, from the downtrodden for whom the discrepancies in our world are beyond endurance. When injustice reaches a critical threshold, violence becomes likely. The key question is how to make that implicit veto explicit and operational, which would presuppose that it operate within the sphere of legitimacy, not outside its boundaries? How to prevent barbarity from becoming the remedy for the basic flaws in our civilised world order?
It seems that the flaws in the UN system are organically linked to the flaws in world order. Everybody admits that the flaws in world order, including the UN system, are greatly responsible for the propagation of terrorism. What is not acknowledged is that without a basic restructuring of the world order, particularly of the UN, terrorism will not go away.
Former UN Secretary-General Boutros Ghali came forward with the idea of preventive diplomacy. Can that be the solution? To prevent a repeat-performance of the tragedies of Bosnia and Kosovo, where total destruction seems to have been a prerequisite for reconstruction, a Marshall Plan for the Balkans has been proposed. But a similar idea was proposed to the Palestinians after Oslo and, so far, the proposal has not materialised. If anything, living standards in Gaza have deteriorated after Oslo rather than the opposite. Along the same lines, much has been promised concerning cancelling the debt of the poorest countries. Here again, the debate has been more demagogical than effective. The recent resolution of the G-7 to cancel the debts of the poorest countries is closer to a bluff than to a genuine reduction.
With the creation of the UN, the International Court of Justice was created. Among its prerogatives is to put on trial war criminals and perpetrators of crimes against humanity. Is there no reasons to expand the jurisdiction of this court, or of any similar institution, to include the power to intervene preventively whenever needed? That would mean providing it with veto powers against acts that can be characterised as crimes against humanity. Would not the creation of a mechanism to implement this idea be of considerable help in the fight against terrorism?
