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Al-Ahram Weekly 6 - 12 January 2000 Issue No. 463 
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Published in Cairo by AL-AHRAM established in 1875 |
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Al-Ahram Weekly 6 - 12 January 2000 Issue No. 463
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| Published in Cairo by AL-AHRAM established in 1875 |
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Egypt Region International Economy Opinion Culture Heritage Millennium Features Profile Living Travel Sports People Time Out Chronicles Cartoons Letters A week in the world
Grievances galore
By Gamal NkrumahNuclear powers are susceptible to terrorism, India and the United States not excluded. The hijacking of Indian Airlines flight IC814 highlighted the dangers festering conflicts pose. An aggrieved people who feel they have been treated unfairly will always produce terrorists, and we shall never know when and where they will strike. The plane, an Airbus-300, was forcibly flown to Amritsar (India), Lahore (Pakistan), Dubai (United Arab Emirates) and Kandahar (Afghanistan), where the Taliban mediated the captives' release. The southern Afghan city and Taliban stronghold of Kandahar is widely regarded as the unofficial Taliban capital. Many suspect it is also the control-centre of several terrorist organisations and their operational base.
"God willing, we shall meet again," one of the five hijackers ominously told one of the 155 hostages as they began disembarking from the hijacked plane. "See you. We will be back soon. This is only the beginning of our war against the Indian government," another passenger was told. Experts are divided as to whether the hijackers are seasoned terrorists or amateurs. One hijacker slashed the throat of Indian passenger Rupin Katyal for daring to disobey orders not to look at the hijackers.
Indian Prime Minister Atal Bihari Vajpayee publicly stated that Islamabad was behind the recent hijacking and urged the international community to brand Pakistan a terrorist state. The hijackers were allowed to drive away when, with Taliban mediation, the hijacking ended peacefully last Friday. A diplomatic row between New Delhi and Islamabad ensued. India alleged that the hijackers fled to Pakistan and remain in hiding there. Islamabad retorted that it had no idea where the hijackers could have gone and said that there is "no shred of evidence" in the Indian allegations. "The Indian government has so far given no details as to the profiles of the hijackers," a Pakistani Foreign Ministry statement said. "In the absence of such details it would be difficult to apprehend the culprits if they enter Pakistan."
Amid the crisis, and unquestionably to stoke the fires, Pakistan's military ruler General Pervez Musharraf said that Kashmir represents a "possible nuclear flashpoint". The Indians were, of course, at their wits' end. India backtracked on its traditionally uncompromising anti-terrorist stance. India freed three Kashmiri militants -- Masood Azhar, a Pakistani national who had been imprisoned in India since 1994; Ahmed Umar Saeed Sheikh, a Pakistani-born British citizen; and Mushtaq Ahmed Zargar, an Indian national from Kashmir -- and turned them over to the hijackers in exchange for the release of the hostages. Originally they had insisted on $200 million and the release of 35 Kashmiri militants and a Pakistani cleric from Indian jails. They also wanted the body of a Kashmiri cleric who was killed five years ago by the Indian authorities. The Taliban was universally acclaimed for convincing the hijackers to drop the ransom demand, arguing that it was against the teachings of Islam, as was exhuming a body and removing it from its burial ground. Preliminary analysis of investigations into the hijacking of flight IC814 seems to suggest that the hijack was monitored by a control centre which could be located anywhere in India, Pakistan or even an Arab or Western country.
But who were the hijackers? These apparently militant Islamist terrorist groups use the very terror-training manuals adapted from CIA-supplied training literature and other material left behind in Afghanistan when Washington backed anti-communist and anti-Soviet forces in the country. The identity of Azhar might provide a clue. Azhar, the Indian authorities say, belongs to Harakat-ul-Mujahideen, a shady organisation which India claims has been involved in terrorist activities in India including the kidnapping of five Westerners in 1994. India also argues that Islamabad is instrumental in instigating the new wave of terrorism against India because as Pakistan is unable to win a conventional war against India, it has resorted to waging a proxy war -- by financing and arming a "powerful section of the Indian underworld" and smuggling arms and mercenaries across the border.
What is most alarming is that terrorists move freely from one country, and one continent, to another with falsified passports and evade security checks. The hijackers might have bribed officials at Indian and Nepalese airports, we might never know -- Indian diplomats have routinely complained that security in Nepal is too lax.
Terrorists have gone global. Western anti-terrorist experts have identified between 30 and 50 militant Islamist groups that do not necessarily form a coherent terrorist network. Although these are not centrally-directed, they are indirectly connected through their fearsome anti-Western posturing and operating procedures. The Taliban supplied both hostages and hijackers with food, medicine and other provisions. They also cleaned the toilets and collected the garbage. The handling of the whole affair was universally acknowledged as a publicity coup for the Taliban. The passengers apparently passed the time playing cards, chess and other board games. On Afghan soil, they were permitted to remove their blindfolds. The Taliban, which interceded at the request of the desperate Indian government, did make political capital out of the unfortunate incident. "There is no question of us giving them asylum. We won't," said Taliban Foreign Minister Wakil Ahmed Muttawakil. "We want only for the passengers to be released and safe." Muttawakil has emerged as the real star of the sordid show. India, which restored ties with Iran in 1993, might now do so with the Taliban. New Delhi has been hostile to the Taliban regime, which controls 90 per cent of Afghanistan's territory, and recognises the Taliban's rival, the northern Afghanistan-based opposition coalition headed by ousted President Burhanuddin Rabbani as the legitimate government of Afghanistan.
The Taliban-ruled Islamic Emirates of Afghanistan is in dire straits. Denied membership of all international organisations, including the Organisation of the Islamic Conference and the United Nations, the Taliban has become an international pariah. The Taliban applied for UN membership in 1997 and again in 1998. It failed twice. Will it succeed next time round following the hijacking? US economic sanctions against the Taliban regime imposed in June 1999 were followed by UN sanctions in November 1999. Its assets abroad were frozen.
The hijacking of flight IC814 coincided with an apparently aborted terrorist bombing campaign half way across the world. US customs officials arrested an Algerian-born Canadian citizen, known as Ahmed Ressam, near Seattle after he came off a ferry from Canada. They claim his car was loaded with jars of nitroglycerin, timing devices and other bomb-making materials. Nobody has a clue who Ressam actually is. His true identity cannot be ascertained because for at least the past 15 years he has been using falsified passports and assumed names. When arrested in Seattle, Ressam was carrying a Canadian passport with the assumed name of Benni Antoine Norris. Ressam immigrated to Canada from France in 1994. His French passport bore the name Tahar Medjadi, and he promptly informed the Canadian immigration officials that his passport and birth certificate were fake. The moral of Ressam's story is that Canada, in the words of a Canadian investigator, has become a "Club Med for terrorists".
While some terrorists are welcomed in the West, economic refugees from the Third World are denied entrance. Last Monday, the US Coast Guard shoed away over 400 would-be, mainly Haitian, immigrants. Dastardly political games, with absolutely no concern for human life and dignity, are being played out on the high seas. Take the Caribbean, for instance, where immigrants from different islands are treated differently. While the US immigration authorities welcome dissident Cubans, even when they fly private jets to Cuba to drop leaflets insulting the island's President Fidel Castro, they bar Haitians entrance. Cubans, of course dissidents, are typically permitted to stay on in the United States if they reach Florida. However, under an agreement with the Haitian government, economic refugees from the island who are grounded ashore without proper documentation are promptly deported. Haitian activists in Miami vociferously criticised US laws that treat Cuban and Haitian refugees differently.
