27 Sep. - 3 Oct. 2001
Issue No.553
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Al-Ahram Weekly Online 27 Sep. - 3 Oct. 2001 Issue No.553 |
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The other losses
In casting its net so wide, an international coalition against terrorism will inevitably catch a variety of fish. Pascale Ghazaleh wonders where the endangered species will find refuge
Where blind skyscrapers use
Their full height to proclaim
The strength of Collective Man,
Each language pours its vain
Competitive excuse:
But who can live for long
In an euphoric dream;
Out of the mirror they stare,
Imperialism's face
And the international wrong.W H Auden
September 1, 1939What do we know, today, of the "strength of Collective Man"? Still principally its destructive capacity: the power to colonise, bomb, annihilate a few of its consituent parts. It would be wrong to read too much into a poem, though; Auden, after all, was no prophet. Besides, the blind skyscrapers stand no more: that dream is forever shattered, although imperialism's face and the international wrong are both alive and real, everywhere -- even in the heart of the imperialist order, as the past days have shown.
War is also a question of vocabulary, and now congressional representatives and senators in the US are speaking of the need to invent a new one, so different will this war be from any the US government has waged before. It is not a war against another nation-state (although it is debatable whether war has ever pitted one of these historically contingent constructs, as a cogent entity, against another); it is a war against a shadowy enemy, which could be anywhere and everywhere at once. And again, as the events of 11 September demonstrate, that enemy could be within the US, behind the white picket fence next door.
Fighting an enemy it has not identified precisely means that the US military machine will have to cast its net wide, killing and destroying on a large scale in the hope that it will somehow hit the specific individuals it seeks to punish. US government representatives have spoken of the sad inevitability of innocents dying, a byproduct they refer to as collateral damage. Whether or not murdering and displacing vast numbers of people in fact constitutes a side effect is also debatable; the US will certainly benefit from an invasion of Afghanistan, and the spectacularly awful attack on the World Trade Center (and, to a lesser degree, the Pentagon), must be matched by a response sufficiently tremendous to deter any groups it may have inspired. Another result of the US's response could also be considered a side effect, but will certainly prove equally advantageous in the long run. This is the crackdown inside the US, and the increased harshness with which its government -- and others worldwide -- will treat opposition movements of every stripe, including the anti-capitalist activism that had been making such progress until Durban. As Noam Chomsky warned in these pages last week, the attack "is likely to prove to be a crushing blow to Palestinians and other poor and oppressed people. It is also likely to lead to harsh security controls, with many possible ramifications for undermining civil liberties and internal freedom."
Eric Foner concurred, writing in The Nation of 8 October: "The drumbeat now begins, as it always does in time of war: We must accept limitations on our liberties. The FBI and CIA should be 'unleashed' in the name of national security. Patriotism means uncritical support of whatever actions the President deems appropriate."
Terror struck New York and Washington on 11 September; two days later, the administration was already peddling legislation that had the American Civil Liberties Union up in arms. US Attorney- General John Ashcroft announced last week that the government would vastly increase its power to detain and deport immigrants who "may endanger the national security" without a legal hearing, and with no opportunity to contest or even examine the attorney-general's decision. "Justified as a response to our national emergency," commented the ACLU, "these rules would become a permanent part of our immigration laws."
The bill would also allow the attorney- general to require unilaterally the open- ended incarceration of any "certified" non-citizen -- even those who entered the US legally, have not been charged with immigration violations or terrorist activity, or have been granted political asylum on the basis of persecution.
Most problematic of all, the bill would also "retroactively make non-citizens deportable for providing material support for the lawful activities of a 'terrorist organization'." This provision would apply, according to the ACLU, "even if the organization was not a designated terrorist organization when the support was provided and the provision of such support was entirely lawful when given."
WOMEN AGAINST WAR: What will become of solidarity movements when the US starts to "smoke the terrorists out"?
So while the government warned against racist attacks, it was seeking the adoption of legislation based on the very same prejudice.
While such legislation theoretically applies to everyone inside the US, some are more obvious targets than others. First, of course, are American Arabs, Muslims and Christians alike, as well as anyone who could be suspected of being an Arab. As Foner put it, "Arab-Americans, followers of Islam, people with Middle Eastern names or ancestors, [will] be subject to special scrutiny by the government and their fellow citizens. With liberal members of Congress silent and the Administration promising a war on terrorism lasting 'years, not days,' such sentiments are likely to be with us for some time to come." Leaving aside the more immediate, and life-threatening, attacks by vigilante groups (just scratch the surface and the KKK appears, it seems), the legislation proposed by the Bush administration seems guaranteed to institutionalise discrimination even more than is already the case. Although individuals of "Middle Eastern" aspect (read: dark skin) may be the prime targets of hate crimes like the 350 committed in the US since the attack, however, they will not be the only victims of such discriminatory legislation.
Under cover of the night on 13 September, the Senate added provisions to a spending bill for the departments of commerce, justice and state. The provisions, according to the ACLU, "expanded the circumstances under which the government can force Internet service providers to give law enforcement agencies information about private emails." The ACLU said the government can already obtain this information by complying with "the minimal requirement of prior court review" and questioned why the Senate "would so quickly jettison even this most basic protection." The bill includes measures that would "minimize judicial supervision of electronic surveillance by law enforcement authorities and vastly expand the government's ability to conduct secret searches." In a statement released on 20 September, Gregory T Nojeim, associate director of the union's Washington national office, judged that "this legislation does not meet the basic test of maximizing our security [while] minimizing the impact on our civil liberties."
In Europe, too, as Naomi Klein, author of No Logo and perhaps the most prominent of the anti-capitalist movements' representatives, noted in a recent statement, "there are attempts to associate those who are openly critical of corporate and US power with these acts of cowardly terror." This, Klein added, "is how acts of terror place a terrible chill on legitimate dissent, and are used as cover for gross violations of civil liberties."
On NoLogo.org, the Web site inspired by Klein's book, one post read: "It is virtually certain that Tuesday's events will function to legitimize the criminalization and repression of all forms of political dissent in North America. For many, though by no means all of us, this will substantially increase what is at stake when we organize and protest." This is especially true since, shell-shocked by the attacks, many dissenters will find it appropriate or expedient to tone down their activities and rally round the flag.
Outside the US, most likely to receive the brunt of new legislative measures will be activists like those who converged on Seattle and Genoa to protest the policies of transnational corporations, or those of the World Bank and World Trade Organisation. As Klein pointed out in an article published in The Nation on 10 July 2000, one of the great strengths of these activists is their "model of laissez-faire organizing," which has proven "extraordinarily difficult to control, largely because it is so different from the organizing principles of the institutions and corporations it targets. It responds to corporate concentration with a maze of fragmentation, to globalization with its own kind of localization, to power consolidation with radical power dispersal." The new policies being implemented by the US -- and those that may follow in Europe -- will be designed to undermine just such diffuse movements, especially if other nations sign on to the "global partnership" against terrorism that Bush is proposing, and whose mission will be, according to a CNN report of 20 September, "to close down terrorist cells or 'nodes' linked to the bin Laden network," to cut off financial flows, and help to "dry up the swamp" of terrorism, in the words of one official.
Increased security measures designed to destroy loosely organised resistance movements, coupled with discretionary powers allowing officials to identify terrorists, are unlikely to differentiate between civil society activism in, say, its anti-capitalist variant (hardly a friend of US government and corporate policies in any case) and Islamist terrorism. For if surveillance and detention are unhampered by any system of checks and balances, who will challenge the criteria on which individuals or groups are singled out for marginalisation, both in the US and abroad?
Nowhere, however, will the increased obstacles to organising any kind of protest be more evident than in the case of Palestinian grassroots movements, which, as far as law enforcement officials in the US and Europe (not to mention Israel) are concerned, are suspect on two accounts: as activists and as Palestinians.
At the time of the attack, these movements had been picking up speed, in large part thanks to the Durban anti- discrimination conference, which "created and strengthened solidarity among various NGOs and grassroots movements," according to Arjan El-Fassed, public advocacy officer at LAW (the Jerusalem- based Palestinian Society for the Protection of Human Rights and the Environment). LAW played an instrumental part in the preparatory committees for the World Conference Against Racism, and its director was a member of the International Steering Committee of the NGO Forum. "The backlash against Palestinians in particular must not be overlooked or underestimated and will have impact," El-Fassed told Al-Ahram Weekly. Images of Palestinians jubilating at the attack have triggered what seems disproportionate outrage even among Westerners otherwise sympathetic to their cause. And while some Palestinians shrug this off (one woman living in Ramallah remarked: "Maybe last year, before the Intifada, we would have been shocked and outraged. Now? Death is an everyday occurrence. It doesn't matter anymore. We have nothing left to lose, at all"), Israel, as El-Fassed points out, has made cynical use of the current situation, escalating its aggression on Palestinians; in the past week, alone, it has killed more than 20 and injured hundreds. "Israel is capitalising on the US tragedy by escalating its military strikes in the name of 'combating terrorism'," El-Fassed explained. "I think the way Israel deals with New York/Washington only proves our points in Durban."
It would be truly ironic if a security clampdown on all protest movements -- whether directed against specific corporations, environmentally destructive policies, exploitative labour conditions, Israeli occupation or crippling debt repayment schemes -- ultimately served to bring these movements closer together. And perhaps the attack on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon will achieve this indirectly, especially within the US, by politicising protest movements that otherwise, as Barbara Spinelli put it in La Stampa, have often been focused exclusively on Western concerns, and share full responsibility for "a globalisation that, far from reigning supreme, ignores the state of law, sees the ambition to govern as negligible and has not developed enough to give credit back to the political and strength to the laws that must protect human persons."
While Spinelli's accusation that activists are insincere in their concern for the poor is not valid across the board -- the Anti-Capitalist Convergence is only one of several groups lobbying and demonstrating against exploitative market practices both domestically and internationally -- it is true that many, especially in the US, have been sheltered from the harshest realities of globalisation. This can no longer be the case: 11 September drove those realities home to them, decisively. Perhaps, too, the attack will serve to bring the US into the world at last, by ending the illusion of invulnerability and the luxury of ignorance so many of its citizens have long enjoyed. Only such a local assault could bring home the global, after all, and show Americans from LA to NY that the world is not truly at peace -- and that American foreign policy is largely to blame for that. Who can live for long, Auden asked, in an euphoric dream?
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