21 - 27 March 2002
Issue No.578
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Al-Ahram Weekly Online 21 - 27 March 2002 Issue No.578 |
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Turning back the clock
The United States is rearranging the world, and in doing so is turning its back on half a century of development in international law, writes Fawzy Mansour
*
"Terror and anti-terror have left the land of reason and found their mythological haven. They stand, on imposing pedestals, staring down on us with ice-cold eyes: twin towers of faith, unquestioned and unexamined. There is not a single analytical tool that can explain the globalisation of bias infused in these two terms. And, there is no moral ground to justify the linguistic apartheid that is now the trademark of US foreign, and domestic, policy."
(Azmi Bishara: "Twin towers of horror," Al- Ahram Weekly, 14-20 February 2002)Domination over other people is a game of many masks. Gone are the old forms: "defending the free world" (second half of the 20th century); "maintaining law and order" in the colonies (first half of the same century); assuming "the white man's burden" in Asia and Africa (19th century) etc. Now it is the "global war against terrorism," woven by the US into a new mask for global domination.
To deal rationally with such threatening, destructive slogans one needs, as a first step, to look carefully at the political forces which coin and use them; the socio-economic formations these stem from and the various mechanisms which determine their motion, in order to ascertain the underlying objectives and identify the newly honed tools of domination. One needs also to ponder the historic, geopolitical, geo-economic and geo-cultural environment within which they operate and, not least, the countervailing powers they call forth or which may spontaneously spring into being.
In offering a glimpse of the global game now unfolding one useful approach is to take a closer look at this much-hyped slogan, the "war against terrorism." Forces working towards domination have always exhibited a predilection for the abuse of language, a knack of choosing simple words, then twisting them out of shape and forcing them to perform functions they were not meant to perform. Terrorism is one example. It has been loaded with psychological and mental images designed to baffle and delude.
To begin with, terrorism is a crime which sane people everywhere abhor. There is not a single act of those commonly referred to as terrorist that is not punishable under modern criminal laws, national as well as international. Murder, arson, and destruction of property are all criminalised. So is violence, and threats thereof, when used to force public authorities to act, or not act, in certain ways. Attempting to, consorting in, inciting, financing, and conspiring to commit these crimes are all punishable under existing criminal laws, even when the crimes are not actually committed. So is membership of groups that engage in any of these acts. Countries suffering such acts, or whose citizens become victims of such acts, are entitled to take legal action against the culprits, wherever they may be. Laws fighting such crimes are constantly being updated to cope with advances in communications, transport, etc... Examples are the international agreement on actions threatening the safety of aviation (New York, 1997) or the agreement on the financing of terrorist acts (New York, 1999).
The legal framework to fight acts now commonly referred to as terrorist, then, is firmly in place, and is being updated all the time, at the national and international levels. These acts are, and have always been, the subject matter of normal criminal legislation. There is, though, a notable absence in current legal definitions of "terrorism" as such -- a deliberate abstention from creating a category of crimes called "terrorism" of which the attributes would be carefully spelled out but without enumeration of the various acts covered by that definition, e.g. kidnapping, taking hostages, blackmail, etc... There are several reasons for such reticence. Jurists and legislators, especially those of a liberal bent of mind, realise that there are no loopholes in national or international criminal law, through which perpetrators of terrorist acts or members of terrorist groups can escape justice once they are identified and found and their guilt is established in a court of law. They believe that the creation of a generic crime named "terrorism" would, however carefully defined, contravene a basic rule of criminal legislation, one that has always been a pillar of human justice and freedom -- the rule that there is no crime without law and no punishment without law. It is feared that, once such "generic terrorist crime" is created, the door will be thrown wide open for authoritarian governments to persecute various protest movements (labour, peasant, feminist, student, peace, environment and minorities), whose natural mode of functioning includes the exertion of various kinds of pressure on governments for the removal of what they perceive as injustice, discrimination or other forms of iniquity.
The reluctance to see terrorism defined is also felt by certain governments, especially the USA, for a different set of reasons. Any definition of terrorism as a crime must contain, as one of its basic terms, the use or threat of use of force. By their very nature, however, governments are large-scale purveyors of violence, certainly against criminals (in which case it is legitimate) but occasionally against their own people or sections thereof (in which case it may have various shades of legitimacy or illegitimacy) and often, especially when violence is exercised by great powers, against other peoples, in which case legitimacy or illegitimacy will be in the eye of the beholder. Accordingly, in order that governments may be able to protect themselves and their agents, another term must be included in the definition: that the use of violence must be illegitimate. Thus in a rare attempt at such a definition a US text specifies that terrorism consists of an illegitimate use of force and violence against persons or property with the aim of intimidating or coercing a government or the civilian population or parts thereof in order to attain political or social ends.* That text, however, is not a legislative one; it has not passed through Congress. It is merely part of an administrative code of federal regulations which defines the tasks of the FBI director and is crafted in such a way as to protect the FBI agents who are empowered to use force in certain situations on condition that this use be legitimate. The US would be most reluctant to give universal application to such a definition. For one thing, it would expose states which use violence in foreign lands to the accusation that they are terrorist; for another it exonerates from such accusation people who resort to violence in defence of legitimate causes. Modern international law, as we shall see, does precisely that. This is one reason why the US is most unhappy with it.
War is the worst form of all violence. We often forget that, because as Charlie Chaplin once remarked: "numbers sanctify," and because states, especially powerful states, have a tendency to put themselves above law and morality -- didn't Clausewitz blithely define war in the 19th century as a continuation of policy carried out by other means? And when war is waged for aggression, it becomes terrorism, indeed the most brutal form of terrorism. If such war results in continuous situations such as the occupation of other peoples' lands, that becomes prolonged aggression, and the violence exercised to perpetrate it, prolonged terrorism. Per contra, the violence which may be needed to resist and remove that aggression becomes legitimate and may not be branded as terrorism.
These principles which now seem self-evident to us did not acquire the authority of accredited law throughout humanity's long history, in which the powerful habitually imposed their will on the weak. It was not until 1928 that war as an instrument of national policy was made illegal by the Kellog--Briand Pact, which was almost still-born. Until the end of the Second World War the real content of public international law was essentially the regulation of war and peace relations between the states of the "civilised countries" -- with the rest of the world, largely the peoples of Asia and Africa, virtually outside its protective umbrella. Under that law, colonialism was a legitimate enterprise.
That situation radically changed in the aftermath of World War II, largely as a result of the development of weapons of mass destruction over which no single power held a monopoly, and the emergence of the Soviet Union as a superpower which, for various reasons, actively supported national liberation movements. Consequently, a new public international law began to develop, which, to distinguish it from the old élite one, I would call the Peoples' Public International Law (PPIL) since, at least in theory, it purported to treat all peoples as equals and gradually began to address itself to peoples' major concerns in the fields of peace, self- determination, human rights, economic development, justice, the protection of the environment, etc.
The new Law is anchored in the UN Charter and Resolutions and in an increasing number of international agreements and international court rulings. It prohibits states from using force or threatening the use of force against the territorial integrity or the political independence of other states. It recognises the right of all peoples to self-determination and asserts that peoples' resort to force in the exercise of that right is a form of self-defence. It insists that any definition of aggression cannot diminish the right to self- determination or the freedom of people denied that right to use force, especially people who are subject to colonial or racist systems or to any form of foreign domination. It also singles out crimes committed by occupation forces -- assassinations, mistreatment and displacement of civil populations in the occupied territories as well as the mistreatment of POWs and the destruction of towns and villages, all of which it designates as "war crimes.".
The new PPIL also gave peoples and even individuals in certain cases procedural rights to vindicate these principles. For the first time in history peoples and individuals became subjects of PPIL.
In a way then, the second half of the 20th century witnessed the infusion of justice, morality and humanism in international law. A varied and comprehensive safety net of international law rules came into being whose function it was to protect peoples, especially oppressed peoples. This safety net, it goes without saying, did not always offer complete protection. That would require a totally different configuration of forces world-wide, a really new world order based on radically changed socio-economic systems. But it was a gigantic and unprecedented step forward, for it is in the nature of law to be an expression of the will of the socially dominant social forces or, at most, of the balance of forces in any given society. PPIL was in advance of its time because it was created in a rare historical moment which favoured the active participation, at various levels of representation, of the vast majority of the world population. Naturally it began to be looked upon by the mighty and privileged of this world as an affront, a challenge to their power and privilege, to be subverted and if possible removed.
We Arabs are well aware of the present imperfections, for it was during the creation of that safety net that the Palestinians continued to be displaced and dispossessed by the Zionist colonialists. A new state was created in the heart of the Arab nation where old fashioned colonialism combines with settler colonialism, and with neo-colonialism masquerading under the name of the "Middle East Project," which endeavours to impose its economic, political and military hegemony on the rest of the Arab countries -- both in its own interests and the interests of western powers, headed by the US, which consider it a strategic and cultural extension to themselves.
The failure of the PPIL safety net to provide protection in this case is due to a number of reasons -- primarily the subservient role assigned to a dependent, fragmented and underdeveloped Arab world in the new American system of world hegemony, the backwardness of the socio- economic formations prevailing in Arab countries and the fragility of the political regimes resulting from them or imposed upon them. Nevertheless, that safety net is still there, giving legitimacy to the struggle of the Palestinian people by all the means available to them to regain whatever rights have not been irrevocably lost, and the right to get any help they can from other Arab or friendly peoples, without that struggle being branded as terrorism.
The Palestinian people live under siege, facing an unscrupulous enemy using against them a most sophisticated arsenal of lethal weapons. In this exceptionally unequal and cruel contest, it seems to me -- with all due respect to those who put to the struggle against such an enemy red or green or yellow lines which are not to be trespassed -- that the only criterion for choosing between various methods of struggle is that of efficacy, using a careful cost-benefit analysis which takes into account results in the long run and at all levels.
In doing these calculations we should not be terrorised by the accusations of terrorism levelled by the US at the legitimate struggles of our peoples. Throughout its bloody history with the original inhabitants of North America, then with the populations of Central and South America, the US was the country most addicted to terrorism in all its forms and varieties. Following the Second World War, and as its plans for world hegemony began to take shape, its terrorist activities were extended to all three continents -- Asia, Africa and even Europe. They ranged from waging regular aggressive wars (e.g. Vietnam) to hatching conspiracies against democratic regimes and helping military and other dictators to seize power, frustrating the aspirations of their peoples, and in the process exterminating millions of them (Iran, Indonesia, Chile, etc) up to the assassination of political leaders it does not approve of.
Eventually US terrorist practices were elevated from mere pragmatism to doctrinal refinements. In this new endeavour each president had something to add to the achievements of his predecessors. As Noam Chomsky pointed out, it was John Kennedy who, in 1962, shifted the mission of the Latin American military from "hemispheric defence" to "internal security" (against popular protests or democratic systems, as happened under the infamous Brazilian Generals). For his part, Reagan devised a new sacred mission for America which is the continuous war against "international terrorism" attributed to countries which the US does not approve of or is not satisfied with its ruling regimes; its favourite tool for pursuing this war was the creation of an extremely powerful network with enormous financial resources (obtained from drug smuggling and subsidised by certain Arab regimes).
The network was used in Central America, Africa and the Middle East. It was condemned by the International Court of Justice and the Security Council (whose decision was of course vetoed by the US). Among the stars of this network were John Negroponte who, as an American diplomat in Honduras, led the American terrorist war against Guatemala and has now, 20 years later, become the official American Coordinator in the UN for international mobilisation against terrorism, and Donald Rumsfeld, special Reagan envoy for the coordination of American and Israeli operations in the Middle East where, in Chomsky's words, "the Reagan administration and its Israeli ally easily won the prize for international terrorism." He is the very same Rumsfeld who came back under Bush Junior as minister of defense to lead America's permanent war against terrorism.
There is however a big historical difference between America's past and present terrorism. In the past the US was confronted by another superpower which was able to mobilise broad international and popular forces against aggression. This caused the US to camouflage its various terrorist activities and be always on the lookout for pretexts which may make them seem palatable. Following the collapse of the Soviet Union, the bi-polar world was replaced by what is mistakenly called a uni-polar world. The dominant forces in the US thought that the way was now open to them to impose, under the slogan of the New International Order, a special kind of globalisation whose task it was to reshape the world in accordance with their long-term interests and objectives. A particular kind of liberal economic integration is being imposed which would maximise investors' profits. Advanced industrial centres headed by the US would continue to monopolise the means of producing and developing advanced technical knowledge, and of transforming its products into goods and services which eventually will become necessities for modern living even in poor countries. Enormous gains are obtained, under various names, which are quite unrelated to real costs, and a very privileged position vis-à-vis the rest of the world is guaranteed to the owners of these means. The most powerful and privileged leader in this system, the US, uses all means at its disposal to stop any serious challenge to the system or to its own leadership of it (e.g. through control of certain strategic material like Middle East and Caspian Sea oil and acquisition of world-wide military bases). Likewise it attempts to eliminate anyone who effectively challenges the stability of the system or provides an alternative to it.
The US vision of globalisation has led to financial and economic turmoil, as well as deepening inequalities. And it has spawned a wide array of protest and resistance movements, both in the First and Third Worlds. The Soviet Union may have disappeared from the picture, but another pole of opposition to US global dominance is emerging. It is made up of miscellaneous activists (labour, anti-racism, human rights, environment, women's rights, etc.). Most political analysts so far overlook this opposing pole, but the United States is feeling the heat, and acting to defeat and discredit it.
On the military front, the United States is adding voraciously to its various programmes, particularly the space weaponry. Statements made by NASA officials make it clear that the US military space programme is being redesigned to take action against distant targets; specifically, against anyone who may offer determined resistance to the New World Order. A recently leaked Pentagon report reveals a plan to develop new nuclear bombs capable of destroying more than 10,000 secret targets in fortified underground locations in 70 countries.
On the political and legal front, the United States has been systematically trying to sabotage and roll back the new legal framework protecting weaker peoples and nations, created in the second half of the 20th century. The instances abound. Washington declined to sign major international agreements (e.g. Kyoto). It withdrew from human rights conferences (e.g. Durban). It vetoes Security Council resolutions giving Palestinians a modicum of protection (e.g. the decision to send international observers to Palestine). And it is increasingly using Orwellian doublespeak (struggle is terror -- war, when fought by the US, is war on terror). And because the injustices of American globalisation are going to last, the war against terrorism, US officials promise, is going to be long and far- reaching. In addition, to avoid being called to account if a legal definition of terrorism is agreed upon, the United States has consistently resisted calls to hold an international conference on terrorism.
Washington is imposing on the world its own brand of terror. It is bullying everyone who is not on its side in its self-styled military quests. As aptly noted by Azmi Bishara it has, for all intents and purposes, defined terror as "acts committed by a terrorist," and a terrorist is anyone resisting the schemes of America and its closest ally, Israel. George W Bush has even introduced a custom-made axis of evil. With regional countries featuring in Bush's threesome of evil, Arab countries are on notice to bend to US and Israeli demands.
The United States is striving to rewrite history and turn back the hands of the clock. It is replacing the post-World War II political and legal scene with one reminiscent of that which existed before World War I. The Arabs are not the only victims, but they bear much of the brunt. The Gulf War (folly of rulers) and 11 September (ignorance of the disaffected about the contemporary world, its balance of forces and the direction of their motion) gave the United States the ammunition it looked for. But these were not the primary cause for what is going on, unless we are willing to believe that the 1914 assassination of Archduke Francis Ferdinand was the cause, rather than the trigger, of World War I. The Arab nation will remain a minor ineffectual player at the margin of historical developments, until the Arab people learn how to seize their freedom from their rulers, live the modern age and join forces with other disenfranchised, dispossessed First and Third World peoples who strive to create a truly new world order devoid of injustice and oppression.
* See on the whole subject John Brown: "Les perilleuses tentatives pour definir le terrorisme" (The perilous attempts to define terrorism) in Le Monde Diplomatique, February 2002.
* The writer is Professor Emeritus of Economics at the Faculty of Law, Ain Shams University, Cairo.
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