Is terrorism a world pole?
Mohamed Sid-Ahmed discusses the relevance of his assumption that terrorism can be categorised as a "world pole"
A young reader objected to the way I phrased a question in a recent article, in which I asked whether the terrorist attacks in Saudi Arabia, Morocco and Israel were repeat performances of the 11 September events. Palestinian suicide bombings, she said in her letter, were acts of resistance, not terrorism, and should not be equated with what happened on 9/11 or with the Riyadh and Casablanca events.
Her point is valid in terms of substance. But in terms of form the use of human bombs to kill Israeli civilians can only be characterised as acts of terror, even if they are perpetrated by an occupied people against a harsh military occupation that is itself guilty of terrorism, and even if the UN Charter condemns military occupation and upholds the right of occupied peoples to resist it by all possible means, including armed struggle.
What may also have shocked my reader is that I placed the attacks against America and Israel on an equal footing with those against two Arab countries, Saudi Arabia and Morocco, thereby overstepping the limits of what is considered acceptable from a pan- Arab perspective.
A number of remarks are in order here. To begin with, the Arab situation has deteriorated to the point where we can no longer remain locked in a mindset which regards certain subjects as off limits. We can no longer afford the luxury of seeing the picture in black and white when it is in fact more gray than anything else. A case in point is what I have termed the four-pronged game that has been set into motion by the roadmap for peace, with negotiations underway between Sharon and Abu Mazen on the one hand and, on the other, opposition to negotiations from two antagonistic groups (at least until recently), the settlers on the Israeli side and Hamas, Islamic Jihad and Al-Aqsa Martyrs' Brigades on the Arab side.
Secondly, the time has come for the mechanisms of democracy to govern our debates, so that no idea, however controversial or contrary to conventional wisdom, is rejected out of hand. In other words, we should be able to freely discuss all issues, however critical, without sensitivities and without taboos.
The third point I want to make relates to the definition of terrorism. My reader chided me for talking of "Palestinian terrorism", and asked me whether I equated it with the terrorist attacks carried out by Al-Qa'eda in Morocco and Saudi Arabia -- if, indeed, Al- Qa'eda was responsible for these attacks. Terrorism is a word which is widely used in our political lexicon but, like a number of other equally ubiquitous notions, such as "democracy" and "aggression", it is poorly defined and subject to various interpretations. I for one have described modern terrorism in many of my writings as a "world pole" that has emerged to challenge the viability of the present world order. It is a description that has angered some of my friends, and I would like to dissipate any misunderstandings related to this issue.
Since 11 September, 2001, I have challenged the assumption that the bipolar world order that prevailed under the Cold War was replaced by a unipolar world order. In my view, world order continues to be based on bipolarity, albeit of a new kind. I believe this will continue to be the case as long as there are rich and poor, privileged and marginalised, people inside the system and others left out in the cold. Formerly, the system was based on a confrontation between two ideologies (communism versus capitalism), two blocs of states (the Eastern bloc versus the Western bloc), two pacts (NATO versus the Warsaw Pact), and an arms race in which both sides built up stockpiles of weapons of mass destruction that threatened humankind with extinction.
This brought the confrontation between the capitalist and communist poles to a critical threshold where it was either mutual extermination or the collapse of one of the two poles. The latter scenario prevailed, and the communist pole did collapse. But its disappearance left a vacuum because the capitalist pole was unable to absorb and assimilate all the remnants of the communist pole. The phenomenon of terrorism tried to fill the vacuum, and 11 September signalled the onset of this new situation.
Can we really talk of the emergence of a global terrorist pole? It could be described as a new state of affairs, a way of reacting to an unusual setup, a new societal or class structure with specifics of its own. But the use of the term pole emphasises that the new state of affairs is not totally unrelated to the former one, namely, the bipolar world order which prevailed under the Cold War. Moreover, characterising terrorism as a pole allows for different interpretations of the phenomenon and different appraisals of which of the protagonists it will benefit in the final analysis.
What does terrorism mean if viewed from a social and class perspective? Opinions vary widely. There are those who see terrorism as a byproduct of imperialism. According to this interpretation Bin Laden is nothing more than a product of the CIA. Others see terrorism as a form of genuine revolutionary struggle against imperialism. That is the view held by the notorious terrorist now serving a life sentence in France, Ilitch Ramirez Sanchez, better known as Carlos the Jackal.
Both interpretations are oversimplifications of a very complex phenomenon. I believe there is room and, indeed, an urgent need, for a more nuanced interpretation. Terrorist activity could be perceived as revolutionary in the eyes of its perpetrators. These may be genuinely convinced -- or brainwashed into believing -- that their acts are revolutionary while, from the objective point of view, they serve world imperialism rather than any true liberation cause. Is it not possible that terrorism is built on an ambiguity made up of subjective and objective factors that are disparate, if not in open contradiction?
Indeed, the subjective and objective readings of a given event need not be identical. One can even go so far as to assert that there is an inbuilt contradiction in much of contemporary revolutionary action. For such action to succeed considerable segments of society must be suffering from injustice, repression, coercion, even backwardness, because the more developed segments of society, enjoying a substantial amount of prosperity, are immunised against the revolutionary spirit. Thus, in the bipolar world order which prevailed under the Cold War, world capitalism proved more capable of "instrumentalising" world socialism than the opposite, portraying it as a model that could not succeed anywhere. This message was reinforced by the failure of the liberation movements which broke out in underdeveloped societies to catch up with the developed capitalist West. If anything the gap grew even wider and the race more difficult to sustain, setting into motion a chain reaction that led to the collapse of the Soviet Union and the events of 11 September.
When liberation movements, whether socialist or nationalist, first broke out, they carried within them great hopes and revolutionary zeal. But it soon became clear that, because of underdevelopment, groups opposed to democracy dominated many of these experiments under the banner of socialism. Thus, instead of being overcome, social and class contradictions were further exacerbated, prompting Stalin to come forward with the theory that class struggle inside socialist societies tends to become more acute as socialism moves forward in the direction of communism. His theory ran counter to the established Marxist theory that communism lays the foundations of a classless society.
Thus it will take more than the physical elimination of terrorists and the dismantling of terrorist networks to eradicate terrorism. What is required is the removal of the objective reasons which generate terrorism. This entails bringing fundamental changes to the international system itself and making serious efforts to address such issues as poverty and the growing gap between rich and poor, as well as to resolve acute crises like the Palestinian problem.
