The "Global War on Terror". NOT!

Last Thursday, it was the British Foreign Secretary David Miliband who gave the real speech--not president Bush.  

In that speech, which was on the final day of his visit to India, Secretary Miliband noted that:

Terrorism was not invented or started on 9/11. But since then, the notion of a "war on terror" has defined the terrain. The phrase had some merit: it captured the gravity of the threats we face, the need for solidarity amongst allies, and the need to respond with real urgency - and where necessary with force.

But for a couple of years now the British Government has used neither the idea nor the phrase "war on terror". The reason is that ultimately, the notion is misleading and mistaken. Historians will judge whether it has done more harm than good. But we need to move on to meet the challenges we face.

The issue is not whether we need to attack the use of terror at its roots, with all the tools available to us. We must. The question is how we best do so.

The notion of a war on terror gave the impression of a unified, transnational enemy, embodied in the figure of Osama Bin Laden and the organization of Al Qaeda. In fact, as India has long known, the forces of violent extremism remain diverse. Terrorism is a deadly tactic, not an institution or an ideology.

The global threat from violent extremism has become more real because technology enables terrorists to connect more easily with each other, whether to plot and plan or to ape each other's tactics and techniques. But it is also more potent because Al Qaeda and its ilk seek to aggregate different local, regional and religious problems into a single complaint: the alleged oppression of Muslims around the world.

Yet the motivations and identities of terrorist groups - from Hizbollah to the Taleban, Tamil Tigers and Lashkar e Toiba - are disparate not singular. The more we lump terrorist groups together and draw the battle lines as a simple binary struggle between moderates and extremists or good and evil, the more we play into the hands of those seeking to unify groups with little in common, and the more we magnify the sense of threat. The trap to avoid is inadvertently sustaining Al Qaida's propaganda - their claim that disparate grievances add up to a unified complaint. We should expose their claim to a compelling and overarching explanation and narrative as the lie that it is.

The Civil War in Sri Lanka

Out of sight, out of mind.  That seems to be the bottom line when it comes to the crisis in Sri Lanka.

 

A civil war has been raging in the former Ceylon since 1983, despite several attempts by outsiders to diffuse the tensions and to put an end to the conflict.  The rebel group, the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam, and referred to as the Tamil Tigers, has adopted a violent approach to achieve an autonomous homeland for the ethnic Tamils who, it alleges, are discriminated against by the majority Sinhalese.  The Sri Lankan government, over the years, has attempted to squelch the rebellion without much success.  

Until recently.

 

For the first time after many years, the Tamil-dominated Jaffna Pensinsula, in northern Sri Lanka, is now under the control of the Sri Lankan army and government. The Tamil Tigers are now boxed into an area of just over 200 square miles—much smaller than the area that they controlled up until the latest military offensive.    

 

International groups watching the war rather helplessly from the sidelines are worried about the fate of civilians, which is my concern too.  The government, sensing that an ultimate military victory might be within reach—something that has been quite unimaginable over the 26 years—has apparently banned aid groups from entering the war area and assisting civilians.  

Reuters reports that “aid agencies say there are about 230,000 refugees in the war zone, where rights groups say the Tigers are keeping them as human shields.”  

Of course, the Tamil Tigers flatly deny that civilians are being used as shields. 

 

It is not only Tamils who are being caught in the crossfire.  A Sri Lankan newspaper editor, Lasantha Wickrematunge, a Sinhalese himself, was shot dead while he was on his way to work.  Ironically, it was not the Tamil Tigers who killed this journalist, even though he has described the rebels as “among the most ruthless and bloodthirsty organisations to have infested the planet.”  

While the killers are yet to be identified, it is believed that Wickrematunge was a target because he was highly critical of the government’s handling of terrorism in his country.  Wickrematunge predicted his end in an editorial, where he wrote that "When finally I am killed, it will be the government that kills me."

 

Wickrematunge’s death and the ongoing war highlight how much the ferocious fanaticism of the rebels is being matched by the government's, and how civilians—Tamils and Sinhalese alike—are paying a huge price for this mano a mano behavior. 

 

Over the Christmas break, I was in Chennai—the capital of Tamil Nadu, and the largest city in the state.  “Tamil Nadu” means the “land of the Tamils” and, as one would surmise, there is, therefore, immense sympathy for the Tamils in Sri Lanka.  There were public demonstrations urging the government—at the state and federal levels—to act in order to help both the Tamils and the Sri Lankan rebels. 

 

Of course, while there is enormous sympathy for the Tamil civilian population in Sri Lanka, the same cannot be said for the Tamil Tigers—after all, this same rebel group was responsible for assassinating India’s former prime minister, Rajiv Gandhi, back in 1991, at an election campaign rally only a few miles south of Chennai. 

 

Yet, I find that there is very little coverage in the US of this serious development.  I do not think there has been a statement on this from our State Department and White House, either.  

Granted that this news item has to compete against updates on the global economic meltdown, the presidential transition, or the situation in Gaza. But, even the controversy over Russia turning off the flow of natural gas to Ukraine and other European countries gets more coverage, not to speak of the hours that were spent on the recently concluded Golden Globes. 

 

I would think that the Sri Lankan situation where hundreds of thousands of civilians are caught in the crossfire merits our attention.  However, and unfortunately, it turns out that the importance of destruction of life and property depends on the geographic area where that happens. 

 

William Shakespeare said it best, although in a different context: “there is something rotten in the state of Denmark.”

update: this was published in the Register Guard on January 19, 2009, under the title "Sri Lanka flies under the radar"

Figting over land: Gaza, and Eelam

The conflict (war?) in Gaza is to the Israeli government the final push to silence Hamas and its acts of terrorism.  Meanwhile, in another part of the planet, the Sri Lankan government is in what might be the final stages of the push to silence the Tamil Tigers and put an end to the civil war that started in 1983.

Land, as we all know, is finite, and a good example of what economists describe as a private good--owning a piece of land means that the owner can exclude somebody else from owning it.  Of course, we could also peacefully co-exist ....

The Economist points out:

The Jews and Arabs of Palestine have been fighting off and on for 100 years. In 1909 the mostly Russian socialist idealists of the Zionist movement set up an armed group, Hashomer, to protect their new farms and villages in Palestine from Arab marauders. Since then has come the dismal march of wars—1948, 1956, 1967, 1973, 1982, 2006 and now 2009—each seared by blood and fire into the conflicting myths and memories of the two sides. The intervals between the wars have not been filled by peace but by bombs, raids, uprisings and atrocities. Israeli settlers in Hebron today still cite, as if it were yesterday, the massacre of Hebron’s Jews in 1929. The Arabs of Palestine still remember their desperate revolt in the 1930s against the British mandate and Jewish immigration from Europe, and the massacres of 1948.

The slaughter this week in Gaza, in which on one day alone some 40 civilians, many children, were killed in a single salvo of Israeli shells, will pour fresh poison into the brimming well of hate (see article). But a conflict that has lasted 100 years is not susceptible to easy solutions or glib judgments. Those who choose to reduce it to the “terrorism” of one side or the “colonialism” of the other are just stroking their own prejudices. At heart, this is a struggle of two peoples for the same patch of land. It is not the sort of dispute in which enemies push back and forth over a line until they grow tired. It is much less tractable than that, because it is also about the periodic claim of each side that the other is not a people at all—at least not a people deserving sovereign statehood in the Middle East.

That is one reason why this conflict grinds on remorselessly from decade to decade.