Daniel Pearl's murder and the pain in all of us
by Syed Badrul Ahsan
The abduction and murder of Daniel Pearl in Pakistan reveals the unpalatable truth that terrorism is yet alive and thriving. That fact comes together with the thought that in places like Pakistan there are yet elements intent on destabilising politics in the region as also elsewhere. Every act of terrorism is in the end a negation of politics. Whether such terrorism comes per courtesy of political figures or through the depredations of rabid people determined to spread the language of violence all around, the inevitable reality that one must face is that terror in our times holds sway in a manner never seen before.
While President Bush and his allies in the West may have succeeded in wiping out all traces of Taliban rule in Afghanistan, they have not quite convinced the world that the likes of Osama bin Laden have fully been neutralised. The inability to nab bin Laden, or to make certain that he is dead, gnaws at our sensibilities. Worse, when news keeps filtering in that he may in fact be alive, the collective realisation is once more of coming squarely up against a man who has used terrorism in pursuance of his political goals once and may use it again. That promises to be a recurring fear, until it finally becomes clear to all of us that the Saudi terrorist has finally disappeared from the global matrix.
The people who abducted Pearl and then beheaded him are heirs to the kind of terrorism which Osama bin Laden and his camp followers have been promoting around the world for years. The tragedy of 11 September was merely a more illustrative account of the extent to which these purveyors of fear could go in their goal of making mincemeat of politics. Pearl's murder exposes a simple truth, which is that even if bin Laden is, at least for now, out of the scene, it is elements like the men behind the so-called group dedicated to the restoration of Pakistani sovereignty who have taken upon themselves the grisly responsibility of employing crude terror in the fulfilment of their objectives.
President Pervez Musharraf, having turned himself - and rather fortuitously too - into the man Americans love the most in Asia at this point in time, is of course under new pressure to deal with the assassins of the American journalist. But it is a job he cannot do alone. His limitations are many. Suffice it to say that there are elements within Pakistan, indeed within its sensitive political and strategic bodies, who would like nothing better than to embarrass him in his efforts to take his country to a definitive destination, away from the crossroads it has so long been paralysed in. That Pakistan's security forces are not up to the job of zeroing in on terrorists has been made abjectly clear from their failure to ferret out the people who kidnapped and then killed Daniel Pearl. For the Bush administration, therefore, it is important that it lend a strong hand to the Pakistanis in flushing out the Pearl killers. A country which has in the last twenty years been home to millions of Afghan refugees and where politics, thanks to the wrong policies of General Ziaul Haq and Ronald Reagan, has been in retreat, Pakistan is in need of a decent return to a warm place under the sun.
The war against terror needs to be prosecuted on several fronts, and not just in Pakistan. Ask President Andres Pastrana of Colombia.
With barely more than a month left in office, he has stumbled upon the truth that it was never a wise move trusting the guerrillas of the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC) to strike a peace deal with his government.
The realisation is of course belated. To be sure, Colombians are happy that their military, having finally been given orders to do battle, have been overrunning FARC positions throughout the country. But a whole lot more will require to be done here, and whoever succeeds Pastrana in the presidency cannot afford to repeat the mistake of giving in to FARC demands and then realise the blunder. The issue of whether, if at all, FARC is an organisation committed to promoting social justice remains moot. Or it all depends on who happens to be discussing the issue. But the recent instance of a Colombian airliner being commandeered on an internal flight and then made to land on a rural highway by the guerrillas are perhaps early indications of the decline of FARC as a viable revolutionary organisation. Extend the picture, to Sri Lanka.
There can hardly be any question that the minority Tamil population in the country has for decades been subjected to neglect by the majority Sinhala people, in nearly every sphere of political and social activity. But that sense or reality of discrimination has quite been nullified by the terrorism which the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam have employed over the decades. The LTTE has assassinated a President, several ministers and an unknown number of civilians. Its role in the murder of Rajiv Gandhi in 1991 overturned, momentarily, the process of politics in India. And over the past few years, Vellupillai Prabhakaran has gone to great lengths to scuttle every move for peace made by President Chandrika Kumaratunga, who herself has been subjected to a murder attempt by the LTTE.
The agreement which has now been reached between new Prime Minister Ranil Wickremesinghe and the guerrillas is being touted as an achievement. Given the record of the LTTE, notably its propensity to return to the theatre of violence on a regular basis, one needs to keep one's fingers crossed where an assessment of the new agreement is concerned.
Terrorism does not sprout from disaffected men alone. It does not necessarily emerge from the bushes, or from isolated tents in the desert. There are governments which have for years sponsored terrorist activity in diverse regions of the globe. The terror unleashed on East Timor by the Indonesian authorities once it became obvious that the Timorese had opted for political sovereignty remains perhaps one of the more gruesome of instances where the state gives itself a licence to kill and maim. Something of a similar sort occurred in occupied Bangladesh in 1971 when the Pakistan army, discarding the principles of military professionalism, went into the reprehensible business of murder and rape all over the country.
No one in Pakistan has deemed it necessary to punish the men responsible for the genocide of the Bengalis, a fact that has prevented a meaningful development of diplomatic relations between Islamabad and Dhaka. In our times, the frenzy with which Prime Minister Ariel Sharon has gone after the Palestinians has stunned all civilised men. Strangely enough, his use of force to destroy Palestinian property and to keep Yasser Arafat confined to his headquarters in Ramallah have not evoked the outrage that one would have thought would move minds in the West. The Bush administration, with little understanding of the problems in the West Bank and Gaza, has happily been content watching Sharon pulverise the Palestinians. It has had no reason to appreciate the compulsions Arafat has been working under. Therein lies the danger.
Through allowing Sharon to have things his way, Washington might be becoming party to conditions where a more radicalised set of Palestinian politicians could take over from Arafat. The suicide killings, certainly unadulterated instances of terrorism, have nevertheless been quite pushed into the background by the militancy of the Israeli state itself. That is an unfortunate reality. And only men like Shimon Peres can comprehend the gravity of it.
All acts of terrorism embarrass us. And terrorism which is employed in the name of religion, of state, of national security, causes to rise in all of us pain which comes in the wake of our deepening realisation that the world might be slipping from our grasp.
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