Dear Readers,
I am trying to simplify and make a coherent understanding of Terrorism. I wanted to know what guides them, motivates them, pushes them so much that they become vehement killers. I wanted to understand the psyche and morale of these human killers in the disguise of human.
Rebels, insurgents, paramilitaries, separatists, militants, guerrillas, insurrectionists, fundamentalists... are these all terrorists? Or does terrorism claim its own exclusive niche? The exasperating inability to define terrorism is betrayed in the UN 2006 Global Counter-Terrorism Strategy - "we, the States Members of the United Nations...strongly condemn terrorism in all its forms and manifestations, committed by whomever, wherever and for whatever purposes".
The vocabulary of terrorism has become the successor to that of anarchy and communism as the catch-all label of opprobrium, exploited accordingly by media and politicians.
The difficulty in constructing a definition which eliminates any just cause for terrorism is that history provides too many examples of organization and their leaders branded as terrorists . This has applied particularly to national liberation movements fighting colonial or oppressive regimes, engaging in violence within their own countries often as a last resort.
Bomb attacks on the US embassies in Kenya and Tanzania in 1998 followed by the 9/11 tragedy in 2001 marked the renationalisation of terror in which a populist and possibly negotiable cause within the nation state becomes subservient to principled grievances against the world order, communicated through the tools of globalization led by the internet. Both attacks in Africa were traced to the group headed by Osama bin Laden known as al-Qaeda. Its ideology is shaped by the belief that Islam is being degraded and humiliated by "western" values, with particular disgust reserved for those Arab countries, such as Saudi Arabia and Egypt, which are close allies of the US. The plight of the Palestinians is a rallying call for al-Qaeda whose central goal is to expel Americans from Muslim lands and dismantle pro-US Middle Eastern governments. To this end all US citizens and their sympathizers are to be killed, regardless of whether or not they are Muslim.
This extreme form of fundamentalist Sunni Islam adopted by bin Laden and his closest associates is often described as jihadism and is believed to have been inspired by an Egyptian radical, Sayyid Qutb, who opposed the Nasser regime. Fighting alongside the conservative Taliban in Afghanistan may have been a further influence on bin Laden. The manic ideology of al-Qaeda has no roots in mainstream Islam which shares core values of peace and tolerance with the world's major religions. The Koran teaches that the killing of innocent humans is a crime and that suicide is unacceptable.
Attempts have been made to construct psychological profiles with proven susceptibility to indoctrination. In Islamic countries such interest focuses on the sense of political impotence created by inadequate democracy and corrupt governance. In Europe, there are suggestions that young Muslims from immigrant families suffer identity problems in reconciling differences between western lifestyles and their upbringing. As yet these theories remain in the realms of speculation. Likewise, media tendencies to brand Pakistan as a source of world terror have been countered by a remarkable petition “Say no to Terrorism” which has been signed by over 60 million people in the country, more than the number of voters in the recent election.
