PEOPLE AND POLITICS BY MOHAMMED HARUNA

The Bogey of International Terrorism

kudugana@yahoo.com

Over a year ago I wrote on these pages about the danger of Nigeria fighting a war that is not its war. This war, I said, was America’s self-declared “war on terror”. In that article I quoted Mahmoud Mamdani as one good reason why it is foolish to allow ourselves to be dragged into someone else’s war.

Mamdani, a professor of Government at Columbia University, New York, had delivered a lecture at Ahmadu Bello University, Zaria, on Contemporary Political Terror: Its origin in the Late Cold War. His conclusion was just about the best reason anyone could give for being careful about swallowing the American propaganda about its war on terror.

That conclusion bears repeating every now and again. “We need”, Mamdani said, “to be wary of the American attempt to draw our governments and political elites into another  version of the Cold War. Let us not forget that for Africa, as for the Middle-East and Asia and Latin America, the Cold war was a hot war. We paid a huge price for it: militarization of state life, unaccountability in politics and the pawning of our economic resources. Before our leaders consider a renewed American invitation to join a new edition of the Cold War called ‘the war on terror’, let us subject that invitation and its terms and condition to broad national, continental and global debate”.

More than one year after Mamdani’s warning, it seems our political elite are hell-bent on plunging our country into a war that is not ours.

Right now a bill that will end up dragging Nigeria into America’s “war on terror” is crawling its way slowly but surely through the National Assembly. The bill, sponsored by my good friend, Senator Ben Obi, is “for an act to enhance the Nation’s internal and external security against terrorism and related tendencies and among other things to enforce or assist in the enforcement of all applicable federal laws and to provide for the establishment of the Nigerian Anti-terrorism Agency; and for related matters”.

On the surface the bill looks innocuous. It defines terrorism first, as any act which violates the country’s Criminal and Penal Codes and endangers life, public property, natural resources, environmental or cultural heritage. Terrorism, the bill said, also includes any act calculated or intended to intimidate, frighten, force, coerce or induce any government, or institution or the general public into taking or abstaining from a standpoint. Again any act calculated or intended to disrupt public service or create general insurrection is terrorism. Finally, according to the bill, terrorism includes promoting, sponsoring, commanding, aiding, inciting, encouraging – etc, etc – any one to commit any of the acts listed above.

The violation of the Criminal or Penal Code is obviously a bad thing and no one will quarrel with such a violator being punished. There is, however, a rub. And this is the criminalization of dissent, in word or in deed, which is implied in this nebulous definition of terrorism.

Let me illustrate with a simple example from The Economist, that veritable British Establishment newspaper, as it insists on calling itself. This is a story the magazine carried in its edition of October 1 about an incident at the recent Labour Party annual conference at Brighton. The significance of story for civil liberties everywhere in the world cannot be overexaggerated.

The story deserves being quoted in full. “How”, it began, “will Britain apply its new anti-terrorist power? If you ask ministers, as many did during the Labour Party Conference in Brighton this week, the answer comes laden with soothing words like sensible, rational and proportionate.

“But the conference showed how those dressed in a little brief authority behave in real life. An 82-year old man was bundled out of the conference hall for shouting ‘nonsense’ during a speech on Iraq by Jack Straw, the foreign secretary. When Walter Wolfgang tried to return he was stopped by the police citing the Prevention of Terrorism Act.

“The burly stewards who ejected Mr. Wolfgang could not have picked on a less threatening person. A Labour Party member for the past 57 years, he came to Britain in 1937 after fleeing Nazi Germany. Mr. Wolfgang offered to go quietly, but the heavies wanted to make an example of him. As cabinet ministers looked on, they turfed another man out of the hall, for daring to suggest that Mr. Wolfgang should be treated respectfully.

“Although Britons treat abstract debate about their civil liberties with a yawn, nothing stirs them like real abuse. On the evening of Wolfgang’s ejection, Ian McCartney, the Labour Party’s chairman, issued a grudging apology. The next morning, after receiving a broadside from the newspapers, the prime minister said sorry properly.

“The fuss is hardly enough to make the government tear up its anti-terrorism strategy. But it should remind lawmakers that people soon make casual use of the powers they are given, whatever the original intention.

“Politicians routinely behave as if this were not so and that they should not share in the blame. While saying sorry to Mr. Wolfgang, Mr. Blair told the BBC that ‘it’s not that me or anyone else has given some instruction to people to go and be heavy’. Coming just a day after he told the conference the criminal justice system should worry less about finding innocent people guilty and more about the rights of people to live in freedom and security, that rang hollow”.

Blair may declaim responsibility for Wolfgang’s ill-treatment, but that is no more than cold comfort for the old man. However, if Wolfgang is still alive to enjoy his cold comfort that was far from the case for Jean Charles de Menezes who was killed on board a Tube train in London July 22 on mere suspicion that he was a terrorist. This was in the wake of the London bombings of July 7 in which over 50 people were killed.

Not long after the London Police Chief, Sir Ian Blair, praised the shooting of Menezes as evidence that Britain’s new shoot-to-kill policy was working to stop “Islamic terrorism”, it turned out that Menezes couldn’t have been more innocent; he was Brazilian and not Arab or a Muslim, the stereotype of a terrorist. Not only that, eye witness accounts later revealed that he offered no resistance when he was confronted by the trigger-happy chaps who gunned him down.

Prime Minister Blair can declaim responsibility for the fate of the Wolfgangs and the Menezes of this world, but their fate was the inevitable result of laws that are made to cover the rapacity and the bungling of those in power rather than to protect ordinary people and their civil liberties. And this is exactly what the anti-terrorism laws of the United States and Britain amount to. Nigeria’s anti-terrorism bill will be no better if passed into law.

Both George W. Bush, the US president, and Blair claim their laws are meant to secure their people from terrorism by severely punishing it at home and spreading democracy abroad, especially in so-called terrorist outposts like the Middle-East, South East Asia, and wherever there are large populations of Muslims. In making those claims the irony is obviously lost on the pair that their laws are merely recreating their countries in the image of the tyranny they claim to be fighting.

Take for example, Bushes USA Patriotic Act of 2001, which spells out chillingly as Uniting and Strengthening America by Providing Appropriate Tools Required to Intercept and Obstruct Terrorism Act. This act, among other things, makes “offensive” criticism of government a crime, lifts the ban on domestic spying by the CIA, allows unrestricted searches of records of individuals and groups by the country’s intelligence outfits, allows unrestricted wiretapping and internet monitory and allows the searching of suspects without warrants.

With a democracy like this who needs tyranny?

Like Bush’s Patriotic Act, Blair’s new anti-terrorism laws equally seeks to abridge the civil liberties of British citizens and foreigners alike, notwithstanding his claims to the contrary. “The rules of the game” he has said insistently in pushing through the laws, “have changed” and therefore the police must be allowed to implement “summary justice”. With the new laws in place, the police can, among other things, shoot to kill, intern people without trial,  arrest arbitrarily and  detain people for up to 3 months without charge as against the former limit of two weeks. The laws also criminalize the “glorification” of the preparation and commission of terrorism without defining the word. And as if to show that his government meant business, people were detained during the recent Labour Party conference for wearing anti-Blair and anti-Iraqi war T-shirts.

Terrorism is essentially crime, not war. But war or not, you cannot deal with it by ignoring its causes. These causes lie in the neo-colonial policies of the world’s super-powers, policies that have impoverished the majority of mankind. If this sounds like the polemics of a left-wing malcontent, then he is in the excellent company of the United Nations, no less.

According to a recent edition The Independent of London (August 26), with barely three weeks on his seat, the neo-conservative American ambassador to the United Nations, Mr. John Bolton, tried to “scupper” the organization’s strategy for dealing with poverty during its last summit. Among 750 amendments Bolton sought on the UN policy document for the summit were changes that would delete all specific references to the UN’s modest Millennium Development Goals which, among other things, sought to eradicate “extreme poverty and hunger”, achieve universal primary education and reduce mortality rate of children under five by two thirds, by the year 2015. Interestingly America had signed on to the document when it was first agreed to in 2000.

At the same time that the Americans sought the deletion of all references to dealing with global poverty, which lies at the root of terrorism, they tried, said The Independent, to “add emphasis to passages on fighting terrorism and spreading democracy”. Yet it should be clear to any reasonable person that democracy and poverty are contradictions in terms, in principle, if not in fact. After all a poor man, as we say in Nigeria, has no choice.

Unlike Bush, Blair and their clique, my friend Senator Obi may be well-intentioned in sponsoring his anti-terrorism bill. But, as the saying goes, the road to perfidy may be paved with good intentions. If he indeed wants to fight terrorism in Nigeria, he ought to know that the effective way to nip it in the bud is to deal with the essentially anti-people policies and programmes of the ruling Peoples Democratic Party.

He ought to know that during yesterday’s Cold War, dictators like Mobutu Sese Seko in Zaire, Augusto Pinochet in Chile and Ferdinand Marcos in Philippines hid under the war against Communism to tyrannize their people and become fabulously rich in the process.

With the Communist threat no longer available to scare the rest of the world into line, terrorism has now been invented to replace it.

Why you may ask, should the world’s only super power have become nervous following the demise of Communism as the only serious threat to its hegemony? One answer is that we all seem to need bad guys  for self-esteem or for power. Whatever the explanation, it is difficult if not impossible to deny the argument that there are certain powerful interests in America that require a constant supply of threats and villains to stay in big business. These interests, as Francis Wheen, a leading British satirist, said in his hilarious but at the same time deadly serious  2004 book, How Mumbo-Jumbo Conquered the world, “are usually known as the military-industrial complex”, a phrase  that was, he saud, first used by Dwight D. Eisenhower.

And Eisenhower should know; he was the 34^th president of the United States and a  four-star general to boot.

True, the threats and villains that the military-industrial complex apparently need to stay in big business are sometimes real, – 9/11 was real and so were Bali and 7/7 – but again as Wheen said, more often than not, they are exaggerated or simply invented. He couldn’t have put it better when he said of the latest threats and villains, that “For the American defense industry, which had spent the past decade fretfully calculating the consequences of a ‘peace dividend’ the identification of Islamic terrorism as the latest globe threatening force was very good news indeed”.

What is good news for America is, however, not necessarily good news for the rest of us. Nigeria’s number one enemy is not terrorism. It is the deadly combination of poverty, ignorance and corruption. This combination is what should concentrate our minds and which we should be spending our time and resources on – not something which essentially has been fabricated to whip the rest of the world into line now that Communists are no longer available as the world’s chief villains.