PERSPECTIVE

Who is a terrorist?

Mohammed Haruna

It was probably not merely coincidental that the Civil Rights Congress (CRC), a Kaduna-based human rights organisation under the leadership of Malam Shehu Sani, organised a two-day seminar on Terrorism, Politics, Religion and Peace: Nigeria and Beyond, beginning September 10. As we all know September 11 was the first annual remembrance day of the earth-shaking dramatic attack on New York’s famous twin towers, known as the World Trade Centre, and on the Pentagon. Even if the CRC seminar was merely coincidental, it was also very apt, starting a day before the anniversary of the twin attack on America and ending on the day of the anniversary of the attack itself.

Although the seminar examined not just terrorism but also politics, religion and peace, controversy at the seminar centred on what is terrorism and who is a terrorist. Thanks to the near total domination of the global media by the West, today, terrorism is equated with how Muslims react to Western aggression and hegemony. Westerners and others who share their values in the Third World often feel outraged at suicide bombing by, say, Hamas activists against Israeli targets, and point at such suicide bombings as sufficient evidence that Islam is a bloody-minded religion.

In expressing such outrage Westerners simply forget history. They forget the legend of Samson. Samson, according to the Bible, had been captured and tortured by Philistines after a bloody war and had been chained and put on display in Dagon’s Temple in Gaza in today’s Palestine. Out of sheer desperation, Samson prayed to God to give him back his strength to bring down the temple on himself and his captors. God answered his prayers and he was able to bring down the roof of the temple, killing himself and his captors.

Samson has since become a hero of the Jews and Christendom. Indeed his heroism was what led the advocates of the Israeli nuclear bomb programme to see it as the contemporary equivalent of Samson and a replacement of the Jewish Masada complex. Masada is an ancient fortress in Israel on a mountain 48.3 kilometer southeast of Jerusalem. This was where, in AD 73, over 900 Jewish defenders of the fortress, called the Zealots, decided to commit suicide than surrender to the conquering Romans. Modern day Jewish advocates of the nuclear bomb saw the Samson option of bringing down the whole Middle-East and possibly the whole world down in defence of a greater and greater Israel as their only safeguard against a repetition of Masada.

Obviously Samson, who today is a hero of Jewry and Christendom, was no more than a precursor of today’s Hamas activist who has been driven into sacrificing even his life in response to the complete ruthlessness of an aggressor. Yet the Hamas activist is seen by the West as a terrorist, period.

Obviously one man’s terrorist, as I said in my short paper at the seminar, is another man’s hero. Sheikh Ibrahim El-Zak-Zaki, the leader of the Muslim Brothers found this statement somewhat disagreeable and unacceptable because it does not, he said, provide an objective and therefore a useful definition of terrorism. I, in turn, thought his observation was a misunderstanding of my statement because I did not mean it as an endorsement of the selective definition of terrorism. Even then, I thought the Sheikh’s definition of terrorism was probably the most scientific anyone provided at the seminar. In any conflict, he argued, there is the aggressor and there is the aggressed. The aggressor, he said, is the terrorist while the aggressed is a counter-terrorist. The problem with the definition, however, is that all too often in a conflict it is not easy to tell who is the aggressor and who is the aggressed.

By his own definition of terrorism, said Sheikh Ibrahim, it is wrong to refer to the Hamas, for example, as a terrorist organisation because it has merely been countering Israel aggression. To which Father Peter Tanko of the Catholic Church objected. Terrorism, he insisted, was terrorism even when used for self-defence because there are always non-violent options for self-defence. At first thought Father Tanko seems to have a point but on second thought one must wonder what non-violent options the Palestinians have in the face of the ruthless Israeli aggression they have faced since the creation of Israel, especially since Ariel Sharon, whose record of bloody-mindedness since he was a junior officer in the Israeli army, became Israeli Prime Minister.

What this little debate between Sheikh Ibrahim and Father Tanko showed quite clearly was that the debate over what is terrorism and who is a terrorist is likely to go on for a long time, if not forever.

My own position, as my short paper suggests, is that even if the aggressed can be accused of using terror to achieve his political objective, the greater blame and the greater responsibility for terrorism as a problem, whether locally or globally, must go to the aggressor for being the first to introduce violence into the equation.

The following is an edited version of the paper:-

Terrorism is the opposite of peace. Terrorism is violence or the threat of violence for political purposes. Such violence includes bombings, assassinations, murder and kidnapping. In this sense everyone should detest terrorism just like everyone wants peace.

The problem with terrorism, however, is that, like beauty, it is in the eye of a beholder. In other words, one man’s terrorist may be another man’s hero. In the local context, for example, Gani Adams, the leader of the more violent faction of Odua Peoples Congress (OPC) that claims to defend the interests of the Yoruba nation, is probably a hero to most Yoruba. To the victims of the organisation’s violent ways, however, Adams is a terrorist. Actually officially he is a terrorist since the Federal Government has outlawed his organisation and once declared him wanted for mass murder including of policemen. The fact, however, that for years he was never arrested, and then when he was eventually arrested and charged to court, he was quickly acquitted in Lagos, the political heartland of the Yoruba nation, suggested that he had sympathy among his people who gave him refuge from the law for a very long time.

Similarly, in the global context, whereas to the West, Osama bin Laden is a terrorist, to millions of Muslims and Arabs, he is a hero who has stood up to Western hegemony. The same thing can be said of Iraq’s Saddam Hussein, whose overthrow has become a cardinal objective of America and Britain, if not the entire West. To the West, Iraq is a terrorist state for, among other things, hiding its alleged nuclear programme, but Israel which certainly has nuclear weapons and has refused to sign the nuclear non-proliferation treaty, talkless allow international inspection of its nuclear weapons programme, is not. Likewise apartheid South Africa which terrorized all its neighbours, in the name of containing communism and which had a joint nuclear weapons programme with Israel, was not.

Similarly, Christian East Timorees who successfully fought for their independence from Muslim Malaysia were considered by the global media and the international community as freedom fighters and its leader awarded the Nobel Peace Prize, but the neighbouring Muslim Mindanaoans who started out fighting for autonomy from the Christian Philippine have been portrayed as terrorists.

Terrorism is in the eye of the beholder for the simple reason that, unlike a common criminal or a mercenary who terrorizes for money, a terrorist does so for political and sometimes religious ends. Naturally those who share a “terrorist’s” political or religious affiliations or objectives will see him as a hero, while those opposed to those objectives will see him as a villain.

In Nigeria, except for the OPC in the South-West and the Egbesu Boys in the Delta region, few organisations have tried to use violence in a systematic way for political or religious ends. The Bakassi Boys in the East is also a violent group. However, it differs from OPC and Egbesu Boys in that it is more of a vigilante group than an ethnic militia which has political objectives. As we approach the next general elections, however, there has been a tendency to use the Bakassi Boys for political ends. There is also an increasing use of university cult members by politicians to achieve their political objectives.

OPC seems to have its remote origin in the annulment by military President, General Ibrahim Babangida, of the presidential election of 1992 which late Chief M.K.O. Abiola, a Yoruba, seemed set to win. Babangida eventually stepped aside in August 1993 and was succeeded by Chief Ernest Shonekan, the head of Babangida’s cabinet, in interim capacity. Three months later, General Sani Abacha, Babangida’s side-kick and Minister of Defence, kicked out Shonekan with a little prompting from Abiola who thought Abacha would deannul the 1992 elections and declare him president. When Abacha failed to do so and instead detained Abiola, the chief’s kith and kin decided to wage a violent resistence against Abacha’s rule. This was the immediate root of OPC as a “terrorist” organisation.

As for the Egbesu Boys, their roots go further back before General Babangida. For decades they had waged a violent campaign against not only the federal authorities but also oil conglomerates like Shell and Elf. Their grouse has been what they considered the exploitation of their oil rich land for the benefit of the rest of the country, an exploitation compounded by what they saw as willful environmental degradation.

As I have said, there are few organisations in the country that have tried to use violence to achieve their political or religious ends in a systematic way. This, however, is not to say there isn’t a lot of unstructured violence for political ends. On the contrary, since the emergence of the Fourth Republic, violence for political and religious ends have been on the increase, especially in the Middle Belt states of Plateau, Taraba and Benue, and also in the North-Western state of Kaduna. Such violence, however, are intermittent and the warring sides do not appear to have well-structured ethnic militias like the OPC or the Egbesu Boys.

Turning to the global context, it seems that America as the world’s only military super power, decides who is a terrorist and who is not. It also seems to decide which ones have global reach and which ones do not.

Herein, I thinks, lies the source of the problem of finding solutions to terrorism. America, and by extension the West’s, definition of terrorism is self-serving. Also America’s reliance on its military might to solve the problem of terrorism deprives it of the moral authority necessary for rooting out terrorism. Indeed its reliance on crude force to solve the problem which was created by its Cowboy mentality, to begin with, makes it the biggest terrorist on earth.

So both within the Nigerian and global context, there is a need to rely more on dialogue than on force in order to solve the problem of terrorism. There is a need to find out the political and religious reasons why people resort to terrorism instead of treating such people like common criminals. This is a tough option because it may encourage the belief that political violence pays, but it is more likely to break the vicious circle of violence than the option of countering political violence with state sponsored violence, whether it is at the national or global level.