Diluting the international fight against terrorism
Twenty years after 9/11, there is backsliding by western nations in their comprehensive fight against terror. This narrower outlook will have global ramifications
September 11, 2001, was a defining moment in the battle against terrorism. Before 9/11, the world was divided into “your terrorist” and “my terrorist”, which were meant to view terror and terrorism as domestic issues, not global concerns. But 9/11 proved that terrorism in one part of the world could devastate the centre of Manhattan, New York. Suddenly, they became “our” terrorists. The war against terror became a collective fight at the global level. The United Nations (UN) Security Council passed a binding resolution on September 28, 2001, and also established the Security Council Counter-Terrorism Committee, whose chair for 2022 is India.
But 20-plus years after 9/11, all is not well. We are drifting back to the era of ”your terrorist” and ”my terrorist”. To begin with, there is a move to categorise terrorism based on the motivations behind such acts. The current preoccupation of Europe (apart from Ukraine) is the rise of their Right-wing. European countries have identified violent Right-wing attacks as their main terrorist threat. These are being called Right-wing violent extremism, violent nationalism, far-Right terrorism, or more simply Right-wing terrorism. This has made Europe defensive while accosting other forms of terrorism, especially the radical Islamist terrorist upsurge in their own countries, and unable to support counterterrorism efforts elsewhere in Asia or Africa.
For the United States (US), the domestic priority now is what it calls racially/ethnically-motivated violent extremism (REMVE). This brand of “extremist terror” has distracted the US from terrorism in other parts of the world. The US attack on select high-value terror targets and also the close cooperation between India and the US in the UN are exceptions. REMVE threats are, at best, limited to certain national or regional contexts, and are certainly not global. Though important in their domestic context, this narrow focus has diluted the country’s larger focus. We are now slipping back to the “my terrorist-your terrorist” era.
Another danger in these labels is that they completely ignore that, in democracies, the Right-wing is part of the polity because it comes to power through the ballot. To demonise these ideologies, using arbitrary labels may work against democracy itself.
This comes even as some fundamental assumptions on which counterterrorism measures rest are being questioned. It is well known that the UN global counterterrorism strategy (GCTS) categorically states that “any acts of terrorism are criminal and unjustifiable, regardless of their motivation, wherever, whenever and by whomsoever committed”. In effect, it says that there cannot be any justification for terror. But when three terrorist attacks took place in France in 2020, the spokesperson of the high representative of the UN Alliance of Civilizations (UNAOC) said on October 28, 2020, that “the inflammatory caricatures have also provoked acts of violence against innocent civilians…”
In one swift sentence, this UN body provided these attacks with a justification (of Islamaphobia no less). It is not a secret that UNAOC depends on funding from Islamic countries for its survival. India held its ground in the latest GCTS report of June 2021 against attempts by countries to provide a justification for terror and dilute the fight against terrorism. There is no good terror or bad terror.
The other worrying attempt is to politicise the phobias against Abrahamic religions, and justify terror. This has serious implications for multicultural, pluralistic, and democratic countries such as ours. Declaring March 15 as the International Day to Combat Islamophobia through a resolution tabled by the Organisation of Islamic Cooperation (OIC) and co-sponsored inter alia by China and Russia, in effect, singled out one religion above the rest and tacitly divided the UN into religious camps. Only India and France made a so-called Explanation of Vote (EOV).
In its EOV, India condemned all acts motivated by anti-Semitism, Christianophobia or Islamophobia and stated: “…such phobias are not restricted to Abrahamic religions only. In fact, there is clear evidence that over decades such ‘religiophobias’ have affected the followers of non-Abrahamic religions as well. This has contributed to the emergence of contemporary forms of religiophobia, especially anti-Hindu, anti-Buddhist and anti-Sikh phobias.”
India provided examples in the destruction of Bamiyan Buddha, the massacre of Sikh pilgrims in gurud
waras, the attacks on temples, the glorification of breaking of idols in temples, and other such, against nonAbrahamic religions. “Celebration of a religion is one thing, but to commemorate the combatting of hatred against one religion is quite another,” said India and hoped that the resolution would not divide the UN into religious camps. The OIC sponsors (whom India recently accused of bigotry) rejected India’s attempts to include the word “pluralism” in the text, revealing their bias. Is it again a coincidence that Islamic countries are the biggest voluntary donors to the
UN for counterterrorism activities?
To top it all, Pakistan continues cross-border terrorism against India and shelters many UN-proscribed terror groups such as the Lashkar-eTaiba and Jaish-e-Mohammed. The Taliban’s capture of Afghanistan, and its continuing strong links with al-Qaeda, have given a fillip to all radical Islamist groups elsewhere, including in Africa and West Asia. The existing structures in Africa are ill-prepared to counter these terrorist groups, particularly in the Sahel, Somalia, or even further down south. We ignore this at our own peril.
Now, some countries seem to have reservations about using the term “zero tolerance” to terrorism. Then have we now come to a stage where we can tolerate a “bit of terror”?
If that is so, how little?