It’s been
more than a week since the horrific massacre in Paris – whose death toll could
have been at least tripled but for the effective work of security guards at the Stade de France where a friendly match had just commenced between France and
Germany….The lockdown this weekend of central Brussels may seem heavy-handed
but obviously warranted given the disaffection clearly embedded in at least one
of the Brussels neighbourhoods……
Given the
long battle which raged around a flat in the St Dennis neighbourhood of Paris on
Wednesday before some of the apparent perpetrators were brought down, it is
quite amazing that only three deaths seem to have resulted (more so in Mali) but,
sadly, many more innocent people in Syria have died as France has stepped up
its bombing of ISIS targets in that country…..
Like most
people I have not only followed these fast-moving events but have tried to
understand the motives of those concerned….For me there are 3 basic questions –
- Who are these people, prepared to blow up
people amongst whom they have lived?
- Why are they doing it?
- What does it take to get
them to stop?
Although I
have 7 years of living in muslim societies, the Russian cultural influence (for
which read vodka) was still strong in Azerbaijan, Kyrgyzstan and Uzbekistan –
although ebbing particularly fast in the last country… where indeed there was a
lockdown in the Pamir mountains just outside Tashkent in 2000 because of
terrorist activities…
that 90 percent of French citizens who have
radical Islamist beliefs have French grandparents and 80 percent come from
non-religious families. In fact, most Europeans who are drawn into jihad are
“born again” into radical religion by their social peers.
In France, and in
Europe more generally, more than three of every four recruits join the Islamic
State together with friends, while only one in five do so with family members
and very few through direct recruitment by strangers. Many of these young
people identify with neither the country their parents come from nor the
country in which they live. Other identities are weak and non-motivating.
One
woman in the Paris suburb of Clichy-sous-Bois described her conversion as being
like that of a transgender person who opts out of the gender assigned at birth:
“I was like a Muslim trapped in a Christian body,” she said. She believed she
was only able to live fully as a Muslim with dignity in the Islamic State. For others who have struggled to find meaning in
their lives, ISIS is a thrilling cause and call to action that promises glory
and esteem in the eyes of friends, and through friends, eternal respect and
remembrance in the wider world that many of them will never live to enjoy.
A July 2014 poll by ICM Research
suggested that more than one in four French youth of all creeds between the
ages of eighteen and twenty-four have a favorable or very favorable opinion of
ISIS.
Even if these estimates are high, in our own interviews with young people
in the vast and soulless housing projects of the Paris banlieues we found
surprisingly wide tolerance or support for ISIS among young people who want to
be rebels with a cause—who want, as they see it, to defend the oppressed.
In another
blog in the same journal a well-known
Pakistani journalist (with a decade of personal experience as a guerrilla) looks
at the divergent pattern of attacks on civilian targets by terrorist groups of
the past decade and offers the obvious
explanation for the attacks in the European heartland -
ISIS is now determined to launch attacks against
those states that are waging war against it. Turkey has just given the US
government permission to use some of its airbases for strikes against ISIS;
Hezbollah is helping Bashar al-Assad fight ISIS.
The Russians are now bombing
ISIS and other groups, while the French are crucial partners in the anti-ISIS
coalition.
French warplanes bombing ISIS from runways in the Gulf states are
about to get a fresh boost as the French government sends its only aircraft carrier
to the Gulf.
ISIS’s message is thus clear—the group is waging
an all-out deliberate war against all those countries that are lining up to
fight it. Again, this is not an attempt to take down the Western order, in the
way that al-Qaeda was trying to do, nor is it a reaction to the evils of
Western heathens. It is a direct reaction to what is being done to ISIS by
coalition forces.
The background for this sad state of affairs is
common knowledge. The emergence of a unipolar world system in the early 1990s
has induced Western governments to push for unrestricted market dominance at
home and abroad. Also, triumphalism has become the norm of foreign policy,
which embraced military interventions aimed at regime change in contravention
to international law and massive public opposition.
One component of the ‘regime-change’ strategy was
to support and collaborate with non-state armed groups. The first pilot
exercise was the direct and indirect (through the ISI of Pakistan) support that
the American administration provided to the Taliban in Afghanistan in the
1990s. The support took an ‘unintended’ form during the 2000s, when the
Taliban were slicing off US aid to the failed state that the
US intervention had left behind.
Then came the Iraq War, which created a large
number of Sunni armed groups, including Al-Qaeda in Iraq. The latter joined
other Sunni insurgency groups in 2006 to form ISIS. The
recruitment ground for these groups consisted of Sunnis who lost jobs and
livelihoods as a result of Western military intervention in Iraq. The link between Western interventions and the strengthening
of terrorist groups was also evident after the overthrow of Gaddafi in Libya.
Under the nose of Western surveillance, Libyan arms depots were looted and
weapons sent to Syria through a NATO ally – Turkey. The Times reported on an arms shipment on 14 September 2012.
This is unlikely to have been the only shipment.
Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Seymour
Hersh wrote an article in April 2014, in which he exposed a classified
agreement between the CIA, Turkey and the Syrian rebels to create the “rat
line” – the covert network used to channel weapons and ammunition from Libya to
Syria through Turkey.
The funding was provided by Turkey, Saudi Arabia and
Qatar, with full knowledge of the US authorities.
My third question does beg some further questions
– not least the obvious one of why I haven’t raised this question before in my
blog…..I'm forced to recognise that our sense of moral outrage is relative and selective.
Indeed even to pose the question is, for many, a concession to terrorism……..
Translate
it to more everyday behaviour….confronted by a bully, do we concede? Surely
not! That's the "lesson" we've drawn from appeasement...Not surprisingly therefore it is the basis of most of the pundits’ commentary……
I
think, however, we need to go back to the first question and be willing to explore more the nature of the
people we are dealing with….it is certainly not the German friend Camus was
writing to in 1944…
And the scale of games being played by our so-called allies in the Middle East (if not Russia) should certainly make us think ten times before sustaining or strengthening some of our strange alliances
update; by a pure coincidence, I have just started to watch this 1985 film "Brazil" which, despite its opening humour, sends shivers down my spine. We've been at it for 30 years??????