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OIC must get serious against suicide
terror
By Phar Kim Beng
KUALA
LUMPUR - The Organization of Islamic Conference (OIC)
will meet in Kuala Lumpur next month. While it has a
long menu of agendas to deal with, none is more urgent
than the issue of suicide terrorism.
Suicide
terrorism is a ghastly specter irrespective of religious
denominations. It is also a problem with which all
citizens have to live, and contend with in the future,
as terrorists have been hitting both hard and soft
targets indiscriminately. This trend was seen early last
October, when a taped message had Osama bin Laden
calling various groups to bring the West and its proxies
to their knees by bombing their economic targets. On
October 12, Bali was the target.
Since the
attacks in the United States on September 11, 2001, the
hyperzealous desire of suicidal terrorists to murder and
maim has been impossible to ignore anywhere, including
Southeast Asia.
In the August 5 bombing of the
JW Marriott Hotel in Jakarta, Southeast Asia experienced
its first suicide attack: The antagonist, whose severed
head was later recovered on the defaced fifth floor of
the hotel, was a member of Jemaah Islamiya, a group with
links to al-Qaeda.
This incident, not unlike the
Bali bombing a year prior - although that was not a
suicide attack - collapses the belief that only in the
Middle East would such crazed acts be possible.
Indeed, suicide terrorism is spreading into
different theaters and spheres. Casablanca, Riyadh,
Davao and Bali have all been hit hard. A study by Andrew
Tan and Kumar Ramakhrisna, both at the Institute of
Defense and Strategic Studies in Singapore, attests to
the terrorists' attempts, botched or otherwise, to
launch their attacks on land and sea.
Although
most Muslim countries remain by and large peaceful,
stagnant economic conditions have made most of them
fertile ground for the recruitment of disfranchised
youth, who normally range between the ages of 18 and 40.
Suicide terrorism is, however, a symptom of the
wretched time in the Middle East due to the recent US
occupation of Iraq. Not since the defeat of Arab forces
in the Six Day War in 1967 - a battle that is still
regarded today as a humiliation, as the Israeli Defense
Forces were able to take out the airfields and jet
fighters of Egypt, Jordan and Syria in relentless
bombings - has the region reached a worse nadir.
First, Iraq was bombed, and Saddam Hussein and
his Ba'athist loyalists dislodged, then quickly after,
the administration of US President George W Bush
declared that while its goal was "to set the Iraqi
people free", they will not be free turn Iraq into an
Islamic state.
Furthermore, the US invasion not
only bypassed the will of a majority of members at the
United Nations and the Arab League, but the world writ
large. Even an emergency meeting convened by the OIC
last February could not save Iraq from invasion and
occupation.
As the OIC summit convenes again
next month in Kuala Lumpur, the question is, can the
organization, a grouping representing some 57 Muslim
countries, of which Iraq and Palestine are members, ban
suicide terrorism as an abhorrent and illegal tactic of
war?
No one knows how a large and unwieldy
organization such as OIC would decide on such a delicate
matter. Guided by a consensus-driven decision-making
style, known in Arabic as shura (close
consultation), there is no telling whether the OIC can
put its proverbial foot down on suicide terrorism once
and for all.
But the OIC should buck tradition
and oppose suicide terrorism unconditionally, as any
prolongation of the issue will have the radical clerics
and disillusioned youth thinking that suicide terrorism
is at least politically correct, even if it could be
ethically wrong.
In fact, urged by Malaysia,
which is categorically against suicide terrorism because
it involves the killing of civilians, an act that is
banned in Islam, the OIC has been used as a platform to
oppose the act. Yet, as seen by previous OIC
deliberations, the collective stance of the members
remains inconclusive. In its meeting in Kuala Lumpur in
April last year, the OIC's 13-member ministerial
committee did not agree on the definition of terrorism.
Malaysian Prime Minister Mahathir Mohamad told
that gathering that all attacks on civilians - either by
government forces or by suicide bombers - should be
classified as terrorism: "Whether the attackers are
acting on their own or on the orders of their
governments, whether they are regulars or irregulars, if
the attack is against civilians then they must be
considered as terrorists."
However, Iranian
Foreign Minister Kamal Kharrazi was among the many
delegates at that meeting who argued that the
Palestinian suicide bombers were not to be deemed
terrorists. Said Kharrazi: "In Palestine, the lands of
these people who are committing suicide have been
occupied. So in general, the resistance is a legitimate
one. To resist against occupation is quite different
from the terrorist attack on New York, which was
condemned by everyone, including the Islamic Republic of
Iran."
In the end, the committee sought to
convene a UN conference to consider the issue, which did
not come to be. Indeed, even during the session, OIC
delegates admitted privately they doubted that the
United States and other permanent members of the UN
Security Council would support the idea of such a
conference. This was because the debate would inevitably
be enlarged to criticize the iron-fist tactics of
Israel, an ally of the US and one of the contributing
causes of the suicidal attacks.
If next month's
OIC meeting is to be of use, Malaysia should continue to
lead on this issue and show the peril of suicide
terrorism anew, this time by persuading Iran to change
its position. After all, the top Shi'a cleric of Iraq,
Grand Ayatollah Mohammed Baqr al-Hakim, who was known to
be a good friend of Iran, was himself killed by a
suicide terrorist act late last month. Iran mourned his
death for three days. Indeed, the time has come for Iran
to make a clean break with any ideological support of
suicide terrorism.
Regardless of the OIC's
dismal record, times have clearly changed. If more
Muslim youth take to suicide terrorism, Islam may well
be irreparably tarnished as a "violent" religion, when
in fact the religion itself is solidly based on the
benevolence and compassion exemplified by the life of
the Prophet Mohammed.
More than ever, the OIC
has to be the adjudicator of a contentious issue in
Islam, without which aggrieved Muslims will continue to
blow themselves up, either in their own countries or
others. Such wanton acts of violence will convey Islam
as an atavistic religion.
(Copyright 2003 Asia
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