SPEAKING
FREELY Terrorism and the problem of binary
vision By Michael Vatikiotis
Speaking Freely is an Asia Times
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SINGAPORE - Security
policy in the United States and Southeast Asia is
made these days in a dangerous knee-jerk fashion,
designed more in reaction to events than as a
divining of
principles and practice as
they should be applied to a given situation.
A senior US intelligence officer told me
recently that there is so much going on at the
same time that the White House and National
Security Council have barely five minutes to
devote to any of the world's major conflicts in a
given briefing.
If the Israeli Air Force
is pounding Beirut and another 50 people die in
car bombs across Baghdad on a single day, what
time is there to even consider the implications of
the Ethiopian army marching into Somalia, let
alone read a position paper prepared by an
academic think-tank on why the Islamic militias in
Somalia are winning ground?
Because there
is so little time between events and the need for
a policy decision, policymakers in the US these
days tend to rely on the media for their informed
opinions. In the process, much of the nuance is
lost. Policy tends to reflect extremes and does
not account for the middle ground.
So in
the "war against terror" we see an all-or-nothing
approach - everyone is either bad or good, there
is no in-between. There are no freedom fighters,
only terrorists. The government of Lebanon is bad
because Hezbollah has some seats in the parliament
- even though they were democratically elected.
Hamas is bad because they refuse to recognize
Israel, but they were democratically elected and
model their party's political strategy on the
ruling party in moderate Turkey.
There are
good Muslims and bad Muslims - the Sunnis are the
good guys, Shi'ites are a threat. Tell the
policymakers that Shi'ites are a persecuted
minority in some countries, and this gets in the
way of a convenient big picture. And so on. The
impact of this more binary approach to security
policymaking is to complicate and attenuate,
rather than resolve, situations the policy is
aimed at addressing. The focus is on unambiguous
symptoms rather than complicated causes.
Here in Southeast Asia, this tendency is
hindering efforts to resolve conflicts raging in
marginal areas of southern Thailand and the
southern Philippines. All the internal conflicts
in Southeast Asia are the product of complex
social, ethnic and religious factors. Rebel groups
use their ethnic identity to fight for political
power and social mobility and drag in religion as
a mobilizing tool. What does this make them?
Terrorists? Jihadists? Or simply misguided
opportunists?
Religious
misunderstanding The reality on the ground
is that religion is a key factor in the chemistry
of these conflicts. But religion is neither the
principal cause nor the main goal of the conflict.
In southern Thailand, Islam is not the basis of
the struggle, which has roots in the ethnic and
cultural identity of the ethnic Malays, and a deep
sense of territorial attachment to the notion of
the former Kingdom of Patani.
The term
"jihad" is used to describe a struggle for
self-determination by the ethnic Malays of
southern Thailand. What is striking is that in
conversation with religious students and teachers
sympathetic to the insurgency in southern
Thailand, aspects of religion as a motive for the
armed struggle are never raised.
To be
sure, religion plays a critical role in helping to
create the networks and support for recruiting new
members of the insurgency. The military wing of
Barisan Revolusi Nasional Melayu Pattani
Coordinate, or BRN-C, a relatively new insurgent
group founded by a prominent political activist
and credited by the Thai authorities with the
largest number of insurgent attacks, was led by a
religious teacher who used the largest
state-approved school in the region as a
recruiting ground.
Perhaps this is a
logical and effective military tactic. Most Malay
Muslim students from southern Thailand study in
religious institutions because they are poor and
religious education is free. Insurgent
organizations use donations from religious
foundations to fund students and create a sense of
obligation. Since many, if not most, of the
students graduate and eventually become religious
teachers, they use the pondoks or
madrassas as a base of operations.
Islam is therefore a strong but nuanced
factor in the conflict in southern Thailand.
Religion is more a tactical than a strategic asset
for the insurgents; it helps recruit and motivate
members, but does not appear to be an important
ideological underpinning or long-term objective.
It would seem axiomatic that religion
points the way to uncovering the network that
sustains the insurgency. From the great carpeted
colonnades of Egypt's Al Azhar to the palm-fringed
compounds of small private pondoks in
remote parts of southern Thailand, the youth of
Pattani are being drawn into another period of
sustained conflict.
They are returning
home from overseas imbued with a great passion for
their homeland and hopes of independence. In
seeking to address this grievance, it would be
best for the government to find ways of reaching
these students, of fulfilling their secular
aspirations and not alienating them because of
suspicions that they are connected with militant
Islam.
The branding of these local
conflicts as outposts of Islamic radicalism has
helped prolong and, in some cases, worsen them.
For almost two years, the Thai authorities took
shelter in the notion that the Malay Muslims of
southern Thailand were motivated by religious
fanaticism instead of wondering how to address
deep-seated grievances based on cultural identity
and access to power.
Likewise, when the
armed forces of the Philippines pound away at the
Abu Sayyaf Group because the United States pays
them to do so, the shelling also hits Moro
National Liberation Front camps and undermines the
10-year-old treaty that tentatively halted the
longest-running Muslim insurgency in Sulu.
Prohibiting dialogue This
reflects a wider concern: in many areas of
security policy, practitioners complain that
objective analysis is stifled because of top-down
directives to come up with evidence that dangerous
jihadists lurk everywhere. Prohibitions on
dialogue do not help. How are we expected to learn
about extremists and their movements, which lie at
the center of contemporary security policy, if we
are prevented by law from talking to them?
Sadly, much of the research that has been
done on the extremists by so-called terrorism
experts is largely based on very cursory fieldwork
and mostly on the often biased notions of Western
security and intelligence sources. There are
exceptions, such as the Brussels-based
International Crisis Group and Jane's
Intelligence, but their readership is limited.
Like so much of the "terrorology",
research is based on a closed loop of data that
tends to reinforce a single pre-determined view.
The researchers base their analysis on what they
are told by intelligence and security officials,
who almost never reveal their sources, and then
the final product is fed back into the system as
support for the government's security policy.
This would be fine if the only collateral
damage was a biased public view of the conflict.
But this rather slanted view has embedded itself
in the security forces because it helps
intelligence and military thinkers avoid thinking
about more costly political solutions to the
conflict. Intelligent punditry hasn't helped where
it might have because the heightened state of
security alert has bred suspicion and fear and
stifled exhaustive objective enquiry.
"We're at war," goes the excuse. "These
are bad, bad people and they would kill you and
your family if they had a chance," an
over-inquiring journalist was recently told by a
US embassy official in this region.
Experienced journalists and public
intellectuals, forgetting the experience of their
elders during the Cold War, have tended blithely
to believe what the security agencies tell them.
The security agencies then reinforce their agendas
with the expert opinion they have seeded.
Policymakers do not mind because there is no room
for skeptical opinions when the next attack could
be around the corner. A fearful public are happy
to dispense with awkward truth when their own
security is concerned.
And so we have
reached a dangerous juncture.
There is an
urgent need for the public to have access to a
more balanced and informed policy debate on
security issues relating to terrorism and Islamic
militancy. Further, there is a pressing need for
dialogue, not just confrontation and elimination.
In Nineteen Eighty-Four, George
Orwell's classic study of totalitarianism, the
world is kept in a state of perpetual warfare
helped by the clever manipulation of the media,
which project a constant stream of concocted
atrocities to a gullible public to sustain
enthusiasm for the war effort. We have not yet
reached that stage, but by stifling uncomfortable
realities and awkward truth in the interests of
preserving narrow security interests, we are
moving dangerously in that direction.
Michael Vatikiotis is senior
visiting research fellow at the Institute of
Southeast Asian Studies and former editor of the
Far Eastern Economic Review.
