In
the immediate aftermath of the Boston bombing, ugly evidence emerged of how
ethnic stereotyping tears apart civilisational fabric. Misdirected racist
vitriol saw Indian- American Sunil Tripathi falsely named as a suspect by
hordes of Reddit and Twitter users. One can only imagine the wretched situation
of the Tripathi family as one of their own faced a social media lynching, only
to be told a week later that a body found in Rhode Island’s Providence Harbour
was Sunil’s. Then the Federal Bureau of Investigation aided the steady,
trickling flow of background details on the Tsarnaev brothers, Tamerlan (26,
killed in a gunfight with police) and Dzhokhar (19, in custody but hospitalised
with severe injuries), suspects in the bombing. Within days, the media
unearthed the Tsarnaev link with Chechnya, Dagestan and Kyrgyzstan and a
cascade of public commentary proclaimed the Islamist connection established.
President Barack Obama kept the rhetoric moving along smoothly when he tacitly
approved labelling what happened in Boston an “act ... of terror.” After the
Boston Marathon bombers struck on April 15, killing four in their wake and
injuring 264, the initial caution about ethnoreligious stereotyping of “Islamic
extremists” appears to have given way to a freewheeling discourse that seeks to
firmly tie Muslims to global terror plots. Before this rather crude logic
acquires a national echo and, similar to the post-9/11 scenario, fuels hate
crimes against ethnic minorities such as Muslims and Sikhs, it is important to
give context to America’s cynical application of the notion of “terrorism.”
Historic
Irony
But
was it really? There are two problems with America’s eagerness to call the
admittedly despicable attack on civilians “terrorism.” The first is replete
with historic irony. What happened on 9/11 on the U.S.’ eastern seaboard is
often seen as the culmination of Washington’s engagement in Afghanistan during
the 1980s, particularly the CIA’s shadowy Operation Cyclone, through which
hundreds of millions of dollars were pumped into the coffers of Afghan fighters
battling the forces of Mohammad Najibullah. While some insist the CIA’s funding
did not cross the red lines between the Afghan Mujahideen and foreign or Arab
fighters, questions were raised about whether the same weapons and training
that flooded Afghanistan during that era came back to haunt the U.S. in the
form of an invigorated al Qaeda and Taliban in the late 1990s and 2000s.
Hypocrisy
In Chechnya
Despite
the grisly episodes of the 2002 Moscow theatre hostage crisis, the 2004 Beslan
school siege and several other “terror” attacks associated with Chechen
separatists, the U.S., led by the neocon- taffed American Committee for Peace
in Chechnya (ACPC), chose to turn a blind eye to events in the region. Back in
2004, John Laughland of the British Helsinki Human Rights Group explained that
ACPC members represented “the backbone of the U.S. foreign policy
establishment,” and included Richard Perle, a former Pentagon advisor, and
James Woolsey, former CIA director who backed George W. Bush’s foreign policy.
The influential group heavily promoted the idea that “the Chechen rebellion
shows the undemocratic nature of Putin’s Russia, and cultivates support for the
Chechen cause by emphasising the seriousness of human rights violations in the
tiny Caucasian republic.”
The
ACPC then upped the pressure against the Putin regime even more in August 2004,
when it “welcomed the award of political asylum in the U.S., and a U.S.-
government funded grant, to Ilyas Akhmadov, Foreign Minister in the opposition
Chechen government, and a man Moscow describes as a terrorist.”
Was
Washington happy to countenance violent groups so long as rival Russia and its
intractable President Putin faced the heat? In insisting Moscow achieve a
political, rather than military, solution wasn’t the U.S. administration
actually calling on Mr. Putin to negotiate with terrorists, a policy the U.S.
“resolutely rejects” elsewhere?
Moussaoui
Overlooked
The
ACPC’s soft-pedalling on terror apart, evidence of the U.S.’ unwillingness to
crack down on Chechen extremism came in the form of one of the most
high-profile U.S. law enforcement successes in the days leading up to 9/11: the
capture of Zacarias Moussaoui in Minnesota on August 16, 2001.
Whistleblower
Coleen Rowley wrote recently that not only did her former employers at the FBI,
CIA Director George Tenet, and other counterterrorism experts balk at allowing
a search of Moussaoui’s laptop and other property but, more disturbingly, they
brushed aside a critical April 2001 memo by erstwhile FBI Assistant Director
Dale Watson. That memo, entitled “Bin Laden/Ibn Khattab Threat Reporting,”
warned about “significant and urgent” intelligence to suggest “serious
operational planning” for terrorism attacks by “Sunni extremists with links to
Ibn al Khattab, an extremist leader in Chechnya, and to Usama Bin Laden,”
reported the New York Times ’ Philip Shenon in his insightful 2011 story of
“The Terrible Missed Chance.”
Even
after the FBI’s attaché in Paris reported that French spy agencies had evidence
suggesting Moussaoui was a recruiter for Khattab and despite senior
intelligence officials admitting that “the system was blinking red” with the
prospect of an imminent terror attack, no one seemed to want to acknowledge
that Moussaoui, Khattab and bin Laden were brothers in bloodshed.
In
the Boston investigation, Dzhokhar is now said to have indicated that he and
Tamerlan were disenchanted with U.S. wars in Iraq and Afghanistan — their
Chechen background cannot be discounted here — and this may have driven their
ghastly actions. If this is established as the true motive then history would
have come full circle. That will — or at least it ought to — provoke more
questions about the cynical manipulation of facts and an ever-morphing concept
of “terrorism” that sustain the U.S.’ wars and its economy.
Gun
Violence Paradox
A
second sophisticated obfuscation of “terrorism” in the U.S. is that it is
liberally applied when a person or group perceived as alien in terms of race,
religion or citizenship is held responsible for an act of lethal violence, but
much less so in other contexts. In this case, the discovery that the Tsarnaevs
were Muslim led to an almost triumphalist cheer in some conservative corners of
the country.
To
give this odd overzealousness some context, consider the case of gun crime
which, some such as Michael Cohen o f The Guardian have argued, gets a
relatively muted reaction from Americans compared to the random act of terror
that hits the mainland from time to time, despite the latter’s far greater toll
on human life. Bizarrely, recent mass killings — including the Sikh Temple of
Oak Creek, Wisconsin, the theatre shooting in Aurora, Colorado, and the school
shootings at Newtown, Connecticut — by mostly white, gun-toting young men, did
nothing to prevent conservatives in the U.S. Congress from defeating a bill
proposing rudimentary checks on gun buyers’ backgrounds before arming them. In
none of these cases did Second Amendment-warriors attach the “terrorist” label
to the perpetrators. Why are James Holmes, Adam Lanza, Wade Page, and numerous
others merely alluded to as “disturbed individuals?” The Tsarnaevs may be no
different from these mass killers, some such as Glen Greenwald have argued, and
all of these men are likely to have been driven by a combination of mental
illness, societal alienation and mostly apolitical rage.
While
a robust debate on the application of “terrorism” would help the American media
and public avoid the frequent retreat to racist stereotyping that we have seen
in recent weeks, a failure to do so would only feed the U.S.’ fatal politics of
convenience and extinguish the prospect of change that could make a real
difference.
Narayan
Lakshman
कोई टिप्पणी नहीं:
एक टिप्पणी भेजें