Terrorism: What is the essence of the bloody war?

By Sanusi Muhammad
The saying: “One man’s terrorist is another man’s freedom fighter”, departs from the rigid, orthodox claims about the evil of terrorism. Those who condemn this weird freedom agitation must be characterized as those with one-track mind. They tend not to see what appears to be evident rationalization behind the beastly butcheries of others to register interests and grouses and campaign for endorsement and redress. But it does not seem to terrorists and sympathizers of terrorism that they are equally guilty of ideological chauvinism, namely, that the cause they believe in cannot, and ought not to provide any rational basis for annihilation. In other words, the quest for liberty to an act ideologies and faiths should not truncate the liberties of others.
The United Nation’s definition of terrorism is quite insightful and instructive. It says that terrorism is “an anxiety-inspiring method of repeated violent actions employed by (semi)-clandestine individual, group or state actors for idiosyncratic, criminal or political reasons whereby, in contrast to assassination, the direct targets of violence are not the main targets”. Herein is the pain implicit in terrorism: the direct victims of terrorist acts—-those filleted and blown into bits, those structures and vehicles blown to smithereens —-are not the real object targets. They are the unlucky victims of coordinated or chance invasions. They are the ones used to generate messages to relevant authorities are unnerved and they dissolve into fits and frenzy pleading for panicky truce while they mop up the gores from the flesh and offal of humans blasted by explosives.
A bit of history will throw further explications on this point. When the Black September Organization murdered 11 Israelis in 1972 at the Munich Olympics, it was trying to generate sympathy from the over one billion viewers of the Olympics on the plight of Palestinian refugees. But the slain Israelis would struggle hard to tell their maker what their offences were that led to their sudden extermination. Yet, when Middle-East terrorists bombed the US Marine Battalion Landing Team at the Beirut International Airport in October 1983, 241 US military personnel were killed and 100 others seriously wounded. But they were not the target. The terrorists wanted to engage the attention of the US Congress and the Americans on the need for the US to withdraw its marine from Beirut. Of course it was a huge terrorist success as that demand was met expeditiously.
The world will not forget in a hurry, the grisly records of the September 11, 2001 attacks on the World Trade Centre in New York and the Pentagon, the US department of defense, in Arlington county, Virginia. The headstrong hijackers forcefully crashed the American Airline Flight 77 into the Pentagon. In the twin attacks, about 3000 lives perished. Those unfortunate victims were not the target. The hijackers were protesting US Zionist support to Israel, the presence of US troops in Saudi Arabia and the imposed sanctions against Iraq. So, they wanted the US and the UN to do a volte-face in certain foreign policy thrusts relating to those countries. While Osama Bin Laden (although later exonerated by the US from the attack after he was gruesomely murdered by US Seals in Pakistan)) was allegedly a triumphant blow-hard over his “terrorist” victories, innocents were sent early to their graves by those driven by smoldering passion for justice and undying craze for the installation of their own form of government in determined territories.
The Lebanese Hezbollah, aligning with Syria’s Bashar A-Assad, seemed to give a good foil to morbid terrorism elsewhere. The West ought to leave the middle-east alone. But that, again, is punctured by the sect’s surreptitious and cagey presence in Nigeria when stockpile of arms belonging to three Kano based Lebanese was discovered in their ‘hideout’ in Kano in 2013. Whatever was their mission, it could not be any less sinister.
The Boko Haram jolted Nigeria to the atrocious reality of terrorism in its shores. When inchoate terrorist, Umar Abdul Mutallab, Nigerian, attempted to detonate plastic explosives hidden in his panties aboard a North West Airline Flight 253 en-route Amsterdam, to Detroit, Michigan on December 25, 2009, many Nigerians said it was quite un-Nigerian of the young man.
But all that is history for now. Nigerian youths, smarting for relevance, recognition and justice, now cultivate counter-cultural values including cheap martyrdom. So, those who still view Nigerian youths as though they are pre-independence youths must be cyber-unintelligent. These days, the barrel-chested, with their muscularity, belies valor and bravado as men with wraith-like frames can be more daring, they blow themselves up to score some defined points and please their groups. Young military and police other ranks are, these days even more plucky than military generals Tides have changed over and over in our country that our nation is now a reckoned force, not in technology, but in “Villainy Added Tasks’ (VAT) and corruption.
But, the rest of us who condemn terrorism seem to view it through some narrow prism. For, to terrorists, they are doing God’s work, only to some extent with appalling over-reach that entombs innocents who were least prepared for untimely death. All the victims of the several Jama’atu Ahlis Sunnah lid-dawa’ati wal Jihad (Boko Haram) on slaught, were not the real target. They were innocent people turned unfortunate victims of madness. The real target is the Federal Government of Nigeria. The government is yet to understand how Boko Haram operates and why it is still around despite several claims of defeating the insurgents and demystifying the group by government apologists that allegedly feed fat on the situation.
When women strap guns and explosives with their babies to their backs just to smuggle weapons to the terrorists in their hideouts, then the secession and rebellion import of the sect’s campaign must be taken more seriously and approached with all seriousness. But, has the government’s 2012 declaration of war against Boko Haram provided any solution to the problem or only re-positioned the sect’s determination?
But in all this, we do not know if terrorists, within or without, appeal to divine endorsement in pushing for justice or some beliefs using hawkish might. It sounds quite ludicrous that, to some, it is a well-reasoned judgment to encourage a no less attenuating strategy in addressing issues. No one wants to queue behind talks these days because talks can be slow, bureaucratic and, at times, ponderous. To youths with modish outlook to life, it is weakness and cowardice to engage talks. Policies and decisions from parleys often seem to steamroll. Authorities, on their part, vindicate the cheerless commentary on them that their mills grind too slowly and they delight in this. But we cannot deny the fact that from the slow grinding probably comes the thoroughness that neither rashness nor intransigence can ever achieve.
However, while many authorities tout the garbled excuses of meticulousness in formulation of policies, it is quite glaring that decisions and agreements among contending parties, in many cases, are never implemented. In this, national and international authorities are seen as unserious red-tapists. So the only way to demystify their claims and hubris, bend their knees and twist their arms to be responsibly responsive is to adopt gun-boat diplomacy. Doesn’t that seem and sound plausibly justifiable? Franklin Delani Roosevelt, 32nd president of the United States once said: “There is no such thing as security for any nation……or any individual…..in a world ruled by the principles of gangsterism. We cannot measure our safety in terms of miles on any map anymore.”
So, either way, our individual failures, one way or the other, have peaked off in the global pantomime we witness today, so that no one may really be a righteous sheriff on the issues of terrorism and resistance movements. Succinctly, there may be real reasons behind terrorism which is why precautions must continue to be applied. The US in 2013, shut down about 20 of its embassies across the Arab world for fear of terrorist assaults. The West has always been seen by the Arab world as sneering at Islam, a fact which former US president, Barack Obama tried so hard to rebut in his famous address to the Muslim world in Cairo, Egypt during a state visit. With Abubakar Shekau, the ruthless and blood thirsty Commander-In-Chief of Boko Haram, then daring former presidents Jonathan Goodluck, Obama, Francois Hollande of France and President Buhari and Israeli Prime Minister, Benjamin Natanyahu, the world, truly, is in spasm.
Nevertheless, if the axiom that two wrongs do not make a right is for all time, then the précis of all these is that using violence to attain objectives is itself wicked and ungodly. The issue of God-consciousness comes to the fore. In every religion, including animism, no one can claim knowledge of, and love for God when he delights in dreadfully slaughtering others just to press demands. It is even sadder when innocent targets are brained and battered to engage the attention of the main target that may ever remain unassailable. This act of using the innocent as guinea pigs and cannon fodders falls short of all known logic—common and esoteric, ridiculous and sublime. How do terrorists and other murderous militants justify themselves before the Almighty or is there no God? Does God reason the way they do? The inexcusability and culpability of serial terrorists is obvious, balanced against popular ethos and shared human sensibilities.
More painfully astonishing are the social and economic ballasts provided for terrorists and militants by society’s lions, among them products of lofty learning. In Nigeria, big names have been fingered as sponsoring terrorists but with little or nothing done to bring them to book. If there is any law against criminality, it follows that the outlaw must be judicially examined and judicially punished. We do not talk of penalties where there are no laws. But we live in a country where politics and other variables must determine the desirability or otherwise of penalties for certain offences.
Even more disgusting is the sacred cow phenomenon behind enactments and attendant punishments. We have watched helplessly how custodians of our laws render our laws malleable and manipulatable instruments which are putty in their hands. It is mind-boggling how society’s machines, in a mindless travesty of justice, make mockery of statutes meant to sanitize the society. This tongue-in-cheek approach has spun so many agitated terror groups that we have lost count of them, all of them given colorations of nomenclatures that suit missions and causes. Terrorism, militancy, kidnapping, raping, armed robbery and banditry are all one and the same. It is a matter of choice of words for which we must thank English for semantic liberty and poetic license.
The world, therefore, has so much to contend with: diseases, hunger, same-sex marriage, gun-running, militancy and terrorism. But the worst of these, it seems, is terrorism. But it is claimed to be a holy war anyway by the terrorists but for the sake of which religion? Defini
tely not Islam!
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Muhammad is the Publisher of Pointblank Newspaper