Dear Friends,

This ran in Global Sikh Daiky News today: . Vengeance offers no solution

By RAMESH THAKUR Special to The Japan Times

In trying to fashion a response to the tragic events of Sept. 11, the right balance must be struck between individual guilt and collective punishment, justice and order, and civil liberties and public safety. One of America's founding fathers, Benjamin Franklin, noted that those who would sacrifice essential liberty in order to attain temporary safety deserve neither liberty nor safety.

President George W. Bush has declared that "Either you are with us, or you are with the terrorists." Instead, he should say: "We will fight all who sponsor and harbor terrorists and defend all their victims." During the Cold War, Washington forged alliances of convenience with dictators who declared themselves enemies of communism, such as former President Ferdinand Marcos of the Philippines, former President Suharto of Indonesia and Gen. Augusto Pinochet of Chile.

Will Washington make the same mistake again with unsavory regimes that happen to be frontline states against today's specific targets? Propping up dictatorships and repressive governments is a poor response to the war on freedom. There is not a single well-established democracy that is suspected of harboring or supporting international terrorists. The short-term compulsions of forging an alliance against Osama bin Laden should not undermine the task of building democratic structures of peace, tolerance and pluralism everywhere.

Washington must not fall into the trap of labeling terror against America as terror against the world, while relegating terrorist attacks elsewhere to the category of local problems to be solved by the countries concerned. The network of terrorism is interconnected and overlapping, and global cooperation is not a one-way street.

Osama bin Laden's evil genius has been to fuse together the fervor of religious schools, the rallying power of the call to holy war, the cult of martyrdom through suicide and the reach of modern technology. Soviet-occupied Afghanistan was the laboratory of terror in which bin Laden and a whole generation of other Islamic fighters learned their deadly trade. The U.S. romanticized the jihad against the Soviet occupiers and bankrolled, armed and glorified its theology of violence with seemingly little thought to blowback effects over time.

But the U.S. was by no means alone in making this mistake. Former Prime Minister Indira Gandhi of India played with religious nationalism in the provincial politics of Punjab, stoked the flames of Sikh fundamentalism, and in the end was consumed by the fire of Sikh terrorism. Her son Rajiv Gandhi harbored Tamil terrorists from Sri Lanka and in the end was killed by Tamil suicide terrorists. Pakistan has been in danger of tearing itself apart from the inside because of armed elements espousing a variety of extremist causes. South Asian neighbors must pool resources to root out the tyranny of terrorism throughout the region, and promote inclusive justice for all groups in the aftermath.

The specificity of countermeasures must be balanced against the broader underlying threat. Attacking only the symptoms of terrorism will address neither its systematic nature nor its underlying causes. Random acts of individual terrorism are often rooted in the politics of collective grievance: dehumanizing poverty, spirit-sapping inequality and injustices perpetrated against a specific group. President Bush has spoken of an "unyielding anger." Such sustaining anger is not exceptional to one people but is common to anyone who is wronged.

America has been the most generous nation in the world in responding to emergencies and crises in other lands. Now that the U.S. itself has been attacked, it should be heartened by the warm and spontaneous international response.

However, it should also be aware that fundamentalism of another kind has infected aspects of U.S. contemporary policy in ways that contributed to the tragedy of Sept. 11. An almost religious belief in limited government, for example, has led to the privatization of even such critical public services as airport security and resulted in poorly paid, ill-trained airport screeners. A determined drive to promote the rule of the market in international transactions has had devastating social consequences. And then there has been the stubborn opposition to institutions and instruments of global governance dealing with everything from arms control to climate change and universal justice.

A global coalition to combat threats to international security, of any type, is already in place. We call it the United Nations. It did not rate a mention in the president's address to the joint session of Congress on Thursday night. An order that is worth protecting and defending must rest on the principles of justice, equity and law that are embedded in universal institutions. A global coalition formed to combat terrorism must not be restricted to punitive and retributive goals, but must instead be transformed into the larger cause of rooting security worldwide in lasting structures of cooperation.

In the process, care must be taken not to turn the "clash of civilizations" into a self-fulfilling prophecy. Muslim terrorists are no more representative of the noble faith of Islam than the northern Irish terrorists (and the Rev. Jerry Falwell) are of Christianity, or the Tamil terrorists of Hinduism. Those who have resurrected the vacuous and discredited thesis of the clash of civilizations seek to hijack the antiterrorism campaign to their own hidden agendas. In the struggle to promote justice and tolerance, the religious bigots and the religious terrorists are on the same side, ranged against the defenders of freedom to foment fear.

What do the zealots want? To divide the West from the Arab and Islamic world, to provoke disproportionate and cruel retaliation that will create a new generation of radicalized terrorists, to destroy the values of freedom, tolerance and the rule of law.

For the sake of our common future, we must not let them succeed. We must not allow reason to be overwhelmed by grief and fear, or judgment to be drowned in shock and anger at the terrorist action. As President Bush has affirmed, we must not brand all followers of any particular faith our common enemy. The monuments to American power and prosperity were shaken to their foundations; the foundation of a civilized discourse among the family of nations must not be destroyed.

Individual terrorism should not provoke mass intolerance. Some 40 percent of Black Tuesday's victims came from 80 other countries: It really was an international tragedy. They, along with the rescuers, reflect modern American society in all its glorious diversity. The best way to honor victims is to recognize our common humanity and work for peace through justice, to build a better life in a safer world, for all.

Ramesh Thakur is vice rector of United Nations University in Tokyo. These are his personal views.

The Japan Times: Sept. 25, 2001 (C) All rights reserved .

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