Istanbul blasts

The killing of Roger Short, the British Consul General, is another reminder of the mindless nature of terrorism. Words are not enough to describe the enormity of the crime.

US President Bush and British Prime Minister Tony Blair have reacted to the attacks much the same way they always did in the past while commenting on such incidents. They have also tried to justify all that the Anglo-American military alliance has done in recent times to obliterate the threat of terrorism. But terrorist attacks continue as does the rhetoric aimed at it. The upshot of it all is that innocent people continue to lose their lives.

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George Bush and Tony Blair have hinted at the war on terrorism being carried to its logical conclusion. But we believe any attempt to solve the problem militarily will fail to obtain its objective. Rather, the need is to get at the root of the problem. Poverty and an unjust global order can and do feed the monster of terrorism more than anything else. Regrettably, there has been no real initiative on the part of the West to eliminate these discrepancies which account for a huge chunk of the world population living under sub-human conditions. The poor countries are the ideal breeding grounds of every kind of terrorism.

The immediate concern, however, is the Middle East, where Israel has been given a freehand to implement its highly jingoistic agenda. Again, the West has failed miserably to deal even-handedly with the parties concerned.

So the ultimate answer to terrorism lies in defusing tension and removing the root causes like poverty and social discrimination, not in demonstration or application of military might.