Global cooperation in fight against paranoia and terrorism

The three incidents took place in three different parts of the world and yet they are parts of a common chain that bind the world. In the first instance, a 16-year old Bangladeshi girl in New York was arrested and taken to custody in a Pennsylvania jail on the allegation that she wanted to be a suicide bomber. In the second instance, some members of Hamas acting as "moral police" killed a 19-year old girl in front of her fiancéin Gaza for what the vigilante group thought was un-Islamic behavior. In the third instance, an Algerian with links to Al-Qaeda was convicted in England on charges of developing a deadly poison that could be used in bio terrorism. More recently, the arrest of Al-Qaeda's No. 3 Mr. Abu Faraj Farj Libby in Murdan, Pakistan provides a similar instance.

The first story reveals the paranoia against Islam. The girl in question was a Muslim from a Bangladeshi family in New York with dubious visa status. The girl in question had left school as the taunts because of her Islamic garb were unbearable. The circumstances were far from clear as she was arrested with a girl from Guinea. In an article titled "Guilty Until Proven Innocent", the New York Times on April 13 wrote: "The post-Sept. 11 world involves two competing nightmares. One imagines another terrorist attack that occurs because authorities fail to respond to signs of danger. The other is about innocent people who are arrested by mistake and held indefinitely because authorities are too frightened, or embarrassed, to admit their errors. We have to be equally vigilant against both." The article continued: "At this point, it's impossible not to worry about a potential miscarriage of justice, given the number of previous incidents in which the government has rushed to make a terrorism arrest that turned out to be baseless". Partly due to the role of the U.S. media The New York Times in particular, the 16-year old girl will now be allowed to leave U.S. and return to Bangladesh. But the trauma will remain.

Tap here to add The Daily Star as a trusted source

In the second story, 19-year-old Yousra al-Azam and her fiancé days before their wedding went shopping for her wedding dress in Gaza City and later they went down to the beach where they ate and watched the waves. On her way home after dark, her car was pulled over by a vehicle full of masked men connected with Hamas. Yousra and her sister and their fiancés were beaten and Yousra was shot dead.

The vigilante act of some members of Hamas was immediately condemned by the Hamas high command and was referred to as a crime to be tackled by the Palestinian authorities. Any group of men armed with modern weapons and an obscurantist ideology can be doubly dangerous. Old idea and new technology are a bad mix. The moral police must be reined in. Any group with absolute certainty as to what is moral is a threat to civilization.

The last two stories signifying a similar pattern provide hope and give some clue as to how to fight terrorism. The only way to fight terrorism is by forging worldwide (global) collaboration of sensible people. Algerian authorities tipped off the London police who acted to stop bio-terror. In the fight against terrorism there is no substitute for global cooperation of the "willing partners" and not isolationism. Some experts correctly pointed out prior to U.S. led invasion against Iraq that the war would deflect attention from the fight against terror. History will prove those pundits right. It is time to recall Chairman Mao's view on guerrillas who were, in his opinion, like fishes while the people were like the river. We need the river on our side to fight terrorism. Combating terrorism is a political struggle at one level and a fight against crime on the other.

Rather than linking terrorism to Islam, or for that matter any religion, it is worth treating it as crime. Rather than using the rhetoric of Jihad, it is important to talk about violence and how to deal with it. Civilized laws must put criminals behind the bar but also protect the innocent from the arbitrary arrest. Administration of justice and prosecution must be based on solid evidence, not paranoia.

To secure peace and social stability, the collective stand must be against violence of any form. A paranoid world continues to associate Islam with violence and neglects the horrific acts of violence elsewhere. According to latest figure the Maoist guerrillas have killed at least 11,000 people in Nepal in the past two years. The real challenge is how to deal with violence and a culture as well as a politico-economic system that breed violence. The target should be violence as such and not just the Islamic violence or Jewish violence. Peace and violence cannot coexist nor can the rule of civilized law and the rule of jungle law. The signs of genuine and fair globalization are when Algerian security forces collaborate with British Police or Pakistan government genuinely cooperates in nabbing the leading terror-suspects and when the New York Times stands by the hapless Bangladeshi family in New York who had practically no other recourse. And those markers of globalization are around us; all we need to do is to consolidate them.

Habibul Haque Khondker teaches sociology at the National University of Singapore.