When British Prime Minister Gordon Brown declared a few days ago that the United Kingdom and the United States would soon convene a special summit on “stabilizing” Yemen in order to reduce the threat of terrorism emanating from there, I cried in my heart for Yemen. My fears were exacerbated when I read the following day that the top American military commander in the region had visited Yemeni President Ali Abdullah Saleh to offer support, pledging more financial and military assistance to defeat the growing presence of Al-Qaeda in Yemen, which also has the potential to affect other countries in the Arabian Peninsula.
The idea that Yemen has suddenly become a “terror problem” country and that the US and UK can lead it to greener pastures is symptomatic of the collective policy failures that have seen the world today suffer so widely from problems of political violence and terrorism. Conferences in London and shipments of US arms and money will not solve the problem. The Anglo-Americans lack the ability or will to come to terms with the full dimensions of terrorism and its genesis. A starting point in that direction would be to grasp that terrorism traumatizes and harms four primary actors.
The first is the terrorist himself. Most terrorists are reasonably smart and educated young men who have become crazy due to the circumstances of their lives and their societies’ political, economic, and social conditions, including interactions with foreign armies.
The second is the society that breeds terrorists, including many in the Middle East. The disequilibrium, disparities and distortions plaguing those societies ultimately generate a handful of men who become terrorists. Terrorists do not emerge from a vacuum. They emerge from terrorized societies.
The third target of terrorism comprises those innocent civilians who are attacked by terrorists, whether in Arab hotels, Pakistani markets, Manhattan skyscrapers, or London buses. The attacked societies are terrorized and traumatized by the criminality that assaults them, and they usually have no idea why they were attacked or what to do in response. They are truly the innocent victims who pay the highest price.
The fourth madness often haunting the world of terrorism is the response of governments whose countries or citizens have been subjected to terror attacks. Terrorized, then crazed with anger and driven to seek revenge, governments in turn unleash their own immense military and police power to fight terrorists and bring them to justice. This approach only rarely succeeds, and more often intensifies the first two problems above: Local traditional societies around the developing world that are at the receiving end of the Western powers’ might eventually become crazed, distorted, ravaged lands full of tyranny, corruption, instability, abuse of power, and violence; and those traumatized societies in turn eventually breed more of their own terrorists who attack at home and abroad. If we do not address these four dimensions of terrorism and its traumas, we will never resolve the problem.
Medieval Arabs used to say that “In Yemen, there is wisdom.” There is also much wisdom to be gleaned from Yemen today, in particular by Anglo-American and other leaders who should understand how and why the country has come to play a role in the world of global terrorism. This starts with an honest analysis of the four victims of terrorism, rather than by isolating only one of them – Yemeni society – and using the wrong tools in addressing it.
The network of Al-Qaeda terrorists in Yemen is structurally linked with, and has organically emerged from, the experience of militants, resistance fighters, terrorists and others who trained and fought in Afghanistan and Iraq – sometimes with Anglo-American assistance against a common foe, but sometimes against the Anglo-Americans who were seen as foreign occupiers. This network has been building up in Yemen since the mid-1990s, but Yemen’s instability and emergence as a terrorist base goes much further back.
The British, with their colonial history in the southern part of Yemen along with other parts of the Arabian Peninsula, bear some historical responsibility for how things have turned out in our region in the past century. The wrecks often masquerading as modern Arab states are fragile in many cases because they emerged from colonial rule (mostly French and British) in wildly unsustainable conditions, due to the double constraints of European colonialism and post-colonial policies: the combination of national boundaries that were highly artificial and thus created structurally unstable states, then the advent of local rulers who were put in place by the retreating colonial powers, often lacked any serious indigenous legitimacy, and ultimately developed into, or gave way to, today’s security states.
Therefore, for the British to convene a global summit to fix Yemen is akin to Tiger Woods offering a course in marriage fidelity. It is not a serious proposition. Fighting the modern scourge of political terrorism with the kind of intellectual terrorism that Gordon Brown offers will not work. If this is a joke, it is not funny. If this is serious, we are all in much deeper trouble than any of us could ever have imagined.
Rami G. Khouri is published twice-weekly by THE DAILY STAR.
var server_client_id = 2074; var server_ad_width = 468; var server_ad_height = 60; var server_ad_style = "468x60_as"; var server_code_version = "4"; var server_ad_color_border = "7E8AA2"; var server_ad_color_background = "FFFFFF"; var server_ad_color_headline = "7E8AA2"; var server_ad_color_body = "000000"; var server_ad_color_url = "666EBA"; var server_ad_keyword = ""; var server_ad_channel = 18; var server_publisher_channels = ""; var server_ad_random = 1; var server_target = "1"; Tags: Al-Qaeda, American, Anglo-American, Fight, London, Military, Terror, Terrorism, Terrorists, World, Yemen
Printable Version Send to a friend Listen to the Article addthis_url = location.href; addthis_title = document.title; addthis_pub = 'dailystar';
Your feedback is important to us! We invite all our readers to share with us their views and comments about this article.
Click here NOW to Comment on this Article
More Opinion Articles . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . »An Israeli view back at a decade of disappearing peace »The West is declining, but Russia might slow the process »Palestinian children suffer from inadequate TV shows »Yemen's woes may stir wider tensions »This time of low predictability is testing global leaders »Why politics might undo the US economy »Violence against women is not a tenet of the Muslim religion »In Afghanistan, social problems can often be customary »There is no going back on greater integration through free markets »The US and the Muslim world: a tougher year than we hoped »Hassan Nasrallah made four mistakes »The rising sons of the moribund North African regimes
For a new Star Scene experience, check our new website at http://starscene.dailystar.com.lb
Privacy Policy | Anti-Spamming Policy | Copyright Policy | Jobs@Daily Star
Copyright © 2010, The Daily Star. All rights reserved. Click here to contact our syndication department for permission to republish or make other authorized use of this material. Contact the Online editor to report any problems with the site or to send your comments and suggestions. var sc_project=731379; var sc_invisible=1; var sc_partition=6; var sc_security="3de32f75"; LEBANON NEWS Politics. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .» Hariri: Key appointments to be based on merit» Hariri Tribunal VP hands in retirement notice» German foreign adviser meets top officialsBusiness. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .» Lebanon's Alfa subscribers temporarily lose network service» Salameh expects Lebanon's debt to GDP to fall in 2010» Lebanon 4th on MENA Quality of Life Index -- More Lebanon News -- _uacct = "UA-360006-1"; urchinTracker();
Printable Version Send to a friend Listen to the Article
Your feedback is important to us! We invite all our readers to share with us their views and comments about this article.
Click here NOW to Comment on this Article
More Opinion Articles . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . »An Israeli view back at a decade of disappearing peace »The West is declining, but Russia might slow the process »Palestinian children suffer from inadequate TV shows »Yemen's woes may stir wider tensions »This time of low predictability is testing global leaders »Why politics might undo the US economy »Violence against women is not a tenet of the Muslim religion »In Afghanistan, social problems can often be customary »There is no going back on greater integration through free markets »The US and the Muslim world: a tougher year than we hoped »Hassan Nasrallah made four mistakes »The rising sons of the moribund North African regimes
For a new Star Scene experience, check our new website at http://starscene.dailystar.com.lb
Privacy Policy | Anti-Spamming Policy | Copyright Policy | Jobs@Daily Star
Copyright © 2010, The Daily Star. All rights reserved. Click here to contact our syndication department for permission to republish or make other authorized use of this material. Contact the Online editor to report any problems with the site or to send your comments and suggestions. var sc_project=731379; var sc_invisible=1; var sc_partition=6; var sc_security="3de32f75"; LEBANON NEWS Politics. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .» Hariri: Key appointments to be based on merit» Hariri Tribunal VP hands in retirement notice» German foreign adviser meets top officialsBusiness. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .» Lebanon's Alfa subscribers temporarily lose network service» Salameh expects Lebanon's debt to GDP to fall in 2010» Lebanon 4th on MENA Quality of Life Index -- More Lebanon News -- _uacct = "UA-360006-1"; urchinTracker();
Your feedback is important to us! We invite all our readers to share with us their views and comments about this article.
Click here NOW to Comment on this Article
For a new Star Scene experience, check our new website at http://starscene.dailystar.com.lb
Privacy Policy | Anti-Spamming Policy | Copyright Policy | Jobs@Daily Star
Read Full Article »