pressured the Palestinian leadership to ban its military wing.
The tendency in recent years, encouraged by the scale of last month’s atrocity in New York, has been to define terrorism increasingly in terms of methods and tactics – particularly the targeting of civilians – rather than the status of those who carry it out. Such an approach has its own difficulties. Liberation movements which most would balk at branding terrorist, including the ANC and the Algerian FLN, attacked civilian targets – as so mesmerisingly portrayed in Pontecorvo’s film The Battle of Algiers. But more problematic for Western governments is the way such arguments can be turned against them. The concept of modern terrorism derives, after all, from the French revolution, where terror was administered by the state – as it is today by scores of governments around the world.
If paramilitary groups become terrorists because they kill or injure civilians, what of those states which bomb television stations, bridges and power stations, train and arm death squads or authorise assassinations? After days when hundreds of Afghan civilians are reported to have died as a result of Anglo-American bombardment – while hundreds of thousands are fleeing for their lives – Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld’s remark that the aim was to ‘frighten’ the other side couldn’t have more sharply posed the paradox of terror.
In his City of God, Saint Augustine tells a story about an encounter between Alexander the Great (the last ruler successfully to garrison Afghanistan) and a pirate captain he had caught on the high seas. Ordering the pirate to heave to, Alexander demands: ‘How dare you molest the seas as a pirate?’ ‘How dare you molest the whole world?’ retorts the plucky pirate. ‘I have a small boat, so I am called a thief and a pirate. You have a great navy, so you are called an emperor, and can call other men pirates.’ Substitute ‘terrorist’ or ‘rogue state’ for ‘pirate’ and the episode neatly encapsulates the morality of the New World Order.
Political violence emerges when other avenues are closed. Where people suffer oppression, are denied a peaceful route to justice and social change and have exhausted all other tactics – the point the ANC reached in the early 1960s – they are surely entitled to use force. That does not apply to adventurist and socially disconnected groups like Baader Meinhof or the Red Brigades, nor does it deal with the question of whether such force is advisable or likely to be counterproductive. ‘Jihadist’ groups, especially networks like al-Qaida with a ‘global reach’ and a religious ideology impervious to accommodation, are considered by many to be beyond any normal calculus of repression and resistance.
The September 11 atrocity was certainly an unprecedented act of non-state terror. But such groups are also unquestionably the product of conditions in the Arab and Muslim world for which both Britain and the US bear a heavy responsibility, through their unswerving support of despotic regimes for over half a century. It was precisely that blockage of democratic development that led to the failure of secular politics, which in turn paved the way for the growth of Islamist radicalism. Groups like al-Qaida offer no future to the Muslim world, but bin Laden and his supporters have their boots sunk deep in a swamp of grievance. As the assault on Afghanistan continues, no one should delude themselves that cutting off al-Qaida’s head or destroying its Afghan lair will put an end to this eruption.
(25/10/01)
The imperial revival: A recipe for conflict without end
Britain has yet to come to terms with its imperial record. A fog of cultural amnesia about the the country’s recent colonial past pervades the debate about its role in the world today. The twentieth century, it was often said in the run-up to the millennium, had been a century of bloodshed and tyranny, with the Nazi genocide and Stalinist terror regularly paired as the emblematic twin horrors of the era. The modern school history curriculum reflects a similar perspective. But when it comes to the role of colonialism and its aftermath, British reactions are usually cloaked in embarrassment or retrospective pride about a legacy of railways and ‘good governance’.
There is precious little acknowledgement of the relentless and bloody repression that maintained a quarter of the world’s population under British rule until barely half a century ago. Nor is there much awareness of the hundreds of thousands who died in continual rebellions across five continents, or from forced labour and torture, let alone the ubiquitous racist segregation or deliberate destruction of economic prosperity in places like Bengal. It is less than fifty years since the inmates of British colonial detention camps in Kenya were routinely raped and had their testicles ripped off, while British soldiers massacred civilians at Batang Kali in Malaya with impunity. But – as with other former colonial powers, such as France and Belgium – there has been no public settling of accounts; no pressure for colonial reparations, or for old men to be tried for atrocities carried out under the union flag.
One consequence of this national failure to face up to the reality of Britain’s impact on the world has been a casual enthusiasm for a latter-day revival of the imperial project. What began as an almost playful attempt at historical revisionism by right-wing pundits on both sides of the Atlantic in the early 1990s has, since September 11, flowered into a chorus of full-throated calls for the US and its allies to move from the informal imperial arrangements of the postwar era to the imposition of direct ‘international colonial’ rule on rogue states. The argument has been most forcefully advanced by the Oxford history professor Niall Ferguson, currently filming a television series on the history of the British empire. But his passion for a new imperium – restrained only by a fear that the Americans may not have the appetite for the task in hand – is far from unique. Among others pressing for a modern imperial renaissance are the novelist and critic Philip Hensher, who suggested a viceroy be appointed to run Afghanistan, while the polemicist Mark Steyn insisted that compared with the current system of relying on corrupt and dictatorial regimes like Saudi Arabia to protect big-power interests, ‘colonialism is progressive and enlightened’.
Such voices could be more easily dismissed as nostalgic mavericks were it not for the fact that they reflect a far broader emerging consensus in favour of intervention against recalcitrant governments, UN protectorates and the imposition of Western norms through legal and economic restraints on national sovereignty. This is the ‘doctrine of international community’, first championed by Tony Blair during the Kosovo war, with its echoes of the liberal imperialism of the 1890s, but expressed in a language of ‘partnerships’ and ‘values’ to appease the sensitivities of the age. Underpinned by that postmodern conceit of ‘humanitarian war’, it reached its emotional apogee in the vision of a reordered world he held out to Labour’s Brighton conference last month. And so long as it is dressed up in a suitably multilateral form, the new liberal imperialists are just as happy with international colonial rule as their blunter right-wing counterparts.
A UN trusteeship or other multinational occupation arrangement is of course exactly what is being prepared for the benighted people of Afghanistan, as and when US ‘daisy cutters’ and Northern Alliance warlords finally displace the Taliban from the rubble of Kabul and Kandahar. We know roughly what such a setup will be like, because UN protectorates – effectively administered by Nato and its friends – are already functioning in Kosovo, Bosnia and East Timor (in Sierra Leone, Britain preferred to act unilaterally). In every case, the results have been dismal – most notably in Kosovo, where the occupation forces have failed to prevent large-scale reverse ethnic cleansing. We have in any case been here before. In the aftermath of the first world war, the League of Nations handed out mandates to Britain and France to prepare countries such as Palestine, Iraq and Lebanon for eventual self-government. On the eighty-fourth anniversary of the Balfour Declaration – in which Britain promised to establish a national home in Palestine for the Jewish people without prejudicing the rights of the Arab inhabitants – it hardly needs spelling out that the long-term fallout was calamitous.
The roots of the global crisis which erupted on September 11 lie in precisely these colonial experiences and the informal quasi-imperial system that succeeded them. By carving up the Middle East to protect oil interests – as Britain did when
