- Much as we must unite against terror; we also must seek a world where justice reigns supreme
Two weeks later, the French authorities are still wondering how a band of terrorists from the self-styled Islamic State of Iraq held Paris under siege in three well-coordinated attacks lasting two hours and killed 129 innocent residents in the worst carnage that city has witnessed since World War II. More than 350 people were wounded, 99 of them critically.
The attacks came less than a year after terrorists struck at the offices of the satirical magazine,Charlie Hebdo, killing more than15 people. They justified the attack on the ground that the magazine had published material blasphemous of the Prophet Mohammed and Islam.
Now, as then, defiance and solidarity have replaced the fear that gripped the city. Parisians have returned to the boulevards and the cafes and the restaurants that define their city. The alleged mastermind, Abdelhamid Abbaoud, who was thought to be in Syria, was killed one week later in his hideout near Paris.
Retaliatory air strikes ordered by French President François Hollande in the ISIS capital Raqqa began the day after the Paris attacks. Pressure has been mounting on President Barak Obama to go beyond the air strikes the United States has been staging for months and commit American troops to battle to destroy ISIS. Russia, which had been carrying out bombing raids on armed opponents of the Syrian regime of President Hafez Assad, is set to turn its air power against ISIS, following reports that the explosive device that blew up a Russian airliner over the Sinai three weeks ago, killing all 240 passengers and crew on board, was planted by ISIS.
There can be no justification for the terrorist attack from which Paris is slowly recovering, or the one that brought down the Russian passenger airliner over the Sinai. ISIS and its fellow travellers in terror are operating under a false ideology. They claim to act in the name of Islam, but fellow Muslims have denounced their actions as a perversion of Islam. Their bombs do not discriminate between Muslims and adherents of other faiths.
The international community must stand united to resist their resolve to impose their pernicious ideology on humankind and make fear a constant companion.
But we should remember that al Qaeda and ISIS and their mutants did not grow out of nothing. There was no al Qaeda in Iraq until the United States and the United Kingdom led a Western coalition to invade and occupy Iraq, purportedly to rid it of “weapons of mass destruction.” Iraq had no such weapons. By the time the invaders were done Iraq and its world-class infrastructure had been destroyed and more than a quarter of its population had fled to neighbouring countries for safety, with civilian casualties numbered in hundreds of thousands. Central authority collapsed, creating an opening for al Qaeda, and later ISIS
The Libyan State exists today only on paper, following a regime change orchestrated by the United States, France and the UK, under the pretext or stopping President Muammar Gadaffi from turning the armed might of the state against an armed opposition seeking to overthrow him. An air strike on Gadaffi’s convoy as he fled from one city to another in search of a safe haven virtually delivered him into the hands of his opponents. They killed him, much to the approval of the West. Today there is no central authority in Libya, only feuding tribes and their armies. And ISIS and al Qaeda have since found fertile ground there.
And then, there is the festering Israeli-Palestinian conflict, in which the Western nations look the other way as Israel, in defiance of United Nations resolutions, continually expropriates Palestinian land to build settlements it does not need, and as it systematically reduced Gaza to what has been called the world’s largest open-air prison.
Justice is indivisible. You cannot deny it to some and save it for others. To quote the Nobel laureate Wole Soyinka, justice is the first condition of humanity.
Although there will always be a lunatic fringe actuated by terror for its own sake, a good many of those we call terrorists see themselves as seeking by self help the justice they have been denied.
Justice will have to be a major component of any meaningful strategy to end or curtail terrorism.
