Terrorism and the fifth freedom

After a disaster as visible and massive as the attack on the World Trade Centre, broadcasters and correspondents have gone on a rampage of using the language that matches the scale of horror, the anguish of survivors and untold feelings of insecurity within the general populace. But as we move away from the events of September 11 2001 to collect the debris left by the recent London bombings, many people have been left wondering why the world has been enveloped by terror of such magnitude.

Terror is a product of arrogance or what the renowned scholar Noam Chomsky termed the “Fifth Freedom” that the Americans and the British have assimilated into their foreign policies. This “Fifth Freedom” to rob and exploit overrides the Four Freedoms which President Franklin Roosevelt made famous in 1941 and to which the United States government is officially devoted. The other Four Freedoms were freedom of speech, freedom of worship, freedom from want and freedom from fear. America and Britain are, as it were, being pillaged by terrorist attacks simply because their foreign policies have tended to disadvantage the political, social and economic life of other people scattered across the globe.

Their unstoppable exercising of the “Fifth Freedom” in search of oil and mineral resources has seen them causing unwarranted havoc and civil unrest in Iraq, Congo, Liberia and Vietnam. This has not been taken lightly by the victims of their pillage but, instead, they have resorted to insurgency. These insurgents’ support and energy springs from a community that is disadvantaged and excluded on their own soil and, as a result, harbours an unbearable grievance. Because there is no constitutional path to redress their sense of outrage, sizeable numbers of them have resorted to violence which the Algerian revolutionary Franz Fanon described as “the highest level of negotiation”. For instance, the Arabs and Muslims have been affected left, right and centre by British and American foreign policy and this has given birth to insurgents like Osama bin Laden and his al- Qaeda network. To a Western world audience, to the victims of the September 11 bombings and to the victims of the recent London bombings, it appears that Bin Laden has no realistic political manifesto beyond a long-term vision for a restored caliphate, a place for Muslims and Arabs in the modern world in which they could enjoy a genuine political status and some expectation of meeting their social needs. Nevertheless in Bin Laden’s own constituency this vision is real enough; it provides the mythology for a cause and in a less materially rich culture, something to dream about.

Bin Laden’s strikes, with their subliminal messages and implicit long-term aspirations, appeal irresistibly to a young, mostly male, energetic, educated and rebellious audience which corresponds to a similarly animated and rebellious Western society. Most Muslims find themselves isolated by poverty and the insensitivity of the “MacWorld” society, which diminishes and excludes them. Their sense of outrage is exacerbated by an increasingly selfimage as an underclass, which is confronted in every aspect of its livelihood by the growing and enveloping Western culture. The last citadels of their religion and Islamic lifestyle are continuously threatened by universal images, which bombard them through advertisements, television and politics. At a national level, they see corrupt and undemocratic Muslim governments kept in power by United States and British support and the spectacle of the Israeli war machine crushing innocent and unarmed Palestinians in their own homelands. The late Palestinian leader, Yasser Arafat, was reduced to a village head by the arrogant Israeli army that is remote-controlled by the Americans simply because he stood for his birthright and mainly because he wanted the people of Palestine to live an independent life in which everything is in their own hands rather than American or Israeli impositions.

In Iraq, the US launched an unnecessary war that caused the deaths of many civilians and the irreversible destruction of infrastructure. As if this was not enough, they appointed a former American soldier, Jay Garner as governor of Iraq and later imposed a government that is a mockery to the people of Iraq and an outright violation of international ethics on human rights and democracy. The people of Iraq need a government of their own and an economy that is run by their own people. British and American firms should cease milking Asian oil. Failure to end this discrepancy means acts of terrorism will continue to flourish. Terrorism is not condoned the world over but when dialogue fails, the oppressed have to resort to violence to control their destiny. Furthermore, the Irish people have a bone of contention with the British government for running away with their sovereignty and their land rights. They feel it’s high time the British government accorded them their rights.

This is a grievance that can cost the British their peace and this is a justifiable cause that can lead to the emergence of the type of culprit( s) who engineered the London bombings. The IRA (the Irish Republic Army) will not take a rest until and unless the British have dumped their Fifth Freedom. These are communities which are so oppressed by the constant intrusions of a richer, more powerful and more successful culture that they will raise a cheer even for a despotic ruler like former Iraqi president Saddam Hussein when he challenges Western double standards, so much that they will blow trumpets when Bin Laden’s strikes’ send shivers to Britain and America. The currently assembling coalition of like-minded states to wage war on terrorism “is an old-fashioned emergency structure that would address a Clausewitzian threat to security, but not the virus of its own condition”.

Echoing the principles of successful counter-insurgency, the sense of outrage has to be removed and the increase of dispossessed communities stemmed. In a nutshell, the oppressed people of the world will not abandon their desire for prosperity and dignity and they continue to seek their political and economic sovereignty, which can guarantee both. In so far as these are incompatible with the West and its “Fifth Freedom”, the elimination of terrorism and that passion will remain a ruling passion in the oppressed. The “Fifth Freedom” has to be driven into oblivion for the bid to end terrorism and the stuttering guns throughout the world to succeed.