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In the weeks following the 11 September 2001 attacks, federal authorities in the United States acted at times in a “wholly unacceptable” way, arresting immigrants on questionable tips, not always providing speedy access to lawyers and abusing the detainees. This is not an accusation launched by the left or by human-rights groups but an admission made during Senate confirmation hearings by Michael Chertoff who, as head of the criminal division of the justice department, was one of the key figures directing the post-9/11 sweep that resulted in the detention of hundreds of innocent Muslims.
An International Summit on Democracy, Terrorism and Security will be held on 8-11 March 2005, sponsored by the Club de Madrid. and the Varsavsky Foundation. Ahead of the summit, a new openDemocracy debate – involving leading thinkers such as Karin von Hippel, Mary Kaldor, Roger Scruton, Loretta Napoleoni, Fares Braizat, Charles Peña, Fred Halliday, John Hulsman, and David Elstein – explores how best democratic states and citizens can respond to terrorism.
You can find out more about the Madrid summit – including how to participate in the worldwide conversation on 11 March 2005 – by visiting safe-democracy.org.
More barbarities have followed – from torture in Abu Ghraib to “extraordinary rendition”, imprisonment without trial in Guantànamo (and Belmarsh, on the territory of the US’s British ally) and the re-adoption of death squads as official US policy.
Terrorism itself is barbaric. It is indefensible and immoral. But it is rarely a threat to the continued existence of a democracy unless that democracy connives in the damage. Yet both George W Bush and Tony Blair have set their administrations on the path of connivance over the last three years. In memory of the innocent victims both of terrorism and the “war on terror”. I would like to offer five tentative principles on which a democratic response to terror should be based:
- Keep the threat in proportion. Horrific though the attacks on New York, Washington, Bali and Madrid were, we should be absolutely clear that none of them at any time threatened the state, the government or the way of life of the United States or Indonesia or Spain. In the United States, the government continued to govern, the courts continued to function and the press continued to report, albeit with a certain loss of form. Spain held a peaceful democratic election within days of the Atocha atrocity. Indonesia witnessed arguably its first clean presidential election. To acknowledge that life went on is in no way to diminish the pain and grief suffered by the victims or their families. To fail to acknowledge it is to exploit those victims in a squalid political game.
- Do not inflate the capacities of the terrorist. The point of terror for a terrorist is exactly that – to terrorise: to frighten peoples and their governments into behaviour that furthers your aims. The more democracies play along with the terrorist, the better it is for them. So every time a democratic leader talks about the great evil out there, named or unnamed, that’s out to destroy life-as-we-know-it, he’s doing it a huge favour. If the president of the United States, to pick an example at random, feels it necessary to invade not one but two countries and to use the rhetoric of perpetual war to a people who lack the information to contradict him, the terrorist should send him a thank-you note. Indeed Osama bin Laden did so.
- Hang on to your moral advantage. Most people in the world, given the chance, prefer to live under a government of their choosing, run by men and women whom they trust and who conduct themselves transparently, honestly and with integrity. The fact that President Bush says this too does not make it false. Unfortunately, this choice is presently denied to most people and, even where it theoretically exists, the results are not always as good as they might be. Nevertheless, given the opportunity, people prefer democracy to tyranny.
Those who pursue another agenda must therefore discredit democracy in order to win recruits. The challenge for the democracies, then, is to demonstrate that they are indeed superior forms of government, true to their principles – the rule of law, separation of powers, respect for civil and human rights and a preference for non-violent solutions. It won’t impress the true believers, but they are lost anyway. It will keep the majority and that’s what counts. Failure to keep to fundamentals enables extremists to persuade their recruits that democracies are hypocritical, disguising a lack of principle beneath empty rhetoric.
Bush and Blair have acted as recruiting sergeants for terror by abandoning these principles in several vital respects. Both have conspired to undermine one of the central attributes of democracy – the rule of law and equal access to justice. Both have conspired to further the use of torture, arbitrary detention, detention without trial and extra-judicial murder. It is interesting to note that where there has been successful resistance to these policies, it has been in the law courts and not, so far, in the legislatures, at the ballot-box or on the streets – a political failure that should be of deep concern to any democracy.
Also by Isabel Hilton on terrorism, torture and Latin America in openDemocracy:
“Justice in the world’s light” (June 2001)
“Semper Fidel” (September 2001)
“Colombia: in evil hour” (March 2004)
“Terrorism, democracy and Muslims after the Madrid bombs” (March 2004)
“Torture: who gives the orders?” (May 2004)
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In conclusion, democracies must fight terror. But democracies defeat themselves if they adopt tactics that inspire revulsion and credible charges of hypocrisy. They win by retaining the loyalty of the large majority of people who reject terrorism as a tactic and authoritarianism as a form of rule. If terrorism is politics by other means, it must be contained and cultivated by a true public politics based on democratic principles.
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