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Injustices not religions breed terrorism: Imran

Daily Times Monitor

LAHORE: As a Pakistani, it has been a bad week to be in London. Not only could one’s relations or friends have been blown up, but those who had committed the hideous crimes justified them in the name of Islam, Imran Khan, Pakistan Tehreek-e-Insaaf chief, wrote in Independent.

Even worse for me was the news that three of the four terrorists had been to Pakistan. But neither Islam nor Pakistan has anything to do with these atrocities, said Khan. Nowhere does the Quran justify attacks on innocent people. Pakistan is being blamed for fostering terrorists, yet Pakistan has been a victim of terrorism for the past 15 years.

“After the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan in 1979, the US used Islam to counter the occupation. It sponsored an international jihad in the Muslim world and encouraged volunteers from Muslim countries to join in it. Thousands, including Osama bin Laden, flocked to Pakistan, where US-funded training camps were set up under CIA supervision,” he said, “But once the Soviets were defeated, both Afghanistan and the mujahedin were abandoned by the US.”

Pakistan had left with sectarian militant groups trained in terrorism and four million Afghan refugees and it was swamped with drugs and Kalashnikovs in the wake of Afghan-Soviet war, Khan said.

Having glorified as heroes for dislodging the Soviets from Afghan soil, the militants now turned their attention to other countries where they thought Muslims were being oppressed. As this brought them up against the US, they went from being heroic jihadis to “Islamic terrorists”, he said.

In place of trying to understand why 9/11 had happened, Bush and his colleagues took refuge in such inane expressions like “they (militants) hate our freedom, our way of life, our democracy” and, even more ridiculously, “they love killing”, Khan said. The main stakeholders used 9/11 to pursue their own agenda, which it was convenient to conflate Islam and terrorism for. Hence wherever Muslims were involved in a freedom struggle, they would become “Islamic terrorists”, he said. Ariel Sharon cited the excuse of terrorism to use his formidable military might against the unarmed civilians in Palestinian. Similarly, Russia would use the magic word of Al Qaida to squash all accusations of genocide and human rights abuse in Chechnya. But the chief grievances were political, not religious, he said.

India claimed that “Islamic terrorists” were operating in Kashmir when the freedom struggle there dated back to almost 150 years. George Bush attacked Afghanistan and Iraq on the same pretext.

The West believed that Muslims were the major suicide bombers with no mentioning of the fact that before 9/11, 70 percent of suicide bombings in the world were committed by the Tamil Tigers in Sri Lanka, who were Hindus, he said. “No one blames Hinduism, nor do they blame Shintoism for the Japanese Kamikaze pilots,” he said. Hence the entire Muslim world put on defensive.

General Musharraf went on to making Pakistan a frontline state against Islamic extremism and terrorism. He invented the term “enlightened moderation” in the hope of encouraging Muslims to avoid militancy.

He said certainly some madrassas did preach hate against other sects, and they should have been closed a long time ago but it was no justification for putting all madressad under doubt. He said President Pervez Musharraf’s hands were tied and he was seen as a stooge of the US.

In Muslim countries where the government was perceived to be a US puppet, there was a rise in both anti-Americanism and terrorism. Suicide bombings in Pakistan started only after the Iraq invasion when both the prime minister and the president were targeted, he said. And where the government was thought to derive its power from its own people (and not from the US), like Iran and Malaysia, there was no terrorism, he said.

The war on terror would never be won as long as people did not address the root causes of terrorism e.g as long as the leadership in the US and UK denied that the horrific London bombing had anything at all to do with Iraq, he said. The great danger was that sooner or later some suicide attacker would get hold of chemical or biological weapons and cause far greater damage in the US or UK than we had seen to date. When episodes such as Guantanamo and Abu Ghraib were broadcast widely, the Muslim perception grown that it was not a war against terror but a war against Islam. The risk was then that the terrorists become “defenders of the faith”, he said. For that cause they would have no shortage of recruits, he said.

By not addressing the issues that give a perception in the world of unjust US policies (like in Palestine, Iraq, Kashmir) and by using the pretext of democracy to invade Iraq, while backing a military dictator in Pakistan or a tyrant in Uzbekistan, the US double standards cause further Muslim alienation. The US and Israel were leaning on Mahmoud Abbas to curb Palestinian militancy, but this would achieve nothing unless the root cause was addressed. Similarly, they could lean on Musharraf to open way for political leadership as much as they liked to close the madrassas, which preach militancy. “In short, the Americans are impotent in this war on terror” Khan said.

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