CIAO DATE: 05/02

Georgetown Journal of International Affairs

Volume 1, Number 1, Winter/Spring 2000

 

Responding to Religious Terrorism
by Mark Juergensmeyer

 

In December 1999, as the world braced for anticipated millenial eruptions of religious mayhem–which never occurred–the Russian government was decimating Chechnya in response to sabotages in Moscow. In 1998, the United States’ retaliation in answer to terrorist attacks on its embassies in Africa were warranted, but ultimately futile. Both examples demonstrate the inadequacy of most responses to religious terrorism. Just after the attack on the U.S. embassies in Africa, Secretary of State Madeleine Albright proclaimed that America was at war with religious terrorists, adding that “unfortunately, this is the war of the future.” She might have added that it is a war that we do not know how to win.

According to military and diplomatic leaders, the fight against religious terrorism is a kind of global guerrilla war that defies the logic of conventional warfare, but can still be won by applying military tactics. Many religious activists, however, view their battle not in military, but in theological terms. They regard social conflict as a spiritual contest, and thus see their acts of religious terrorism as an aspect of cosmic war. For this reason, viewing terrorism as a political and military strategy has proven insufficient for understanding and combatting religious violence. In my recent book on the subject, Terror in the Mind of God, which is partly based on interviews with religious terrorists, I conclude that many of these acts had a more symbolic than strategic significance. Even those terrorists who have specific goals were to some extent engaging in forms of “performance violence,” dramatic acts meant to call attention to a vast hidden war.

Any government’s response to religious terrorism must, therefore, address both the realities of this spiritual war and the human aspirations that often accompany it, including the desire for a renewed role for religion in public life. How should governments respond? There are at least five approaches that governments have recently used in countering religious violence.

Retaliatory Force. The most direct response to religious terrorism is retaliatory force. It is probably also the most difficult to undertake effectively. It includes the possibility of killing or forcibly controlling terrorists. This strategy is often dangerous because it can legitimize the very worldview religious terrorists themselves use to justify their actions–one in which secular and religious forces are at constant war. A belligerent secular enemy is often just what religious activists hope for, since it increases their support. In Algeria, for instance, when the military junta halted elections and enacted martial law, popular support for the Islamic party and violent resistance against the junta mushroomed.

In order for the retaliatory strategy to work, a secular government must be willing to declare a total war against religious terrorism and wage it over many years, perhaps decades. The prognosis for victory is, however, positive only when the opponents are easily identified and contained within a specific region. Israel’s attempts to control its Muslim enemies have had varying degrees of success. The Indian government, on the other hand, was able to virtually obliterate the most militant of radical Sikhs in 1992 in part because it embarked on a ruthless search–and–destroy mission against the activists, almost all of whom were located within the limited confines of the state of Punjab.

Legal means of quelling a religious insurrection have also been effective, but only when a government possesses legal authority over the attacking group. The Japanese government, for instance, not only brought the Aum Shinrikyo leaders to trial and imprisoned them, but also employed legislative and police powers to restrict the movement’s activities. Similarly, in early 1999 China outlawed the Falun Gong movement on the grounds that it was anti–government and potentially dangerous. But as the United States discovered in the case of Libyan terrorists who allegedly destroyed Pan Am 103 over Lockerbie, Scotland, in 1988, persecuting activists in another country–especially an unfriendly one–can be a difficult matter.

Activist groups do, however, sometimes destroy themselves. The infighting within some movements has become so severe that they have literally disintegrated, or become so impotent that their government opponents can handily subdue them. The internal squabbling of various factions within the Sikh movement, for example, enabled the Indian government to crush that movement. In the year before he instigated the nerve gas attack in the Tokyo subways, Shoko Asahara, the leader of Aum Shinrikyo, mentioned group suicide as a way to escape what he thought was a government conspiracy against his movement. Thus, it is not always necessary for a government to use military power to obliterate a terrorist band, since sometimes the band’s own internal tensions can accomplish the job themselves. In general, however, terrorist groups are not easily destroyed.

Sword Rattling. There is a second scenario in the category of knee–jerk responses to terrorist acts: the rattling of swords. Its aim is to threaten such harsh violent reprisals that they will deter religious activists from pursuing further terrorist missions. Many law enforcement agencies base their “crack down” strategy on the assumption that even if authorities cannot destroy the terrorists completely, they can at least frighten them by raising the stakes of engagement in terrorist activity.

Though it is possible that some fringe members of an activist group are sobered by such brinkmanship, it is unlikely that a “get tough” strategy will have much of an effect on the more dedicated members. According to these members’ perspective, the world is already at war, and they expect authorities to respond harshly. In fact, they would be puzzled if governments did not. The threat of additional penalties and punishment, therefore, has little if any deterrent effect.

Libya is often offered as a case in which intimidation was successful. In the mid–1980s, Libya was thought to harbor Muslim activists perpetrating a series of acts of international terrorism against the United States. In response, in 1986, the United States executed an air strike against the leader of the country, Muammar Qaddafi. The missiles targeted one of his residences and killed a member of his family, but Qaddafi himself survived. Almost fifteen years have passed, and very few anti–American terrorist acts have been attributed to Libya. Did the air strikes have anything to do with this outcome?

Although it may be possible that Libya was intimidated by the air strike, the government’s immediate response was quite different. The number of terrorist incidents linked to Libya and directed against the United States actually rose in the two years following the U.S. air strikes: fifteen in 1987 and eight in 1988. The most devastating terrorist attack against the United States in which Libya has been implicated–the tragic explosion of Pan Am 103 over Lockerbie, Scotland, which killed all 259 on board–occurred after the air strikes in December 1988.

It is not clear why terrorist attacks from Libya decreased overall in the decade following American action. Perhaps Qaddafi was eager to normalize relations with other governments for trade reasons as much as any other. Indeed, statements made by Qaddafi in 1998 seem to indicate that the economic sanctions leveled against Libya were much more persuasive than the military actions. In any event, there is no clear evidence that he or any other supporter of international terrorism has been intimidated by America’s show of military might.

Terrorism Wins. The third outcome is when terrorism, in some way, wins. This is the aim for which every religious terrorist yearns.

When asked whether Jews and Muslims could live in harmony in the area he described as Palestine, Dr. Abdul Aziz Rantisi, the Hamas leader, affirmed that they could–but not under the present arrangement. He said he could not accept “Israel’s sovereignty over Palestinian land,” but the two groups could live in peace if the situation were reversed and the land were controlled by Palestinian Arabs. “Jews would be welcomed in our nation,” Rantisi explained. He pledged not to mistreat them “when we become strong.” Needless to say, this solution has not been enthusiastically embraced by Israel. Given Israeli opposition, and realizing that Israel holds the preponderance of military power in the region, could any part of Rantisi’s Islamic Palestinian objective be achieved? The answer is yes, but only as long as Rantisi and his colleagues in Hamas accept an incremental or compromise solution. If that occurs, the violence of Hamas will have won its leaders the power to negotiate the settlement.

In other cases, the leverage obtained through terrorist acts has indeed been converted into bargaining chips for negotiated settlements, and former terrorist organizations have been forged into political parties. Examples include peace negotiations in Northern Ireland that led to the Good Friday Agreement and the emergence of Sinn Fein as an effective political voice for the Catholic community. Yet as the bombing in the village of Omagh in August 1998 revealed, such negotiations have not always been accepted gracefully by renegade members of activist movements who insist upon continuing their violent paramilitary campaigns. After all, the ideology of cosmic war does not easily submit to compromise.

The government response has made all the difference in a successful transition from violence to compromise. The attempted resolutions of the Northern Ireland and Palestine conflicts are interesting cases. In Northern Ireland, the British did not blame Sinn Fein for the Omagh violence, and both British and Sinn Fein leaders formed a united front against it.

The public therefore perceived Omagh as a senseless act that was counterproductive to the political purposes of the Northern Irish Catholic community. In Israel, however, Benjamin Netanyahu and other Israeli leaders publicly blamed the Palestinian peacemaker, Yasser Arafat, when Hamas resumed terrorist activities after the Peace Accords. Hamas activists gained credibility since Netanyahu equated them with Arafat, while Arafat’s legitimacy was undercut by the existence of renegade activists that he could not control. With Arafat weakened and Hamas emboldened, violence continued. In this case, violence won Hamas the ability to control the peace process and even settle it entirely.

Separating Religion. In the fourth scenario, religion is removed from politics and moves to moral and metaphysical planes so that conflict can be rid of absolutist demands. Even if the leaders of a movement are crushed, intimidated, or compromised, no permanent solution can be forged as long as images of spiritual warfare remain strong in the minds of other religious activists and are linked in the popular mind with social struggles in the world around them. In some instances, however, the image of cosmic war itself can be transformed. Religious activists can conceive of a more moderate view of religious warfare that leads their groups away from political and social confrontation. The extreme form of this option–religion’s privatization in the post–Enlightenment world–is, however, unlikely. Few religious activists are willing to retreat to the time when secular authorities ran the public arena and religion stayed safely contained within the confines of churches, mosques, temples, and synagogues.

In the late 1990s, however, many Islamic countries witnessed a reaction against politicized religion. In 1999, Iranian students demonstrated in support of leaders such as the moderate Muslim theologian Abdol Karim Soroush, who argued that political activism undermined Islam. Soroush made a distinction between ideology and religion, and claimed that Muslim clergy had no business in politics. Similar statements were made by moderate Islamic thinkers such as Hassan Hanafi in Egypt, Rashid Ghannouchi in Tunisia, and Algeria’s Mohammed Arkoun. For these leaders, the image of struggle is largely a spiritual battle–a contest between moral positions rather than armed enemies.

Their positions do not require the image of cosmic war to be removed from public life or abandoned altogether. Rather, the image is redirected to the battlefield of ideas. Two conditions must be met, however, before such a transformation can occur. First, members of the activists’ religious community must embrace this moderate form of social struggle as a legitimate representation of cosmic war. Second, the opponents of religious terrorism have to accept this representation. Secular authorities have been able to do little about the first criterion, since it requires a transformation of thinking and leadership within the religion itself. Yet they can affect the second criterion by resisting bellicose actions that would confirm the impression that they were fighting a cosmic war, and by developing an open role for religion in a less confrontational context.

Capturing the High Ground. The fifth option is for secular authorities capture the moral high ground and embrace the dominant values of society, especially those associated with religion. Such a position would undermine the claims of religious activists to be spokespersons for a righteous public order. Moreover, in many conflicts, solutions are dependent on the contending parties’ abilities to summon at least a minimal level of trust and respect for one another. The likelihood of a compromise solution increases when religious activists perceive governmental authorities as having a moral integrity equal to, or accommodating of, religious values.

In some cases, where religious violence has been quelled, religion has been subsumed under the aegis of governmental authority. In Sri Lanka, for instance, the efforts of the government to destroy the Janatha Vimukthi Peramuna (JVP), the People’s Liberation Front, which was supported by many radical Buddhist monks, were two–pronged. The harsher measures involved tracking down and executing the most dedicated members of the radical movement. The more accommodating measures included efforts to gain the support of militant religious leaders. President Ranasinghe Premadasa funded Buddhist schools and social services, and in 1990 created a Ministry of Buddhist Affairs, naming himself the first Minister. Premadasa also formed a council of Buddhist advisors, which included Buddhist monks who had been critical of the secular government. One of these advisors told me that Premadasa’s pro–religious measures had made the government finally begin to “reflect Buddhist values.”

In Northern Ireland, the British response to Irish terrorism emphasized the government’s stance to follow the rule of law and not overreact to terrorist provocations. This demonstrated to both its friends and foes the government’s subscription to moral values. It also made it difficult for religious activists to portray Britain as the evil enemy. Finally, it increased the possibility of cooperation with religious activists on both sides of the Northern Ireland dispute–and led to the signing of a provisional peace accord in 1998. Such measures, of course, do not erase all sources of opposition to a government, but they markedly reduce the terrorists’ bases of support within their own communities. Since violent religious activists rely on this support to carry out and gain politically from their ventures, a diminution of community support is tantamount to cutting off terrorism’s life blood. Governments that chose the other route–abandoning their own democratic principles in response to terrorism–have embarked on perilous journeys. The violence that erupted in Algeria after the military junta annulled elections in 1992 was in part due to the perception that the government had discredited itself. In the eyes of many supporters of the Islamic Salvation Front, the secular leaders had demonstrated that they could not meet even the mundane moral standards of secular democracies, much less the presumably higher standards suggested by religion.

It is poignant that religious activists have so often accused the governments of modern nations of being morally corrupt, since modern nationalism is based on Enlightenment moral values. Yet the ability to label secular leaders as hypocrites has animated religious activists from the Enlightenment until the present day. This point was made to me in a peculiar place–the Federal Penitentiary in Lompoc, California–where Mahmud Abouhalima, a convicted terrorist, lectured me on the lack of moral and spiritual purpose in Western society. Incarcerated for his role in the World Trade Center bombing, he accused all secularists of being hypocritical. He challenged secularists’ dedication to the virtue of tolerance when they could not tolerate religious activists such as himself. He insisted that he knew that Western people lacked “the soul of religion,” and said that people in the secular world “are just living day by day, looking for jobs, for money to live.”

Several thoughtful observers of Western society have agreed with Abouhalima’s latter point. They suggest that the time has come for religion to reenter the public arena. Marcel Gauchet, a French social theorist, has argued that Western society needs to recover the spiritual roots it abandoned early in the Enlightenment when it transferred the sense of sacrality from God to the nation. American theologian Reinhold Niebuhr made a similar argument. Although Niebuhr was suspicious of religion’s ability to absolutize and moralize political calculations that were conducted for reasons of self–interest, he saw a political role for what he called the “illusions” of religion in providing the ties that bind people together “in spite of social conflict.” He described these as “the peculiar gifts of religion to the human spirit.”

Niebuhr was right: What religion provides society is not merely high–mindedness, but a concern with the quality of life, a goal more noble than the simple accumulation of power and possessions. It is for this reason that religious rhetoric has entered into political discourse at turbulent times like these, when the moral and spiritual roots of traditional communities are challenged or in danger of being severed.

At such times, groups have seized on religious ideas to give a profundity and ideological clarity to what, in many cases, have been real experiences of economic destitution, social oppression, political corruption, and a desperate need to rise above the limitations of modern existence. The image of cosmic struggle has given these bitter experiences meaning, and for some participants the involvement in a grand conflict has been exhilarating–even empowering. Persons and social movements engaged in such conflicts have gained a sense of destiny. In such situations, religious believers view acts of violence as both appropriate and justified.

Those who oppose religious terrorism have to find a way of rejecting the violence without the religion. The most effective strategy is to affirm the public validity of religious values–even those to which acts of violence have been occasionally and deviously attached–while rejecting the violence. This is a goal that cannot be achieved easily or quickly. There are turbulent years ahead in which religious activists will attempt to stake their claims in vicious ways, and in which moderate governments will be called upon to exercise a great deal of patience, reason, and a continuing subscription to their own moral values.