‘Solutions’ to the wrong problems
October 23rd, 2002
Senior police officers hit the talk-show circuit over the weekend in the wake of the bombings in Zamboanga City and Metro Manila, and President Arroyo’s appeal for calm and unity.
Judging from what these leaders of the lead agency that’s supposed to protect the public were saying, however, we’re in real trouble. One police officer who’s supposed to be on top of the counterterrorism campaign in Metro Manila, for example, kept saying that “there will be more bombings,” and repeated an earlier police warning for people to stay away from crowded places.
However, Filipinos are congenitally incapable of keeping to themselves, perhaps in fear of being alone with their miseries. They will in fact gather in large numbers to gawk at the scene of any disturbance. This much was evident during the serial coup attempts of the late 1980s, when they even jeered putschist troops and received a hail of bullets in return. It was equally evident on EDSA the other night, when some kibitzers were photographed even smiling at the scene of the bus bombing in Balintawak.
The Metro Manila bombing also coincided with a huge sale in Metro Manila’s biggest malls, which meant that, gripped by the usual fatalism (“what will be, will be”), as well as by mass cynicism over police credibility, people will risk life and limb anyway in search of great bargains and for a chance to do a little early Christmas shopping. By Monday, despite a bit of decline in the numbers the malls expected, it seemed that a couple of hundred thousand Metro Manilans had done exactly that.
Besides the police warning’s falling on mostly deaf ears, it also contradicted Mrs. Arroyo’s own assurance that everything was under control and people could go ahead and shop. Here was the police, however, suggesting precisely the opposite, and what’s more, predicting that more bombs would indeed go off.
This is the kind of mindless prediction that either provokes suspicions that the police know something we don’t, but can’t do anything about it, or encourages conspiracy theories, like that one which says the police is itself involved in the bombings.
Compounding an apparent incapacity to calculate the public impact of his statements, the same police officer went on to definitely describe the bombings in Zamboanga and Metro Manila as terrorist acts—without, however, saying why. This prompted the program host to ask what exactly terrorists want—to which he replied that terrorists “want to create trouble.”
That reply puts terrorists in the same league as someone who hurls a rock at a storefront window, or who dumps garbage on your driveway. A terrorist is of course far more than that, and dealing with terrorism requires more than the usual recourse to easy answers a police force with a long record of incompetence has been used to.
Although the Philippine police and military have long used the word terrorist to describe political and guerrilla organizations, the present preeminence of terrorism as a method of achieving certain ends in an imperfect world order is relatively new.
That preeminence is a consequence of, among others, the end of the Cold War era.
Among others, the end of that era resulted in a number of groups’ losing the administrative and political guidance afforded by, say, their closeness to, or sympathies with, the defunct Soviet Union. It is also a consequence of the perception by many of these and other groups fighting for a host of political and religious ends that there is no longer any deterrence on US power from any state.
As the sole remaining superpower in the world, the United States is today regarded as the primary barrier to such diverse causes as Islamic fundamentalism, a Palestinian state, and even the aspirations to independence of various ethnic groups within existing states.
As a result, many of these groups have concluded that only a network of like-minded individuals prepared to sacrifice their lives and everyone else’s can achieve their ends. Note that terrorism began to take center stage only a decade ago, when global power relations went through the profound changes brought about by the fall of the Soviet Union and the entire Eastern European bloc.
Philippine police officers, however, may not need to know the global context of terrorist resurgence. But what they do need to be clear about is that terrorism is not about “troublemaking.”
Not every violent act, says the vast literature on the subject, is terrorism, as the military and police forces of this country so glibly assure the public.
For an act of violence to be a terrorist act, it must first of all be indiscriminate, meaning it claims noncombatants, or those not directly involved in a conflict, as victims. A terrorist act is meant to sow fear as well, meaning it is committed against the innocent or uninvolved to strike fear into a larger audience.
It is, in the words of the US Terrorism Research Center, “a psychological act conducted for its impact on an audience.”
An act of terrorism is therefore neither random nor unplanned. It is an act of violence calculated to produce a certain effect beyond the act itself. The purpose may either be to seize political power, or to achieve a change in government policy or action. Terrorism may thus be used by any group committed to the achievement of a political or religious end. But it is always a political act.
The usual suspects in this country after the Abu Sayyaf are the Moro Islamic Liberation Front and the New People’s Army. The Terrorism Research Center, however, warns that “insurgents are not necessarily terrorists if they comply with the rules of war and do not engage in those forms of violence identified as terrorist acts.”
Modern terrorism, for example, makes no distinctions between combatants and noncombatants, as the rules of war stipulate.
The bombing of a bus, if indeed committed as part of achieving the political purpose of changing government policy or even to seize political power, can heighten public anxiety only if committed against the innocent. Noncombatants, for example, can be assured by a clash between guerrillas and the police that they will not be targeted. An indiscriminate act of violence like a bus bombing, however, provides no such assurance.
To achieve the purpose of fomenting mass anxiety, however, the act must be publicized, usually through the mass media, and with the perpetrators’ admitting responsibility. The admission of responsibility is essential. If a terrorist act is committed for a political purpose, the group that committed it and its goals must be known to have committed it, to drive home the message that it can strike at will, and that the government can stop the attacks if it agreed to the group’s demands. There would be no point to a bombing unless it is subsequently made clear what the perpetrators want from government.
No group has so far claimed responsibility for either the Zamboanga or the Metro Manila bombings—which raises the question whether they were indeed a terrorist activity, or plain, garden-variety criminal acts. Instead of describing the bombings offhand and without the benefit of any investigation as terrorist acts, the police and the military should thus be looking into the possibility that they may not be because they lack one of the essential elements that make an act terrorist.
As it is, the proposed responses to the bombings—the passage of an antiterrorism law and putting a national ID system in place, both of which are likely to damage civil liberties—presume them to be terrorist acts despite no group’s claiming credit for them and issuing or renewing their political demands. The Philippine government could yet end up providing costly “solutions” to the wrong problems.
(TODAY/ABS-CBNNEWS.COM, October 21, 2002)