opinion

The terrorist attacks in Washington DC and New York City have highlighted once again the menace of extremism. Although in this case, the so-called Islamic 'fundamentalists' were involved, human history has shown that extremism transcends religion, race, culture, ideology and language, and also that extremism thrives on oppression, injustice and persecution.

For example, Catholic and Protestant extremists in Northern Ireland who have been ravaging both Northern Ireland and Britain for years, Tamil Tigers in Sri Lanka, extreme leftists in Japan and Germany like the Red Army or Red Army Faction in the 1970s, extreme right-wing in the United States like the Ku Klux Khan, Basque separatists in Spain, and the apocalyptic Aum Shinrikyo cult in Japan.

Earlier examples include Serbian nationalists like Gavrilo Princip who assassinated the heir to the throne of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, Archduke Franz Ferdinand, in 1914, and the many pre-Bolshevik Revolution anarchists in Russia and other parts of Europe, as well as the United States.

There were of course non-political extremists and non-religious terrorists who are simply mad or nihilistic like Theodore John Kacznski or popularly known as the Unabomber (universities and airports bomber), an American mathematician who killed and maimed people in universities and airports by sending them homemade bombs for 20 years, simply because he hated modern technologies.

Normally, those extremists and terrorists who have committed criminal offences like murder, illegal possession of firearms, forgery of travel documents and kidnap, should be arrested, charged in the open court, sentenced and punished accordingly under criminal law and procedures.

They and their supporters should be convinced by the justice and the moral superiority of the system they try to destroy by cowardly violent means. To prevent them from actually committing those crimes, efficient and self-disciplined police and military intelligence systems are certainly important and necessary.

State terrorism

Given these universal broad agreements, whether preventive detention of suspects without open trial for an indefinite period of time could serve the purpose well or whether it is counterproductive, should be subject to genuine, honest, rational and open debate.

One simple reason is that preventive detention of mere suspects or worse still, legitimate, non-violent and respectable political dissenters, without trial for an indefinite period of time could only serve to confirm the moral inferiority of the existing system of jurisprudence in the opinion of the ordinary people, and the validity of the claims of extremists and fanatics, real or merely perceived, who offer stricter rule of evidence in their 'Ideal Society'.

Another reason for caution against blind endorsement of the authoritarian measure in the midst of anger and fear, is the prospect of state terrorism.

In their joint work, Terrorism today - the past, the players & the future (Prentice Hall, 2000), anti-terrorist experts, Clifford E Simonsen and Jeremy R Spinlove argue that state terrorism includes, both terrorism supported and financed by states against external 'enemies' or as a strategy or tactic of war, as well as against "its own people or dissenters". (p 47)

Examples of state terrorism committed in the name of 'national security' are not difficult to find and cite.

According to sociology professor Misagh Parsa in his latest work, States, ideologies & social revolution - a comparative analysis of Iran, Nicaragua and the Philippines , between 1978 and 1980 when former US-backed dictator Ferdinand Marcos was at the height of power, the number of kidnaps and 'salvaging' of Filipino citizens reached a staggering figure of over 8,000 and more than 50,000 people were arrested on charges of 'subversion'. (p 51)

Although the number of victims of state terrorism varied in Nicaragua under the Somoza and Shah Pahlavi of Iran, the moral of the story was the same: President Franklin D Roosevelt's policy was wrong when he said: "Somoza may be a son of a bitch, but he is our son of a bitch."

Armed with unlimited and unspecified emergency power, or the power of preventive detentions, those desperate dictators and opportunistic tyrants abused it for the protection of their own partisan and financial interests.

They eliminated moderate, peaceful and constitutional oppositionists, suppressed civil liberties, violated human rights and rendered the democratic process meaningless. Economic exploitation of the ordinary people and financial indiscipline and scandals further eroded their moral authority to rule.

Third force

The findings of Misagh Parsa in the case of the Iranian Revolution are supported by the observations of historians Patrick Brogan who wrote World conflicts (Bloomsbury, 1992), and TE Vadney in The world since 1945 (Penguin, 1992): After successfully eliminating or suppressing all secular and moderate Islamic opposition, the Shah of Iran was confronted head-on with the more radical faction of Islamic oppositionists who treated physical sufferings and even death as martyrdom, and who could mobilise even secular leftists and nationalists as well as atheist communists who genuinely felt the futility of parliamentary struggle and democratic participation.

The state terrorism of the Shah thus created the ground for the radicals: A political system that was oppressive, cruel and dictatorial, and popularly felt to be so.

With hindsight, we can conclude that it actually took both Ayatollah Khomeini as well as the US-backed Shah Pahlavi to make the 'tragic' Iranian Revolution.

There is therefore an urgent and pressing need for cool-headedness and a balanced third force, both domestically and internationally, in the current situation where both extremists and crooked opportunists ("our sons of a bitch") actually and secretly need each other to justify their plans, operations and raison d'etre .

JAMES WONG is chief analyst of Strategic Analysis Malaysia (SAM) which produces the subscriber-based political report, [#1] Analysis Malaysia[/#] . James is a former Member of Parliament (1990-1995) and a former columnist for the Sin Chew Jit Poh Chinese daily. He read political science and economics at the Monash University in Melbourne, Australia. While in Sin Chew , he and a team of journalists won the top awards of Malaysian Press Institute (MPI) for 1998 and 1999.