Two remarkably similar sentiments were expressed this week on either side of the Atlantic by the bereaved relatives of the victims of Canada’s and Britain’s worst terrorist acts.
“The families have said again and again there was enough information that the deadly sabotage could’ve been avoided,” said Bal Gupta, head of the Air India Victims’ Families Association. He was speaking after a disclosure that an informer had alerted the Royal Canadian Mounted Police about a plot to bomb an Air India flight, and done so eight months before the 1983 mid-air explosion killed all 329 people on board.
“Could the bombings have been prevented? As a father who lost a son, I am drawn to that conclusion,” said Graham Foulk. He was speaking after a disclosure that MI5, the British secret service, knew of a connection between the five Britons convicted Monday of a terrorist plot and two of the suicide bombers of the July 7, 2005, subway blasts that killed 52 commuters.
Security forces seem to veer between bungling such seemingly credible leads and going overboard with such excesses as Guantanamo Bay, or shipping suspects abroad to be tortured (Maher Arar) or the Afghan secret service allegedly abusing detainees, including those handed over by Canadians.
Politicians, too, fluctuate between denial, as in Canada during the period of Sikh militancy and in the United States after the 1993 World Trade Center bombing, or overreacting, such as enacting the draconian Anti-Terrorism Act (two provisions of which have since been voted down by Parliament) or detaining suspects for long periods without charge under the Security Certificates (since declared unconstitutional by the Supreme Court).
Governments are often at bay in dealing with terrorism, and not just Muslim terrorism. Lasting solutions rarely emerge until the conflicts underpinning the terrorism are resolved, as seen in the Punjab in India or more recently in Northern Ireland. The opposite is true in the Israeli Occupied Territories and Sri Lanka.
The rule seems to apply equally to both the indigenous, mostly localized terrorism (by the IRA or the Basque separatists), and the “homegrown terrorism” in the West motivated by faraway conflicts (Punjabi separatists then, Tamil Tiger sympathizers now, as also jihadists operating in the name of Palestine, Chechnya, Iraq, etc.)
Conflicts involving Muslims galvanize a handful of the West’s disaffected young Muslims.
Many are second- and third-generation beer-drinking, cricket-playing Britons or basketball-loving North Americans, whose law-abiding immigrant parents are as stunned as other citizens by their conversion to a violent cause.
Some of these young men had gone to Pakistan for al-Qaeda training but they could just as easily have gone to northern Ontario for such a camp. Many had met on the web long before seeing each other in person. Geography is not the key.
The real issue is what motivates them, not who and how — radical imams, Internet videos, militant pamphlets or, as some critics stupidly assert, multiculturalism. We need to address the causes far more than the symptoms.
In this bleak landscape of the failed war on terrorism, the conviction of five Britons offers some relief.
They had their day in court, disproving the prevailing Muslim belief, best summed up in a joke — “the black man complains he can’t get a fair trial; the Muslim says he can’t even get a trial.”
Two sets of young Canadians will also get their day in court. Ottawa-born Mohammad Momin Khawaja, an alleged accomplice of the five convicted Britons, is to go on trial this summer, as also the 18 Toronto-area men charged last year with terrorism-related charges.
The sooner and more transparent their trials, the better. Upholding the rule of law does matter in the war on terrorism.
In this vein, it was good to see Peter MacKay raise a stink in Beijing about Huseyin Celil, a Canadian citizen and resident of Burlington convicted and jailed in China on alleged terrorism charges. The foreign affairs minister insisted on Canadian consular access to Celil to ensure that he has not been tortured.
After MacKay’s departure, Chinese officials complained that Canada was harping too much on human rights.
This, ironically, is what some right-wingers in Canada are also saying about the parliamentary furor over the alleged torture of detainees handed by Canadian soldiers to Afghan authorities.
Two lessons emerge: the war on terrorism will continue to fail if it fails to address its causes; and we won’t preserve our democracy by attacking its foundations.
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