ISSUE 38: SEPTEMBER-OCTOBER 2005

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Absolute security is neither possible nor desirable

Ramesh Thakur is senior vice rector of UN University. This commentary first appeared in the Canberra Times on July 29. These are his personal views

By Ramesh Thakur

Jean Charles de Menezes, a young Brazilian legally living and working in Britain, was killed at a London Tube station in a tragic case of mistaken identity. Police have confirmed he had no links whatsoever to terrorism. But he had come out of a house under surveillance by anti-terrorist undercover police, was overdressed on a warm day, ran in panic when challenged by the police, and was shot seven times at point-blank range. Perhaps he had suspicious wires sticking out: turns out he was an electrician. From his perspective, in the heightened state of fear in London, perhaps he ran because a group of suspicious young stalkers were chasing him.

Sympathy for the police dilemma is tempered by still greater sympathy for Menezes. The case highlights the need for a proper balance between civil liberties, human rights, and the responsibility of the state to protect its citizens from terrorists.

Before 9/11, Westerners were prone to ambivalence between terrorists and governments fighting to maintain national security and assure public safety. After 9/11, they began to view other countries' parallel wars against terrorism through the prism of a fellow-government facing agonizing policy choices in the real world, rather than single-issue groups whose vision is not anchored in any responsibility for policy decisions.

But no government has a licence to kill. The death of Menezes is a victory for the terrorists. Success in defeating terrorism requires us to be true to our values that they reject. Michael Ignatieff has argued for the lesser evil of curtailing liberties and using violence in order to defeat the greater evil of terrorism. But we must be careful not to succumb to the still greater evil of destroying the very values for which democracies stand. The way to do this is to require of governments that they justify all restrictive measures publicly, submit them to judicial review and circumscribe them with sunset clauses to guard against the temporary becoming permanent.

Many democracies have shifted the balance of laws and administrative practices towards state security. A CIA counter-terrorism expert testified that "After 9/11 the gloves came off", while another US official remarked that "if you don't violate someone's human rights, you aren't doing your job". There developed also the distasteful practice of "rendition to torture", sending prisoners to other countries precisely because the latter were known to practice torture as a routine repertoire of interrogation. In Australia, the post-9/11 hysteria was harvested by the Government to introduce tough detention laws against illegal immigrants in defence of a policy of Fortress Australia that led to the detention of 33 Australian citizens, one of whom was deported to her country of birth and another, a mentally ill woman, spent 10 months in detention.

Terrorism has a threefold impact on human rights. It is itself an extreme denial of the most basic human right to life, and it creates an environment in which people cannot live in freedom from fear and enjoy other rights. Second, the threat of terrorism can be used by governments to enact laws that strip away many civil liberties and political freedoms. One common technique is to reverse the burden of proof: those accused of terrorist activities, sympathies or even guilt by association on the basis of accusations by anonymous people are to be presumed to be guilty until they can prove their innocence of unspecified charges. Third, without necessarily amending laws or enacting new ones, governments can use the need to fight terrorism as an alibi to stifle dissent and criticism and imprison or threaten domestic opponents.

President Bush's response to 9/11 was to elevate terrorism from a tactic or a method into a transcendental conflict: an epic struggle of historic proportions between the greatest force for good on earth, responding to a calling from beyond the stars, against enemies bent on destroying it. Neutrality was not an option. But this Manichean reinterpretation of 9/11 emboldened many other governments to re-label their domestic difficulties as part of the global war on terror.

The robustness and resilience of the democracies' commitment to human rights norms and values will be judged in the final analysis not by the breaches in the aftermath of 9/11, Bali and London, but by the reversal and attenuation of the breaches through judicial and political processes as well as the pressure of domestic and international civil society.

We must not privilege security and order to such an extent as to destroy our most cherished values of liberty and justice in the search for an unattainable absolute security.

Islam is a religion of peace. Muslims should reclaim their religion from the fanatics. No excuses, no alibis, no mantras of one man's terrorist is another man's freedom fighter. Tough on terrorists, yes. But tough also on the causes of terrorism and in defence of the virtues of tolerance, human rights and civil liberties.

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