State of fear the global attack on rights: Richard Swift wonders if we will all end up under occupation

New Internationalist, March, 2005

'THE army is a poor school for democracy.' The words are those of the former Canadian Prime Minister Pierre Elliot Trudeau. We students took them and plastered them all over the walls of downtown Montreal when Trudeau invoked the War Measures Act and sent soldiers into Quebec streets in response to a couple of terrorist kidnappings. It was October 1970--and an object lesson in the fragility of civil liberties. Hundreds of activists who had nothing to do with the Front du Liberation de Quebec were rounded up and held without charge. Overnight we lost cherished freedoms that had taken decades of struggle to win. It was, in its way, a minor dress rehearsal for George W Bush's current War on Terror.

Military occupation--whether in the dusty towns of Iraq's Sunni triangle, the ruins of the Chechen capital Grozny, the Chinese-controlled Tibetan highlands, or anywhere else for that matter--is never kind to rights and freedoms. Curfews, preventive detention, censorship, checkpoints, informers, interrogations, surprise 'sweeps' of local neighbourhoods, official identity documents limiting movement: these are all ways of dealing with a hostile and agitated population. The arbitrary exercise of power is the centrepiece of any occupation. It is hard to imagine it otherwise.

[ILLUSTRATION OMITTED]

Occupations, at least of the modern variety, are also the seedbeds of terrorism. The Israeli occupation and settlement of the West Bank and Gaza, the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan, the US in Afghanistan and now Iraq, the Russians in the Caucasus, India and Pakistan parcelling up Kashmir--all of these have made terrorism worse, much worse. It is like throwing a rock into a pool and watching the ripples move out in ever-widening circles. Even the CIA recognizes this: a recent report by their National Intelligence Council thinktank warns that 'a successor generation' to al-Qaeda is being created in the cauldron of the Iraqi occupation. The report predicts this new generation will now spread across the world using the internet to stay in touch.

It is by now well known that the killing of a family member or friend, or domicide (the destruction of your home) at the hands of the occupying power are common experiences among those who commit themselves to terror tactics. Others seem more motivated by the humiliation as their national or religious identity is degraded and debased. Both experiences are the products of occupation and domination. The desire for revenge agitates the soul and, as the Sicilian proverb says, 'it is a terrible dish, best served cold'--in other words, when least expected.

Occasionally the real motives of the occupier can be glimpsed through the cant about territorial integrity, democracy, economic stability or finding a 'proper' partner for peace. The blunt-speaking Donald Rumsfeld is good for this. According to him the US intervention in the Middle East will end because 'eventually the Iraqis will get tired of dying'. Israeli Army Chief-of-Staff Moshe Yaalon, another man known for refreshing candour, opined that: 'The Palestinians must be made to understand in the deepest recesses of their consciousness that they are a defeated people.'

[ILLUSTRATION OMITTED]

Similar sentiments may not reach the lips, at least not on prime-time TV, but they are surely held in the hearts of occupiers everywhere--from the Moroccan general behind his fortified wall in Western Sahara to the Jakarta administrator who presides over Indonesia's occupation of the far-flung Melanesian territory of West Papua. This is, of course, the occupier's fantasy and it's a dangerous one. What the occupier demands most is compliance. To get this, any democratic anti-occupation politics needs to be suppressed in a thousand different ways. Some occupied subjects may react with the desired resignation, but others will take up the weapons of terror and accept the embrace of fundamentalist absolutism. In the absence of democratic possibility, terrorism flourishes.

Increasingly this 'mentality of occupation' has taken on a broader application. Security and control are its watchwords. Every policy post-9/11--aid, immigration, economic development, foreign policy, social policy--must be refracted through its prism. Nothing must be left to chance. Hearts and minds must also be 'occupied' by fear to create the political will needed to buttress the national security state. Hence the constant warnings of impending threat--amber alert ... red alert ... chemical attack ... biological attack ... nuclear attack ... on the subways ... in the water supply ... at the shopping mall ... at the sports stadium--the drumbeat is endless.

An age-old fear reflex allowed us to escape the Sabre-Tooth Tiger and the Woolly Mammoth. Today when it is triggered, we rush to surrender our democratic agency, turn our tax dollars and rights over to the security forces and become volunteer soldiers in a war against a shadowy enemy 'other'. Not that the threat isn't real sometimes, as the innocents of Madrid and Beslan, made to pay such a terrible price last year, would testify. But the threat cannot be separated from its source--the brutal military occupations that grip the world's 'trouble spots' and the occupiers who defend their 'necessity'.