According to a recent feature in Scientific America, the US
Homeland Department has dished out $12 million to a research facility
which investigates the origins, dynamics and psychological impact of
terrorism.
The facility, staffed by more than 30 experienced scientists, is called Study of Terrorism & Response to Terrorism (START).
According
to Scientific America: “Whereas earlier researchers focused on the
political roots of terrorism, many of today’s investigators are probing
the psychological factors that drive adherents to commit deadly deeds …”
START
is now concentrating on trying to figure out the minds of persons who
are willing to cause indiscriminate carnage and maximum deaths
(including their own) for what they believe is a cause close to their
faith. Such a person does not see it as an act of terror, but, rather,
an expression of their theological conviction.
In the
past, a majority of studies in this context have been more inclined to
treat such men and women as consequences of systematic brainwashing and
even mental illness.
Recent studies suggest that terrorist outfits usually tend to screen out mentally unstable recruits and volunteers because their instability is likely to compromise the mission and expose their handlers.
Even though these two factors are still being investigated,
the most recent studies on the issue emanating from research facilities
such as START suggest that most of the terrorists might actually be
mentally stable; even rational.
Summarising the results
of the recent studies, Scientific America informs that “the vast
majority of terrorists are not mentally ill but are essentially rational
people who weigh the costs and benefits of terrorist acts, concluding
that terrorism is profitable.”
By profitable they mean an
act of terror which, in addition to being financially favourable to the
perpetrator (or to his or her family which gets looked after if the
person is killed); is also an act which is perceived by the person to be
beneficial to his or her sense and perception of their spiritual
disposition.
What’s more, recent studies suggest that
terrorist outfits usually tend to screen out mentally unstable recruits
and volunteers because their instability is likely to compromise the
mission and expose their handlers.
The studies also
propose that even though economic disadvantages do play a role in
pushing a person to join a terror outfit out of anger or desperation,
this is not always the case.
Forensic psychiatrist Marc
Sageman of the University of Pennsylvania, carried out an extensive
survey of media reports and court records on 400 ‘extremists.’ He
determined that “these individuals were far from being brainwashed,
socially isolated, hopeless fighters; 90 per cent of them actually came
from caring, intact families; and 63 per cent of these had gone to
college.”
There is another interesting query that the
researchers are trying to investigate: why were terrorists during the
Cold War more constrained in their acts than the ones which emerged
after the end of that conflict?
Studies suggest that a
majority of significant terror groups during the Cold War were driven by
nationalistic or communist impulses. Modern religious terrorism largely
emerged from the 1990s onward.
Interestingly, despite
the fact that Cold War terrorists did not hesitate to kill perceived
enemies, they were, however, overtly conscious of how their acts would
be perceived by popular opinion and the media.
For
example, militant left-wing outfits in Europe, and even some factions of
Palestinian guerrilla organisations (in the late 1960s and 1970s),
would often abort attacks in which they feared casualties of innocent
bystanders could mount.
This is not the case anymore. It
seems, today, the old concern of being perceived as an indiscriminately
brutal outfit has actually become the purpose. Terrorists now actually
want to be perceived in this manner.
This changing
mindset reminds me of a man who once ran a small roadside tea stall a
few streets away from the offices of an English weekly I used to work
for as a reporter in the early 1990s.
People called him
Anju Bhai and he was in his 40s. He was famous for his doodh pati which
he used to serve in transparent teacups. But there was something else
about him which was far more intriguing.
Long before
some young Pakistanis began to pour into Afghanistan to fight in the
1980s, and before men began travelling to Syria, only to return and
wanting to destroy the whole concept of society as we know it. Anju Bhai
travelled to Egypt to fight in a war against Israel.
Travelling
across Afghanistan, Iran, Iraq and Algeria, he made his way to Egypt on
buses. This was during the 1967 Arab-Israel War. Anju Bhai was just 20
and had quit college to go fight against the Israelis.
Anju was a passionate admirer of Egyptian leader Gamal Abdel Nasser, and also equally passionate about the Palestinian cause.
Arab
Nationalism was all the rage in those days — a fusion of nationalism,
anti-imperialism and socialism. It was also vehemently opposed to
conservative Arab monarchies. Nasser was one of its main architects.
The
war lasted for just six days. Egypt was decimated and so was the charm
and influence of Arab Nationalism. Anju lost four of his fingers when a
grenade exploded in his right hand. He was part of a rag-tag brigade
mostly made up of Syrian, Algerian and Palestinian volunteers.
A
month after the war, Anju joined Yasser Arafat’s PLO. He travelled to a
PLO camp in Jordan and got trained in guerrilla warfare. In early 1968,
he was selected to join a group of four Palestinians and two Syrians in
Beirut.
The group was to attack an Israeli military
convoy on a road near the Lebanon-Israel border. But suddenly, three
members of the group changed the plan and decided to attack a bus
carrying Israeli labourers on the same road. The rest of the group,
including Anju, refused, saying they would not target civilians.
Anju
told me this split was symptomatic of the major split that would divide
Arafat’s PLO in 1974 between Arafat’s faction and the faction headed by
the notorious Abu Nidal.
Anju returned to Pakistan in
late 1968 — broken and bitter. His father, a cashier at a bank, refused
to talk to him. Anju could not complete his education. In 1974, he found
employment as a copy-maker at the PPP-backed progressive Urdu monthly,
Al-Fatah.
He was still there when the PPP regime was
overthrown in the 1977 reactionary coup. Anju remained unemployed till
1980 when one day he borrowed 2,500 rupees from a friend and set up a
small tea stall on I.I. Chundrigar Road.
The stall kept
him afloat and he got married in 1987. I last met him in 1998. A few
years ago I went looking for him again, but was told he had folded his
stall in 2001 and had moved to Bahrain with his wife and kids.
Nevertheless,
in the context of this piece, I must relate here what he said when once
I asked him a pointed question. Being an ‘angry young man’ myself in
those days, I had asked him, wasn’t he angry and vengeful towards a
society that had rejected him twice and turned his life upside-down?
After
listening to my question, a wry smile had cut across his aging face and
he just said: “Scene ulta tha, chotay bhai (It was the other way round,
little brother). Society ko mein ne reject kiya tha (It was I who had
rejected society) …”
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