Home truths on terror and development

It speaks volumes for President Mahinda Rajapaksa's perceptiveness to point out that the terror scourge, which is almost universally experienced, affects the poor of any country most.

This is a point which is often missed by observers. While the violence unleashed by the terrorist, wherever he may operate, is blind, in that it does not discriminate among its victims, it is the poorer segments of society who are entirely overpowered and rendered absolutely helpless by such violence.

To be sure, the September 11 hell-fires did not discriminate between rich and poor, mighty and lowly, but whereas those with some means who were affected in any way, could have picked-up the pieces and gone on living, the poor and helpless would have been reduced to extreme helplessness and deprivation.

This lesson is borne out in Sri Lanka's North-East too. In the East, it is the poorest of the poor of all our communities who are affected by LTTE terror. Whereas, the better-off among the North-East populace are leading relatively stable lives in urban centres in the North-East and South, the metropolis or even abroad, a vast number of persons have been reduced to IDP status or even beggary.

The latters misery is compounded by the fact that they come under the tyrannical control of the LTTE in areas where the latter have a presence.

Accordingly, one could be happy that President Rajapaksa has had an all-encompassing view of the consequences of terror. It is equally gratifying to note that he has not glossed over the economic imbalances back at home. It is important that the President chose the G11 Summit to speak out eloquently for balanced and equitable development.

In sum, he made the point that the poor cannot be left out of the development process and that we cannot consider ourselves a 'middle income country', in the real sense of the phrase, if the poor are not integrated into the development process.

Hopefully, the President's speech would stimulate further thinking on development in its truest sense and help in fine-honing the conceptual tools of the world on poverty-alleviation.

In fact if the development process is evolved to its logical conclusion in the form of equitable development, the problem of terror may wither away.

An interdependent world could make this economic dream a reality and we hope the President's speech would induce closer economic cooperation between the haves and have nots of the global economy.

Nevertheless, there is no getting away from the need for the right-thinking, freedom-loving sections of the world to cooperate closely in eliminating terror. This particularly applies to the world's democracies.

The liberal democracies of the West are fully agreed that terror and democracy cannot co-exist. There is in fact a global consensus to fight terror. It is no secret that there is a Western-led 'war on terror'.

If this is so, the democracies of the world in particular, need to cooperate closely and concertedly in eliminating terror. Terrorists and their front organisations cannot be tolerated in the name of democratic values. The world needs to overcome this 'double think and speak' on terror.