Terror suffers another heavy setback

Within just two years of the killing of terror mastermind Velupillai Prabhakaran by the Sri Lankan security forces, another mega personality in the same fiendish preoccupation of raining terror on the world of the innocents, Osama bin Laden, has met with his end, thus bringing the curtain down on one of the longest-running hunts for the lawless, in the history of modern espionage and war.

The parallels between the Sri Lankan and US situations are so striking that they hardly need any elaboration. Both terror leaders chose the world as the staging ground for their monstrous actions and invited the same inevitable fate at the hands of the forces of law and order.

At this juncture with news and commentaries of the bin Laden killing still coming in, a more studied assessment on the implications of this incident should await a subsequent occasion, but at first blush it could be said that terror has met with its just desserts. Inasmuch as the LTTE strongman’s atrocities could not have been blinked at by the civilized world, so couldn’t the terrible excesses of bin Laden.

The 9/11 horror is dying hard for very obvious reasons and one of the initial reflections that occurs to one is that ‘those who live by the sword die by it’. That is, those who choose terror and lawlessness as modes of their existence, eventually fall to the forces of law and order. In short, the law will reign supreme and those who engage in criminality will be doing so only at their own peril.

It is in the fitness of things that US President Barack Obama has said that the elimination of bin Laden does not amount to the US waging war on Islam. Terror leaders and organizations have time and again tried to pick on religious doctrines and slogans to give their insane acts a semblance of legitimacy, but the civilized world would do well to guard against such misleading and incendiary rhetoric.

No religion of the world justifies the use of force and terror for the attainment of political aims and this should be understood with the greatest clarity. Accordingly, religious organizations and their leaders would do well to disassociate themselves from terror outfits which blatantly misuse religious beliefs and slogans for the achievement of their dark and infernal aims. Unfortunately, this is not done consistently or vigorously and a plethora of misjudgments and ambiguities occur.

However, it is our conviction that those sections of the world which value law and order, and who uphold International Law, should come together, as never before, to speak with one unambiguous voice against the use of terror for the attaining of political goals. Generally speaking, there needs to be universal and strong denunciation of the use of force, in the resolution of international disputes.

That is, the use of force should be outlawed to the extent possible. For, it should never be perceived that the Rule of Law is being violated with impunity by states in the international arena. Herein lie the roots of international anarchy.

Fortunately, we are not short of sensible opinion even in this instance of the killing of bin Laden. There is no guarantee that the killing of this individual would ensure a complete end to terror and related security issues.

Although we are told that sections of the West are euphoric over the killing of bin Laden, saner counsel is prevailing among some law enforcement agencies which have opined, very rightly, that there can be no letting down of a country’s defences, even though one of the world’s most wanted men has been killed and the threat of immediate attacks on cities and urban centres would seem to have receded somewhat.

The best that the world could do at this juncture is to try its utmost to eliminate the conditions that could give rise to the birth of the likes of bin Laden. It was mentioned before that there needs to be a gradual renunciation by the international community of the use of force in the resolution of disputes among states and social and cultural groups.

In addition, concerted and concrete efforts must be made in the direction of resolving international conflicts, such as the one bedeviling the Middle East, if the conducive conditions for the use of force, are to be minimized.

It is well and good that degenerate persons who resort to criminality and savagery are neutralized, but the world’s security worries would not cease with only the elimination of these persons.

While security measures would need to be constantly beefed-up within individual states and internationally, a vigorous effort would need to be made by states to engage with the disaffected consistently and to resolve their just grievances. In short, a peace culture should be enabled to bloom within states and internationally.