UN race: It’s time for Dhanapala to bow out gracefully

Tomorrow is the 5th anniversary of 9/11, the worst terrorist attack on the United States and one which will surely remain permanently etched in the collective conscience of its people.

While the near 3000 deaths that resulted from those terrorist attacks will resonate for years in the minds of the families that lost their near and dear, it will also leave a deep impress on those who thought powerful nations were safe from terrorism on a mass scale.

In the last year Europe has begun to feel the impact of what has come to be known as Terrorism Incorporated, the deadly transnational 'organisation' with a worldwide reach.

After Spain suffered from the terrorist bomb attacks last year it was the United Kingdom that next fell victim to a concerted attack on its public transport, the weakest link in terms of terrorist targets.

It brought home to the British people a salient fact. The attackers were not foreigners who came from outside the country to kill and maim and sow the seeds of chaos and destruction.

They may have had foreign connections and links to terrorist organisations that operated outside the UK. They may have had their training in the use of explosives and putting together dangerous incendiary devices.

But more importantly, they were home grown individuals who seem to have got their first indoctrination in the pursuit of the glories of self sacrifice and the marvel of martyrdom.

Two weeks after the first simultaneous attacks in London another planned attack appears to have been aborted thus saving the lives of an indeterminate number of civilians who would otherwise have died or been seriously wounded as in the July 7 London bombings.

This new scourge of terrorism confronting Europe is considered serious enough to merit several pages in the 2006 Strategic Survey launched last week by the prestigious International Institute for Strategic Studies IISS) based in London.

It might be recalled that the IISS was the first well known think tank to have mentioned the emergence of the LTTE's nascent air power some four years ago in another of its well documented publications "The Military Balance".

Not only does the latest Strategic Survey devote some pages to Europe's dilemma- the radicalisation of a small part of the Muslim populations of some European nations- but it was also referred to in the introductory remarks made by Dr John Chipman, director-general of IISS at the press launch last Tuesday.

Dr Chipman referred to the "extent of Muslim radical disquiet in Europe" and said this has become a key strategic issue.

Said Dr Chipman: "Five years after 9/11, one of the most disturbing developments of the past year has been the increasing evidence of radicalisation of a small number of Muslims in Europe. While the tendency towards 'home-grown' terrorism is evident in several countries, the United Kingdom has been a particular target with the July 2005 London bombings followed last month by arrests in connection with an alleged plot to blow up transatlantic aircraft. There have also been several trials for terrorist offences."
Since the security crackdown on suspects in the alleged conspiracy to blow up the planes and the unprecedented security alert in the country, further arrests were made over the last week in a case unrelated to the purported plan to blow up some 10 flights from London to the US.

The 14 arrests in South London apparently followed several months of surveillance of alleged training camps across the country.

Anti-terrorist police struck against what they believed was a network of terror training camps in Britain that included ones in the Lake District and the grounds of a Muslim school in East Sussex.

These latest arrests accentuate the perceptible shift in terrorist strategy. If earlier, British-born Muslim youth were indoctrinated and trained abroad in the art of terror, today the radicalisation and training are supposedly being provided within the country.

This shift necessarily calls for a change in counter intelligence strategy. While earlier a watch was kept on Muslim youth who travelled to Pakistan, Iraq or Afghanistan in the hope that this would lead the security services to any cells planning attacks, now they would have a much larger canvass to cover and more people to keep under surveillance with the accompanying fear of being accused of human rights abuses.

If this is what is happening in the UK the same could very well be happening in continental Europe. The European Union, for instance, has some 15 million Muslim inhabitants which is about 4% of its total population.

The IISS assessment is that the Muslim share of the population would double in another 20 years as a result of both high fertility rates among Muslims and immigration.

"It has become less and less likely that the perpetrator of a terrorist attack in Europe will be a member of, or affiliated with, a pre-existing terrorist organisation; that is to say, European Muslim terrorists are increasingly home grown," says IISS.

It says that "colonial legacies help determine the geographical distribution of Muslims in Europe, and some of the violently inclined take their cue from various home conflicts (eg, British Muslims from Pakistan's political and religious strife, French Muslim's from Algeria's, Spanish Muslims from Morocco's and perhaps Dutch Muslims from Indonesia's)."

This, however, could not be the complete answer to the growing number of jihadists in Europe. Among the reasons for the sense of alienation and claustrophobia felt by many Muslims is the continuation of social, economic and political policies that tend to marginalise Europe's Muslims, heightening their sense of grievance.

Also European foreign policy, certainly that of Britain, has influenced many young Muslims to become jihadists or voice strong opposition to policy on Iraq, Afghanistan and more recently in Lebanon.

Whatever Prime Minister Tony Blair and sections of his government might say, this has been proved by public opinion polls and interviews with young Muslims here.

That is why Britain has become a specific target of terrorist attack. Blair's uncompromising support for President Bush in his war in Iraq, which really had little to do with his war against terrorism and more with his evangelically-driven interventionist foreign policy that found a kindred spirit in the British prime minister, made London an obvious target.

The question for the wider Europe is whether tough counter measures alone will be the answer to a deeper problem of alienation and insularity.

European governments would need to look seriously at softer options that would pull the second and third generation Muslims into society rather than push them into the kind of limbo where they see no alternative but radicalisation that would allow them to assert themselves differently and possibly violently.