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 Editorials | September 2006 
September 11, Permanent Fear
 Jean-Pierre Stroobants - Le Monde
| | The hypothesis that anti-terrorist measures and human rights are irreconcilable is gaining ground, but we don't know who will be the final victor in the present struggle. |
Five years after September 11, 2001, the world is not safer, and al-Qaeda has not achieved its political and religious objectives. As for the "war" against terrorism, it has created innumerable victims. Thousands dead and freedoms sacrificed just about everywhere in the world to the benefit of the establishment of a climate of generalized fear and demand for security.
"Humanity now is under the impression of living in a state of permanent insecurity, where fears of violent death and of a nasty, brutish, and short life dominate," political scientist Pierre Hassner explained already in 2003. "The issue therefore, has become that, in order to eliminate fear of the other - by definition a mysterious, multiform, and more or less anonymous other - further risks are taken that give birth to other fears: the risks of outrages to personal freedom and the fear of violence coming from those same states or empires that we had charged with protecting us."
That prophecy has been realized and has swept aside the warnings of UN General Secretary Kofi Annan and some others, who emphasized that anti-terrorist legislation and action must be compatible with human rights and democratic principles to assure the very success of the struggle against the authors of attacks. "To derogate from these values, to fight those who seek precisely to destroy them, amounts to helping and confirming them in their aversion for the universal norms on which our societies are based," wrote the International Federation for Human Rights (IFHR) in October 2005.
The apocalyptic acts of the September 11 men and their emulators have changed nothing in the condition of those they supposedly wanted to serve. They have, on the other hand, strengthened all those who asserted, even before the al-Qaeda attacks, that the ideal of modern societies could not be freedom, but security. Certainly, Europe wants to play with a less Manichean division than the one in Washington that preaches the destruction of "Evil" by the "Good" and celebrates Theodore Roosevelt, who explained that "Unless we keep the barbarian virtues, gaining the civilized ones will be of little avail."
Nonetheless, in Europe also, decisions often taken under the impact of a surge of emotion have favored rapid reconsideration of the notions of detention, arrest, fair trial, and even of the guarantees linked to respect for privacy. In several European Union states, the rights linked to extradition or those of migrants and refugees have also been re-examined, sometimes allowing one to suppose that certain leaders, outside their carefully tailored speeches, are rallying to the thesis of a generalized conflict between the threatened West and a conquering Islam.
France, endowed - unlike many of its partners - with a specific arsenal and organization ever since the terrorist campaigns of the 1980s and 1990s, has also reinforced its dispositions since 2001. And to a singular degree since the London attacks in July 2005. The fields of video surveillance, electronic interceptions - with access to data about those under surveillance - and information about travelers have been extended. The incriminations and the penalties, with respect to acts with a terrorist objective, have been strengthened. Security specialists have congratulated themselves on this development, while still wondering about the measure concerning forfeiture of French nationality.
It is planned to change the time allowed to begin a procedure for forfeiture of nationality by naturalization or marriage from ten to fifteen years in the case of "an act bringing obvious harm to the Nation's fundamental interests, an act of terrorism, or an act incompatible with the character of a French citizen." "That, all the same, allows far too broad a margin of interpretation," note Franáois Heisbourg and Jean-Luc Marret, authors of Le Terrorisme en France aujourd'hui [Terrorism in France Today] (Editions des Equateurs, 126 p., 13 €). They emphasize that this proposed law has been referred to very little in public debate. A reflection, perhaps, of the discomfort of those who fear to seem to be dividers if they formulate too many criticisms at an hour when "sacred unity" imposes itself in the face of the bomb-setters.
Law of Exception
In the United States, it's a phenomenon of another scope that has been set in motion with the repressive policies founded on a law of exception that found its ultimate concretization in Guantanamo. The still uncertain status of detainees on the Cuban base is probably only the most visible part of such American practices. Less well known, the targeting and summary liquidation of presumed al-Qaeda members are, for the Republican administration, legitimate practices in the framework of a new kind of conflict. Defense Department lawyers have legitimized this practice against "civilians defined as another nation's combatants, guerrillas, or members of a terrorist type organization the acts of which threaten our country's security."
New Yorker journalist Seymour Hersch has explained that intelligence specialists, even Special Forces members, have worried about the wisdom, the moral thrust, and, in the final analysis, the effectiveness of such practices. Paul Wolfowitz, former Assistant Defense Secretary now become World Bank head, went so far as to mention the constitution of a "volunteer force" "openly" engaged in missions of physical elimination around the world.
Summarizing all the threats to al-Qaeda and Osama bin Laden - "loss leaders, in the marketing sense of the term: products that sell," explains Jean-Luc Marret - the Bush administration has given itself over to other practices that infringe on American legal tradition. Among them, direct or indirect torture, through means of prisoner "transfers."
In Great Britain, where Tony Blair failed in his attempt to extend protective custody to 90 days for terrorist acts; in Israel, where the mention of the al-Qaeda threat has allowed the government to obtain backing to fight against Palestinian or Lebanese organizations; in Central Asia; in Russia, other notable developments have taken place.
The hypothesis that anti-terrorist measures and human rights are irreconcilable is gaining ground, but we don't know who will be the final victor in the present struggle. Societies that will succeed in really protecting themselves in the face of a persistent, even growing threat? Or criminal networks that know that blind repression feeds them more than it weakens them?
Translation: t r u t h o u t French language correspondent Leslie Thatcher. |
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