Terrorist tactics - no message as message!

By: Hatto Fischer, Athens

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After the 7th of July bomb attack no one claimed responsibility. After the botched bomb attack on July 21st, the police got lucky. Images of the four or five bombers were caught on the surveillance cameras as they ran out of the station. Arrests followed including the fugitive one in Rome who managed to slip out of London via Euro star to Paris from where he took a plane to Rome.

Still the message was that there was no message at all. Instead police and everyone else started to think aloud what connections there might be to the Al Qaeda network, to the bombing in Madrid, to 9/11 in New York and to what the world has seen already in many other places, including Turkey, Egypt and of course Iraq. It came, however, as a shock to discover in the first incidence that these were suicide bombers coming from Leeds: British citizens even though from immigrants who had come to this country from various parts of the world, but especially in this case from Pakistan and Somalia.

The bombing on July 7th in London coincided with the opening day of G8 meeting in Scotland. Due to events unraveling in London no one paid any more attention to what happened at that meeting. Tony Blair chaired in the morning still the first meeting but then rushed back to London to face the press. Leadership had to be demonstrated and resolve. His first statements were one of defiance: “they shall never change the British way of life”. Something similar was said by David Livingstone, mayor of London in response to these bomb attacks coming the day after it was announced that London shall host the Olympic Games in 2012.

Consequently the message may lie in the timing for certainly the bomb attack achieved a shift in agenda and in what the media would focus on: not debt relief for the Third World but on wounded persons coming out of the London Tube station or who was killed on a red double deck bus after having been blown up?

While in the days after the terrorist attack the media continued to say that so many have been killed a cloud of mystery surrounded those who were on the bus. Also many more were missing and not accounted for. Partly this was due to police investigation wishing to establish who the suicide bomber on the bus was while rescue operations of those killed on the Piccadilly Line were hampered by high temperatures in the tunnel deep under ground. It became with time also plausible that the police needed time to conduct forensic tests in order to identify the various bodies. Definitely they wished to establish who was if at all a suicide bomber. Israeli experts gave here advice on how to identify bodies in such a case. They have many experiences in doing that. Once the attacker’s identity was established, the identities of the other passengers could be released. It was a matter of following police procedures that dictated what would be revealed to the public, what not – at least not yet.

But what sense to make out of all of this? There is a usual pattern when yet another suicide attack has taken place and the police announces in very brief statements to the public that so many have been arrested after house searches were conducted, but while progress is being made the public should remain vigilant. Nothing more is being said for the moment. People feel upon hearing such announcements that there is not going to be real follow-up - just emptiness. While there is a lot of talk about security precautions, evidence on the ground has it in their minds that they are not going to be protected any better in future but shall remain as it was before the most vulnerable ones. What makes this awareness so awful is that they don’t know really the reason why they are attacked and not the well protected government officials? Why this random violence?

The void created by life having been lost without any meaning draws its circles in first conversations with neighbors, then in glances cast down the streets while walking towards the next stop of the public transport system. Such thought of helplessness lames clearly everyone first in thought, then in movement. At the same time everyone tries to draw new mental maps to contemplate possible alternative routes to work in order to avoid taking the tube. Some prefer to walk. But many others don’t see any alternative and are forced to take the tube even if they don’t like this one bit.

Once a city like London has come under such an attack there are hard choices to be made if life is to go on. It is an illusion all would come back to normal as things were before. Even defiance cannot compensate the absence of tourists or push aside for lack of answers as to why these attacks took place the new uncertainties. Many people venture alone but more often driven on by speculations in the media towards the very hard question but who is responsible for this, if only to return home empty handed, literally speaking, in body and soul. That is a different feeling to the urban emptiness in the sixties and seventies when cities were drained of their populations by everyone moving out to the suburbs. Now violence drives everyone into who knows what directions with no place appearing to be safe anymore. The city as place of refuge were everyone feels more protected by experiencing immediate responses to possible forms of violence, has no longer that affirmative impulse of life itself. Instead urban places are subjected to horrific violence justified in the name of a religion that expounds on the belief that waging war against the West would be a holy one – Jihad.

If this does not prompt citizens of Madrid or London, Amsterdam or Berlin to doubt how world affairs have been managed up to now, then at the very lest they enter a soul search about their fellow human beings and what some of them are apparently capable of once under the sway of a certain religious fervor to be called ‘fanaticism’ for want of another term.

From many vantage points the critical point seems to be reached when neither citizens nor the officials of the transport system along with police and politicians know anymore how far can public trust still convey a sense of security while taking the tube or using the public transportation system? It is admitted in public that even if security measures are increased and more surveillance cameras installed and made use of, it does not mean these kinds of attacks can be prevented in future. The fact that two weeks later there followed a botched up kind of bomb attack on July 21st drove home the message that a return to normality was inconceivable as long as the reasons for and the networks behind such attacks cannot be made out.

While defiance was propagated and even linked to how Britain withstood the onslaught of Hitler’s rockets in Second World War in the aftermath to the bomb attack on July 7th in London, at a personal level many more self assurances are needed in order not to allow this to get to one. How frail the nerves are no one knows. Just a forgotten bag on the platform can already raise the alarm level as one false alarm after another indicates how jittery things can become if no one can be sure what will happen next. Clearly it seems to be the tactic of those planting terror in the minds and souls of people, namely that favoring mistrust and intensifying nervousness, the reaction possibilities of the system are tested at the utmost limit between just coping and risking if not bread-downs, then many costly delays and an ever hardening of daily routines as people try going about in their usual businesses. It makes the coming to terms with modern living conditions that much more complicated and more importantly less enjoyable. Indeed, the pleasure of life seems to be taken out of daily life and what has been even a reason for cities to strive in tourism and economic activities due to this vibrant sense of coming into the twenty-first century with élan and confidence.

Once no longer sure in which direction to develop in, while an escape into the countryside is not right now conceivable given the dependency upon a job in London, many decide to carry on but with greater caution. Still others can say about themselves and their close friends that there is, of course, a hardening of positions. Many more ask what about all those illegal immigrants and what about these Muslim Communities in our midst? Without noticing it so much, they feel that a great deal of cynicism has crept into their mental make-up when it comes to face an uncertain future but then they say to themselves a dose of skepticism is also not bad for such a world.

In the absence of any clear message and with public trust down to a new low, naturally government officials and politicians struggle to keep up public morale and sense of security by hinting without much evidence that the security measures are working because so many potential terrorist attacks have been thwarted. Still, the counting of dead bodies does not make sense. Rather the non-messages conveyed by all these anonymous attacks against innocent people strengthen if anything the authorities in their will to be tougher on terrorism. Whether they will have any success, depends whether they grasp the need for a theoretical debate about politics and religions in terms of what challenges lie ahead. Much could be altered in the approach to things if aside from responding immediately to this violence by stoking up police and security efforts, to reconsider the meaning of the city as a place of refuge from violence. With such a new law of development based on recognizing cosmopolitanism as outcome of previous centuries making everyone into a refugee and exile, there goes not revenge but forgiveness.

The humane city based on forgiveness in a secular sense makes possible entry into the process of redemption. It would give the city the task of healing first of all not merely the physical but more so the mental and psychic wounds from all kinds of war fares. This means a definite need to confront recent ones such as the bombardment of Kosovo not to be called a Humanitarian war for there is no justification of any war. The city will have to show how people can live together free from both sectarian conflicts and possible lash-outs by states traumatized by the ‘unknown’ as brought home by such terrorist attacks. If cities do not give or create space for fruitful debates of that kind based on forgiveness, then they will be unable to reach out to others to make them understand what other kind of life is possible, a life beyond self sacrifice and the ‘avalanche of stupidity’ that Adorno and Horkheimer had identified with xenophobic tendencies as a bigger threat than Fascism itself. Unfortunately cities have not given sufficient time for such contemplations but rather have taken away time and space from very much needed reflections and careful deliberations.

If anything, the real damage aside from the many innocent victims is that political discourse has been grounded by these terrorist attacks. Under pressure to show immediate results, the political process shuts down. Further measures are clouded in ever greater secrecy so that the odd situation is created of having a lot of information and none at all in order to draw some conclusions. Consequently such situations prevail after such attacks that mock the claims democracy means transparency. Rather than careful deliberation to ensure subsequent decisions are taken on the best of knowledge, knowledge has been replaced by ‘intelligence’ i.e. briefings by police and secret agents working under cover. The slogan ‘leave it to the experts’ is part of a systematic disenfranchisement of the public and of the active citizens.

Easily this can mean anything goes, even rumors because ‘intelligence’ can be easily functionalized to suit the expediency of the moment. If left without any reality check, such development can become extremely dangerous. Already it can be noticed that at the level of public discourse all arguments for peace and authentic democracy are left like the twisted metal of a car just blown up. Terror distracts from many other key issues as it justifies only greater security measures becoming more important than providing young people with such jobs that are not based on self exploitation or exposed to the gimmicks of a society wishing economic growth to be fueled merely by consumption of ever more expensive things.

All of this indicates already what may fuel discontent and more than revolt real terror against certain tendencies in this globalized world. The bomb attack and its reality exposes the fake reality of the Western World with its ready-made answers suggested by any advertisement promising a better life if someone has the right sun lotion or the sexy car. This fake reality implodes to easily in face of a reality brought suddenly to an abyss with a bomb ripping open the street used till then for consumption of time and leisure. In that sense the link of religion on the rise due to an absence of meaning in life and terror as extreme outlet of utmost frustration with a system showing no way out is more than a challenge to all preexisting understanding of political discourse about Europe’s future.

 

 

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