The right side of the mirror

As the first anniversary of the 11 March 2004 terrorist attacks approaches, we all feel in one way or another concerned with the issue of how to commemorate it. The fact is that terrorism is not something that caught us by surprise that unfortunate day, for Spain has a sad thirty-four year experience of living with terrorism. Of course, this time it was different, due to the scale of the killing – and in relation to terrorism as in many other areas, the quantitative scale may be perceived as a qualitative escalation.

The other “innovation” of 11-M was that the killing was done by terrorists in the name of Islam, and this has already had some very negative “cultural side-effects” on people’s perception of Muslim immigration. But that is another story.

While thinking about the Madrid anniversary, I came across Mient Jan Faber’s openDemocracy article on “Talking to terrorists in Gaza”. It was interesting and a surprise, for two reasons. First, I am quite sure I met Mient Jan more than once in Amsterdam, at the Transnational Institute (TNI), where I was a fellow, and associate director, almost twenty years ago. Second, I am very familiar with the situation in Palestine (including Gaza), a place I have visited regularly since 1967.

In advance of the International Summit on Democracy, Terrorism, and Security from 8-11 March 2005, openDemocracy writers debate the roots of terror and the justice and effectiveness of democracy’s responses:

• Mary Kaldor, “Safe democracy” (December 2004)

• Karin von Hippel, “Five steps for defeating terrorism” (January 2005)

• Roger Scruton, “The power of resentment: a response to Karin von Hippel” (January 2005)

• Fred Halliday, “Terrorism and world politics: conditions and prospects” (January 2005)

• Isabel Hilton, “Five principles for a safer future” (February 2005)

If you find these articles insightful and valuable, please consider supportingopenDemocracy so that we continue our work.

I read Mient Jan’s very good article, and I have to start with a sort of a disagreement over his insistence that the basis of his position stems from his Calvinists roots. Perhaps, but I am not a Calvinist. I was raised a Catholic (so to speak), then decided forty years ago that I could only be agnostic. But on the substance of his article I totally agree, and my own experience in trying to talk with people who think very similarly to the militants he describes (of Hamas or Islamic Jihad) is parallel to his.

It is a moral issue. In the end it brings people to an individual, moral question: in politics, does the final end justify all means? It is a simple, fundamental question that can be answered with a straight “yes” or “no”.

At this point let me say something about my encounters with the consequences of terrorism. In June 1987, the Basque group Euzkadi ta Azkatasuna (Basque Homeland and Liberty, ETA) left a big bomb in the carpark of a supermarket in Barcelona. It was Friday afternoon, a busy time when people were shopping for the weekend. Twenty-one people were killed, among them a good friend of mine. He was the father of two children. We had been militants of the same underground organisation (although not a terrorist one) resisting Spain’s dictator, Franco.

There was a professor of economics at my university, Ernest Lluch. We used to meet perhaps twice a day in the elevator or the corridor (his office was just one floor above mine). On his way home one evening in November 2000 he was shot in the head by ETA. His crime was that from 1982-86 he had been minister of health in the socialist government of Felipe Gonzalez.

In between these two killings, another person, who though not a close friend was someone I know personally, Jose Ramon Recalde, was also shot in the head. He was badly wounded. Also a socialist, he had been minister in the Basque regional government in the 1980s. He survived but can hardly talk.

My list is longer. In September 1976, our good friend Orlando Letelier, at the time director of the TNI, was killed in Washington DC by a Dina (Chilean secret police) agent on the direct orders of Augusto Pinochet.

There is another connection or parallel with Mient Jan Faber’s experience. His father was in the Dutch resistance to the Nazi occupation of the Netherlands. My father was an officer of the Republican army, on the losing side of Spain’s civil war. He went to France after defeat, then ended up in Andorra to escape the Nazis. I am a son and grandson of refugees and so is my wife, both of us grew up in exile.

With this background, some might think that there would be more than enough room for anger. Instead, I try to face the problems posed by terrorism by not making it a personal issue. I approach it as a social and political issue, to be confronted in terms of collective action, on solid moral grounds. I lecture at the University of Barcelona, and I have to be careful about what values and judgements I teach to the students. To personalise your case as a basis for grand political discourses is unacceptable.

Double standards in the use of moral arguments is an even more serious problem, for it happens all the time. Many of the people one could define as “the social basis” of terrorist groups try at the same time to smoothly justify the crimes committed in the name of their cause and (when detained) claim the rights and judicial guarantees of the system they want to destroy. I agree that they have these rights. The difference is that they think that their victims have no rights at all, the right to life for instance.

Also by Pere Vilanova on openDemocracy:

• “Aznar versus the people: a Spanish divorce?” (May 2003)

• “Indonesian democracy: lessons for the west” (August 2004)

• “The good, the bad, and the unjust” (December 2004)

This issue of double standards from a moral viewpoint is larger than it seems. Many people outside Palestine who voice support for the Palestinian cause have serious problems in admitting that suicide attacks on civilians (blowing up buses or restaurants) are simply “crimes against humanity”. In symmetry, some people who defend Israel consider that the death rate of Palestinian people (children as well as adults) who have nothing to do with terrorism are “sad but inevitable” side-effects of fighting terrorism. Such arguments are supposed to provide enough legitimacy to match any possible moral dilemma.

When it comes to means and ends, political violence has to do with our individual moral choices as single individuals, and therefore with the responsibility of the individual - and not a “group” or a “country” or any abstract subject. To try to understand the structural and ideological causes of terrorism is crucial, in order to counter and prevent it. At the same time, to stand on clear moral grounds without giving up our principles is a precondition for collective action that makes sense and can therefore be effective against terrorism.

So, talking about terrorism, I still think that for an average citizen of my age and profile, the statistics concerning personal friends killed by terrorism are at the same time absurd and meaningful: absurd because it’s too much, and meaningful for I still have the feeling of being on the right side of the mirror.