Suicide Terrorism: Lives less worthy?

We’re all involved

According to a report published by the RAND Corporation, victims of the September 11, 2001 terrorist attacks in the United States have received $38.1 billion dollars in compensation, with insurance agencies and the United States government making more than 90 percent of the payments. The 52 victims of the 7/7 attacks in London have also received a total of over five million British pounds in compensation. Similarly victims of the Madrid bombing in Spain received compensation both from Spanish and EU authorities.

Nearly 200 people have been killed in suicide bombings in Pakistan since 2002 and there is scant evidence that the families of these victims have or will receive anything at all in terms of compensation. The families of the 27 victims of the latest suicide bombings at the Marhaba Hotel in Peshawar are equally unlikely to receive any assistance.

Indeed, marking the disparity between the accolades and commemorations awarded to victims of terror in Western countries begs a question increasingly forgotten by those perpetrating the “war on terror” across the globe: are Pakistani and Muslim victims of terror less innocent and less worthy of mourning than western victims of terror? Are the stories of fathers, brothers, wives, daughters and children that perish on the streets of Karachi or the bazaars of Peshawar somehow less tragic than those of stockbrokers in the World Trade Centre and commuters on the London tube?

These questions are uncomfortable and cumbersome and tragically few in western countries wish to ask them. One reason for this reticence may simply be the inability of the West to acknowledge the reality and tragedy surrounding non-western victims of terror. When a terrorist attack occurs in the western world, immigrant Muslim groups immediately confront an onslaught of scrutiny, with western news media counting the minutes and seconds until condemnations are issued and recriminations posted on Muslim newspapers and websites. At these crucial moments, all Muslims, especially those living in the West, essentially have to disprove the presumption that they are complicit in these horrendous crimes.

Yet when terrorist attacks take place in countries like Pakistan, and the victims are all Pakistanis and Muslims, few non-Muslims in the western world take the trouble to issue condemnations or organise vigils and rallies in support of the innocent victims. At best, a few tersely worded statements are issued by the US State Department that make little pretence at empathy and reek of condescension.

News of suicide attacks in countries like Pakistan is often relegated to one-line dispatches in national news broadcasts across the western hemisphere. The “terrorism experts” that have become a regular feature of Western television news channels do not bother to analyze the dimensions and details of attacks occurring in Peshawar or Karachi. While Pakistan may be incredibly useful as an ally in the war on terror, Pakistanis, who are victims of terror, receive scarce attention and none of the empathy western governments offer to their lost citizens and their families.

Because Iraqis, Afghans and Pakistanis share a religion with the perpetrators of the senseless violence, their deaths are considered less urgent, indicative of an internal problem within Islam that makes the victims, if not as culpable as the perpetrators, then certainly not entirely innocent in the bargain. It is this damning assumption – one that under-girds so many western debates on the ravages of suicide terror and venerates the western victim as more important and more worthy of sympathy – that lies at the crux of the world�s inability to deal with terrorism as a pressing and grotesque disease afflicting the world community.

The culprit is the framing of the war on terror as a conflict between the enlightened West and the progress-averse Muslim world. Reductionist and completely misleading, this construction does incredible disservice to both sides. On one hand it allows the western world to languish in the lie that Muslims only perpetuate terror and are never victimised by it. On the other it allows Muslims to live in the rationalisation that religious extremists are battling only the West and have no qualms or enmities against their fellow Muslims.

The grotesque reality of the deaths in Peshawar is the most recent incident that must lead the world to question the dangerous lies behind both of these assumptions. Seeing religious extremism, and the terrorism it spawns, as a problem that afflicts only one or the other side of the world is to deny the universal human cost being imposed by those for whom human lives, western or non-western, are ultimately meaningless and expendable.

Pakistanis need to realise that when they see horrendous acts of terror such as those carried out on 9/11, they are witnessing not some anti-imperialist victory that is finally bringing an arrogant United States to its knees but rather the unabated death and carnage of thousands of innocent and hapless victims not any different from the scores dying of suicide attacks on the streets of Peshawar and Karachi.

The suicide bomber in Peshawar reportedly had the following message emblazoned on his legs: “This is what happens to American spies”. Yet the people he killed were unassuming diners who simply had the misfortune of being at the wrong place at the wrong time. If anything, the tragedy of their deaths should expose the absurdity of a quest that sought to obliterate innocent civilian lives to avenge ideological hatred.

At the same time, westerners need to descend from the secure bandwagon that paints terrorism as a problem deserving attention only when it claims their lives. In doing so, they need to acknowledge the reality that the tragedies afflicting families who lose members to terrorist attacks in Pakistan, Afghanistan and Iraq are just as afflicted, grief-stricken and worthy of the empathy and compassion as those dying in their own countries.

In acknowledging the humanity and common suffering of all victims of terror, perhaps the world can come to realise that the real war is between those who believe in the ultimate sanctity and value of a human life and those who do not.

Rafia Zakaria is associate editor of altmuslim.com and an attorney and member of the Asian American Network Against Abuse of Women.  She teaches courses on constitutional law and political philosophy. This article previously appeared in Daily Times (Pakistan).