The lexicon of terror
By Shashi Tharoor
"The Hindu", Online edition of India's National Newspaper
September 11, 2005

In the four years that have followed 9/11, the litany of tragedy has lengthened around the world ... . What can one do to respond meaningfully to such meaningless violence?

A DEFINING MOMENT IN HISTORY: A memorial service at sunrise at the World Trade Center site (file picture). PHOTO: AP

EXACTLY four years ago today, terrorists crashed two aircraft into New York City's World Trade Center buildings and transformed the world as we know it.

I was in New York that morning: at the gym, as it happens, when the first plane hit. My sons were at high school, from which they watched in horror as the towers fell. I rushed back to my office and spent the day at the United Nations, which, after some initial confusion, was evacuated, but for a handful of us who remained to steer the Organisation's immediate response to a horror we knew would haunt us all for years to come.

In the four years that have followed, the litany of tragedy has lengthened, as Bali and Beslan, Madrid and Moscow, Baghdad and Bombay, London and Delhi, to name just a few, have added their stories to the global narrative of terror. "9/11" entered our lexicon; "13/12" in Delhi and "7/7" in London have threatened to follow suit. But we might as well find ourselves using up all the dates in the calendar. Terrorism is a threat to all of us, all the time; its particular horror lies in its randomness, in the knowledge that it can strike anytime, anywhere.

When terror strikes, it leaves survivors with unanswerable questions.

Escape, then tragedy

What if I (or he, or she, a loved one) had taken a different route? Woken up earlier, or later? A friend of mine told me of her panic about the London bus bombing in July; it was the very bus her daughter took to work every day, at that very time. When she finally got through, her relief was inflected with incredulity: for the first time, her usually diligent daughter had overslept, and missed the bus. On that same day, Miriam Hayman, the daughter of a Kolkata woman, survived the subway bombing, called her father to assure him she was alright — and then caught the bus to work instead, the very bus that was boarded, a few seats away from her, by a disaffected man with a bomb in his briefcase.

"She was meant to go that day," a friend of her mother's told me. "How else can one explain that she would survive one blast and succumb to another a few minutes later?" A notion of fate, of unavoidable destiny, may indeed be the only terms in which one can come to an acceptance of such an unbearably pointless loss. And yet grief is all the greater when it derives from such randomness.

Counter-terror strategy

What can one do to respond meaningfully to such meaningless violence? As one who has spent his entire working life at the United Nations, I have to say that terrorism denies everything the U.N. stands for: the rule of law; the protection of civilians; mutual respect between people of different faiths and cultures; the peaceful resolution of conflict. And the response to it also places in jeopardy all the hard-fought civil liberties and protection that have come to distinguish contemporary civilisation. As understandable fear and suspicion dominate the law-enforcement response, human rights, the presumption of innocence, the rejection of racial stereotyping, all risk going by the board.

Earlier this year U.N. Secretary-General Kofi Annan set out the main elements of a global counter-terror strategy, in terms of five goals: to dissuade disaffected groups from choosing terrorism as a tactic to achieve their goals; to deny terrorists the means to carry out their attacks; to deter States from supporting terrorists; to develop State capacity to prevent terrorism; and to defend human rights in the struggle against terrorism. Of course all this is much easier said than done. Terrorists kill because they think that terrorism is effective, and that it advances their objective of sowing fear in the targeted populations, and inducing the affected societies and governments to change a policy or reverse a course of action. The world has to prove to them that they are wrong: but until the terrorists are convinced that terrorism is futile, it will continue.

So we have to show any future terrorist that terrorism never gets what it wants because terror only hardens the resolve of the targeted society.

We have to demonstrate in word and deed that terrorism is so unacceptable that to resort to it undermines our sympathy for the cause on whose name it is undertaken. No rightful cause, no flagrant wrong, justifies the deliberate killing or maiming of non-combatants. For years India has advocated the adoption of a comprehensive international convention on terrorism that makes this clear. Governments have yet to agree on one, though the impetus is now growing. Ordinary citizens, civil society and religious leaders should also join the cause: the time is ripe for a truly global "people's campaign" against terrorism.

So let us all be resolute. But at the same time, let us promote and defend human rights — the best bulwark against the very injustice that is sometimes cited by the terrorists to defend their actions.