OPINION
There is no doubt that “terror” is a reality that most of the world now has to confront.
We know about the bomb attacks here – and their cost in terms of Kenyan lives and limbs.
It is of no comfort that those lives and limbs were apparently incidental, meaningless even in relation to the real targets.
We know too about the persisting lack of justice and reparations for the survivors – the victims’ family members as well as victims permanently physically injured and still traumatised as a result.
Both Kenya and the targets – the US – have hung those survivors out to dry.
That pain is real. But, relative to other regions of the world, we have had it – until now anyway – relatively easy. Indonesia has had no less than 23 bombings between 2000 and 2009.
Attacks in Pakistan have become a constant, with an entire region now essentially a war zone.
Nationalists from the former Soviet republics in the Caucasus region are believed to be behind the suicide bombings right in the heart of the Russian capital. And Maoists behind those in India.
The diversity of groupings and apparent motives of those involved in “terrorism” put paid to the notion that it is a new phenomenon – or one solely associated with fundamentalist interpretations of Islam and their supposedly more widely shared political aims (an end to the occupation of Palestine, for example).
Groups featuring on lists of “terrorist” organisations include those from the left as well supposed nationalists from minority ethnicities or religions within a given country, sometimes with regional and international affiliations.
Which is why it is sometimes tempting to justify if not their methods then at least their apparent cause.
As the saying goes, one person’s terrorist is another person’s freedom fighter.
And it is true that, in today’s world, the collective rights of groups of people to self-determination seem forgotten.
It is also true that we tend, in our focus on individual rights of survivors and victims, to treat as though equal in power both recalcitrant states and non-state armed groups.
But the line cannot be drawn when it comes to civilians and non-combatants.
On this, even all those who have written about guerrilla warfare seem to agree – the aim is to get all civilians and non-combatants on your side, not to “terrorise” them and thus place them, as most civilians and non-combatants too often are, between the rock of a state and the hard place of armed groups that too easily settle for soft targets of human flesh against the harder targets of vital state installations or state security force members.
Today’s victims, for both sides, are civilian and non-combatants – and always those with the least options in terms of protection.
All that said, however, it is equally obvious that “counterterrorism” measures have similar human consequences, again always for those with the least options in terms of protection.
If the United States has been able effectively to redefined torture to enable its use in “counterterrorism,” we should not be surprised at the excesses in less democratic countries implementing such measures.
In all of the countries mentioned above, common threads emerge.
Ethnic and/or religious profiling. Enforced disappearances. Secret detention centres.
Interrogation techniques that involve torture. Falsified criminal charges. In worst-case scenarios, summary executions. All of which are illegal.
So illegal that (in a flow of logic that makes sense to those convinced that there is no option) often these patterns will be accompanied or followed by attempts to modify constitutions or introduce legislation in ways that “lessen” the illegality.
Basic, fundamental rule of law principles are being thrown out of the window – the presumption of innocence until proven guilty in a court of law. Access to civilian courts of law. And the right to a remedy for those who survive all of this.
As Ekaterina Sokiryaniskaya of the HRC “memorial” in Russia dryly said, speaking of the number of cases her organisation has taken before the European Court of Human Rights and won: “The European Court decisions are taken by Russia as a tax on impunity.”
Meaning that Russia pays, without fail, the compensation ordered towards the survivors and victims – but there are no prosecutions of the security service personnel involved.
None — even where they have been clearly identified.
In fact, her colleague was assassinated last year – after an abduction similar to those she reported on in respect of alleged terrorists from Chechnya.
There really is nothing new under the sun, anywhere in the world – it is a matter of degree.
All human-rights defenders here heard of Natalia’s death with a chill – we know what those involved in similar human-rights investigations here have gone through.
And it is now one year plus since the assassinations of the Oscar Foundation staff – for which nobody has yet been charged.
It is not sufficient to say that crime and insecurity justify these excesses, these retreats from the rule of law. Or to say that there are no options.
“Terrorism” is, of course, essentially organised crime and needs to be dealt with as such, but within the boundaries of the Constitution and the law. Nothing justifies torture or extrajudicial executions. And there are always options. Always.
L. Muthoni Wanyeki is the Executive Director of the Kenya Human Rights Commission (KHRC).
Source: The East African
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