Summary justice

Kesava Menon

WHILE THEY unequivocally condemn terrorism, Middle Eastern leaders often ask the rest of the world to take cognisance of the existential angst and the political conditions that breed terrorism. But when it comes to dealing with terrorists on their soil these same leaders go about it with a ruthless efficiency. Trial in a special court, a swift verdict and a prompt execution usually forms the three-step dance between the act of terrorism and the end of the terrorist.

An international magazine recently defined Al-Qaeda as an essentially Egyptian organisation with a Saudi head. To an extent this description results from the journalistic practice of encapsulating a broad theme in a pithy form to attract attention but it is nevertheless not far off the mark. Most of the 19 persons identified as the likely perpetrators of the September 11 terrorist strikes in the U.S. were either from Egypt or Saudi Arabia.

Assuming that these terrorists were linked to the Al-Qaeda setup of Osama bin Laden, the above description seems apt. What is also been known about Al-Qaeda is that while Osama might be the nominal head, the real operators are Ayman al Zawahiri (on the ideological and organisational front) and Mohammed Atef a.k.a Abu Hafs (on the operational front). The latter two are Egyptians while Osama, whose family originated in Yemen, was a Saudi citizen till his family and his country disowned him. In trying to understand the jehadi phenomenon, analysts talk of the conditions that youth confront in the countries of West Asia and North Africa. They live either under dictatorships or monarchies with little opportunity to vent their grievances. Their rulers are either corrupt or self-centred or inefficient, and their well-being and their culture is under constant threat from more powerful economies and influences from without. In such a situation it was but natural that Egypt and Saudi Arabia should have provided particularly fertile ground for the jehadi mindset to flourish. Egypt has been the intellectual and cultural leader of the Arab world while Saudi Arabia of course is the birth-place of Islam.

Egypt has had to contend with the Gama'a al Islamiya and the Islamic Jehad (the Egyptian group does not seem to have any connection with the similarly named Palestinian outfit). There is some confusion about which of these organisations is the senior one. In the 1990s when fundamentalist terrorism was raging in Egypt, the Gama'a was more prominent and its leader, Sheikh Omar, is currently in a U.S. jail having been convicted for complicity in the 1993 attack on the World Trade Center. But the Egyptian Islamic Jehad claims a longer pedigree. Khaled Islambouli, leader of the assassins who killed the former Egyptian President, Anwar Sadat, was a member of the group, and his brother and several other members were prominent among the Arab Afghans who fought the Soviets during the 1980s.

Even before Sadat's assassination, Egypt launched a crackdown on fundamentalism notably with the arrest of Sayyid Qutb, an Islamic ideologue who bears fair claim to being the original designer of the jehadi format. Fundamentalism revived with intensified force in the 1990s and while the Gama'a claimed responsibility for a slew of terrorist acts , the worst incident - the knifing to death of 56 tourists in a temple in Luxor - was attributed to the Jehad. It is a measure of the ruthlessness with which the Egyptian Government has tackled terrorism that those Egyptians who want to pursue jehad have been forced to do so elsewhere other than their country. Similarly, the Saudis too have shown no hesitation in dealing with the phenomenon within their country. Those responsible for the car-bomb attack in Riyadh in 1996, in which two Indians and four Americans were killed, were dispatched by the executioner's sword before the FBI had a chance to interrogate them.

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