When chickens come home …

Tuesday 19th October, 2021

The world is mourning the death of a senior British lawmaker. The coldblooded murder of Sir David Amess, which shook the world, has been widely condemned. The British government lost no time in calling the savage crime an act of terrorism, and the British MPs declared equally fast that terror would not win. They no doubt mean what they say anent the assassination of Sir David and threats to them as well as their country’s national security, but the question is whether they have the same concern for the other nations affected by terror.

Scientists who experiment with dangerous germs to produce biological weapons run the risk of being hoist with their own petard. The same could be said of the powerful countries that use terrorism to advance their hidden agendas, Britain is no exception. It has been harbouring various terror activists, and some of its MPs are unashamedly abusing their positions to help further the interests of foreign terrorist groups in return for votes and other such favours.

Following the killing of Sir David, there have been strident calls for stern action against terrorism. They must be heeded. Curiously, this is not the way Britain reacted to the assassination of Sri Lanka’s Foreign Minister Lakshman Kadirgamar in 2005, or the killing of any other political leader for that matter. It together with the other self-appointed Co-Chairs of what was then known as Sri Lanka’s peace process pressured Colombo to continue to negotiate with the LTTE, which killed Kadirgamar. That the LTTE had assassinated President Ranasinghe Premadasa, Opposition Leader Gamini Dissanayake, former Indian Prime Minister Rajiv Gandhi and a large number of Sri Lankan Tamil political leaders also did not matter to the UK, and other western nations.

Britain’s counterterror strategy has not worked. It was to safeguard British national security interests that the UK joined forces with the US to wage war on Afghanistan. In 2009, the then British PM Gordon Brown publicly called the Afghan mission a ‘patriotic duty’ to keep the streets of Britain safe from terror attacks. His Foreign Secretary David Miliband also maintained that the Afghan war would ensure the safety of Britain. But they thought wrong.

Much is being spoken about the radicalisation of some Muslim youth, who carry out terrorist attacks in various parts of the world, and the role that the ISIS plays therein. The UK, the US and their allies must take responsibility for creating conditions for the emergence of ISIS, through their invasion of Iraq. The West has also provided a perfect foil for Islamic extremists by carrying out hostile campaigns against the Muslims. If the US had cared to develop Afghanistan after achieving its strategic goal of getting rid of the Russians from that country, the Taliban would not have been able to emerge so powerful. The UK and the US also provided assistance to terror groups in Iraq and Syria and thereby facilitated the development of the ISIS terror network. In 2015, the UK suddenly terminated criminal proceedings against a man accused of being involved in terrorism in Syria, when it became known that the British intelligence had provided arms and other military assistance to the terrorist group, of which the accused had been a member!

It is high time the British Parliament realised the danger of its members being swayed by the agents of terrorists, who offer votes, etc., in return for various favours they receive. The need for the UK to abandon its double standards on terrorism cannot be overemphasised. Chickens come home to roost.

Terrorism is an evil—never a justifiable means to an end—which must be eliminated in all its forms and manifestations for the sake of humanity. Time was when the western powers laboured under the delusion that they were too strong to be affected by terrorism, which they were using to further their interests, but today they have become as vulnerable as others. The World Health Organization’s pithy slogan as regards the current pandemic is applicable to the scourge of terrorism as well: No country is safe until every country is safe.