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Sol Sanders Archive
Monday, March 2, 2009

Compassion: The terrorists’ cruelest weapon

Sol Sanders also writes the "Asia Investor" column weekly for EAST-ASIA-INTEL.com.

Again, at two ends of the world, drama is unfolding that bears all the marks of a miscarriage of rational geopolitics in the name of doing the merciful thing in consort with the injunctions of all the great religions and moral codes.   

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Hillary Clinton, since a stalemate has been reached in the endless pursuit of an arrangement between the Israelis and Arabs in the Mideast, is obligated by the campaign oratory of the Obama Administration to seek solutions everywhere. So she has chosen to play Lady Bountiful on her first visit as secretary to the Mideast. She is scheduled to make a $900 million [one wonders how that figure was arrived at] commitment to the rebuilding of Gaza at a donors get-together in Cairo.

Meanwhile, the calls for compassion have gone out from all over the world – the most significant from its giant neighbor India – to the Sri Lankan government to accede to a ceasefire in what looks to be its final moments of victory over a bloody 25-year insurgency. The Tamil Tigers, hoping once again to demonstrate their capacity for renewal using a long history of domestic ethnic discrimination and extortion of a diaspora around the world, are refusing to down their arms. Instead, they are using tens of thousands of civilians as a shield against the government offensive.

The long history of the use of relief funds for the Palestinians, not the least those under UN mandate and supervision, is one of unrivaled corruption and diversion to violence. Even the UN-supported schools have permitted instruction in hate and violence. The complaint that 400,000 Gazans are penned up in a tiny area, the most densely populated in the world, in poverty and misery, has pulled on the world’s heartstrings [and guilt]. Hamas, carried officially as a terrorist group by most of the civilized world, continues to dominate the structure of what order there is in Gaza. And it continues to permit the firing of terror rockets into Israel inviting new rounds of violence.

Given the past performance of the relief agencies in Gaza, there is little reason to believe that however well-meaning the donors who will gather with Clinton, these new funds will not go toward the same old end. The history of the half century of violence and corruption in the area – whatever current professions by the Saudis that they and the World Bank would administer their contribution, for example – suggests the same old pattern will continue. The historical reality is that their petrobillions notwithstanding, the Arab governments always have used the Palestinian issue for their own political purposes. At the same time, the Palestinians have been left to moulder in their camps, Israel absorbed some 800,000 poverty-stricken immigrants from the Arab and Moslem world when a million Jews fled for their safety in the l950s.

In Sri Lanka, the world is dealing with a somewhat neglected horror. It was, for example, the LTTE [Liberation.Tigers of Tamil Eelam] which brought back to the modern world suicide bombing. They invented the unspeakable tactic of organizing a “Black Widow” revenge unit of soldier’s spouses, copied now in parts of the Muslim world. It was one of those women who assassinated Rajiv Gandhi, former Indian prime minister and grandson of Jawaharlal Nehru, one of the country’s founders. The tragedy was grimly convoluted: his mother, Indira Gandhi during her prime ministry, had acquiesced in the training and arming in south India of the original LTTE elements by agents of Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat and the Soviets when Colombo began to move too close to the U.S. in the Cold War. The LTTE has not only waged a guerrilla war against the government. As important has been its assassination campaign against individual civilian opponents – many of them ethnic Tamils who opposed them. A quarter century of violence has taken at least 70,000 lives, many if not most noncombatants.

The international human rights advocates, including United Nations spokesmen, have called on the Sri Lankan government to facilitate the exit of civilians from the tiny enclave that still remains in LTTE hands but under bitter government attack. It is clear that the Tigers are repeating the tactics they have helped spread to their co-terrorists throughout the world: they are using embattled hospitals, civilians, and any other artifice they can to hang on to their last redoubt by appealing to the world’s humanitarian conscience.

Just as it was proved out over and over again during the Israeli attack on Gaza that similar tactics were used by Hamas, it is an effective weapon in the complicated propaganda and political battles that one day will dictate a settlement. A UN spokesmen admitted that earlier accusations, for example, of a purposeful Israeli attack on a school were not true. But as always these later clarifications of partisan regional UN officials – and even those on the secretary-general’s staff -- never quite catch up with the media.

Nor will it be long remembered that UNRRA, the tainted international agency devoted exclusively to Palestinian relief, had in all good conscience temporarily suspended aid in Gaza because it was being outrageously diverted to Hamas’ warmaking purposes. But with large numbers of UNRRA’s local employees either actively members of Hamas or subject to their “discipline”, or to other Palestinian political terrorist organizations, this was simply another propaganda feint in a long history. Corruption.has seen literally billions of American taxpayers’ dollars and the EU’s euros flow to through Palestinian officialdom to foreign banks with little or nothing to show for it either in Gaza or on the West Bank.

The conundrum of “collateral damage” – the loss of life and property to bystanders in a war – is as old as war itself. A not unsimilar equation is being played out in the Pakistan-Afghanistan tribal areas where not only on the ground, but with the new spaceage weapon of the unmanned aerial vehicle [UAV], civilian casualties unhappily are a part of the successful destruction of terrorists in their lair. The tipping point at which such casualties of legitimate warfare become an element in the balance for the support of the local population is crucial to winning international public opinion for long and difficult campaign. It is also, particularly in guerrilla warfare in the more primitive areas, essential to winning the longer contest for elimination of sanctuary for terrorism on the ground.

But the problem of the Palestinians and their legitimate rights to peace and freedom – which are the basic feeling the terrorists have been able to exploit – is critical. Simply trying to continue to buy off the Palestinians with an endless charity is not the answer to the problem. In Sri Lanka, the Norwegians – who through their bungling if well-meaning efforts at conciliation extended the insurgency for decades – have proved that witless compassion simply extends the bloody contest.

The Obama Administration, not least through the personal contacts of the President himself, has an intimate knowledge of the long history of muddling through the Mideast diplomatic processes. That may not be the case in Sri Lanka. But certainly New Delhi, which has been in and out of the local struggle throughout its history, must be clear-headed about what is at stake in this critical time.

Compassion is not enough.


Sol W. Sanders, (solsanders@cox.net), is an Asian specialist with more than 25 years in the region, and a former correspondent for Business Week, U.S. News & World Report and United Press International. He writes weekly for World Tribune.com and East-Asia-Intel.com.

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