JANUARY 26 ― Yesterday, Kuala Lumpur welcomed leaders from around the world for the commencement of the conference on Deradicalisation and Countering Violent Extremism.
Ministers from across the Asean nations, as well as key strategic partners, will meet to discuss deradicalisation programmes and methods of rehabilitating individuals who may have succumbed to such teachings.
In a time when we have seen fear and lack of understanding lead to some troublingly impulsive and poorly rationalised actions, this is a welcome change of pace from world politicians.
It feels that in the last few years, months even, it has been one heinous terrorist attack after another. A violent rollercoaster of malice; just as we recover from one shock, the other is swiftly approaching with barely time for us to catch our breath.
The fall-out of this violent pattern seems to send many a world leader into the sadly familiar tailspin of impulsive, ill-educated, reckless policy-making we have grown so accustomed to following acts such as the Paris attacks and 9/11.
We have cultivated a society in which the response to these acts, rather than reflection, is to retaliate with more violence, more fire power and more bravado. Governments are seen as weak if they don’t immediately find the nearest bomber jet and wage war on some far-flung nation.
The people stand strong; we pay our respects, we daub the Eiffel tower in the Tricolore, we have our hashtags, we sympathise with the victims and we passionately vilify and berate the perpetrators. But we don’t try to understand why.
“Why?” seems to be almost a dirty word when it comes to terrorism, instead we choose to vilify and demonise. Showing a desire to understand the motives, and from where these arise, can lead one into an uncomfortable realm for some people and, to quote David Cameron, leave us being dubbed as “terrorist sympathisers.”
It took the UK government just three weeks following the Paris attacks before it dropped its first bombs on Syria. Francois Hollande scrambled to organise a military coalition that could immediately begin targetting the IS in the Middle East and Obama stepped up airstrikes.
This course of action strikes me as particularly irrational on a number of levels. Firstly, this seems to be playing right into the hands of IS and giving them exactly the vindication they crave. By continually destroying and dominating these areas, we give meaning and significance to the rhetoric and propaganda of this organisation.
Innocent young bystanders who have seen nothing but destruction and poverty at the hands of the West may start to see relevance in the teachings that they may once have deemed lunacy. Take away their livelihoods, their infrastructure and their hope and where else do they have to turn? Certainly not the West, they find no sympathy there. They want nothing to do with them.
What seems most ill-considered with this gung-ho, all guns blazing approach to Syria is that the Paris attackers in question were not in fact from Syria. They were French and Belgian. Surely the key here is not to bomb the country of the bully radicalising them over Facebook but to ask why affluent and stable nations such as France and Belgium (and Britain and the US before them) were unable to provide a better offer to their disenfranchised youth than the extremist rantings of a lunatic half way around the world.
Without understanding why the life of an IS fighter is more enticing than their current environments and why the violent rhetoric holds such a vice-like grip on these young men and women, we will never even begin to solve the creeping spread of extremism.
So I must commend the intentions of the current ongoing conference and the world leaders who have come together to try to understand. Hopefully they will not only be looking at how to stop radicalisation and terrorism but also why it happens in the first place.
What is it in these vulnerable demographics of society that drives people to see this as their best option, as more attractive than the alternative? Granted, this is an action that may take some significant self-reflection on the part of this current government but it is a step in the right direction all the same.
I don’t know about you but the airstrikes, the armed police, the extreme discriminatory policies didn’t make me feel any safer. Perhaps this approach will.
*This is the personal opinion of the columnist.
