Australian Human
Rights Centre (AHRC)

WORKING PAPER 2004/1

Human Rights, Counter-Terrorism, and Security.

Michael Humphrey [1]

School of Sociology

In a recent statement the UN Secretary General Kofi Annan observed that in the name of security liberties are being sacrificed weakening rather than strengthening common security. “Internationally, the world is seeing an increasing misuse of what I call the “T-Word” terrorism, to demonise opponents to throttle freedom of speech and the press, and to delegitimise legitimate political grievances’. The 'collateral damage' of the war against terrorism individual bodies and values including damage to the presumption of innocence, to precious human rights, to the rule of law, and to the very fabric of democratic governance."

Are Kofi Annan and the UN ‘soft on terrorism’, as Bill Ashcroft would say? No. Terrorism constitutes a major transgression of core human rights - right to life, right to personal liberty and security, the right to humane treatment, the right to due process and to affair trial, the right to freedom of expression, and the judicial protection and its correspondent obligation to respect and ensure all human rights without discrimination - and the UN has consistently condemned it. The Vienna Declaration and Programme of Action – June 1993 – stated that terrorism is indeed aimed at the destruction of human rights, fundamental freedoms and democracy and that it could never be justified, including to promote and protect human rights. [UNHCR –‘Terrorism and human rights’ Sub-Commission on Human Rights resolution 2002/24]. But, the statement adds, all counter-terrorism measures must be ‘in strict conformity with international law, including international human rights and humanitarian law standards.’ After September 11 UN Resolution 1373 (2001) compelled all governments to take measures against terrorism and at the same time a UN Counter-terrorism committee was established to monitor performance of its implementation. On 18 Jan 2002 UN Secretary General said “we should all be clear that there is no trade-off between effective action against terrorism and the protection of human rights. On the contrary, I believe that in the long term we shall find that human rights, along with democracy and social justice, are one of the best prophylactics against terrorism.’

Terrorism, as an attack on core human rights, can never be justified but the universalism of that perspective ignores the fact that it privileges the political status quo thereby forgetting how it was achieved. In the history of nationalist struggles against occupation or resistance against dictatorship there are many cases where political violence, what now would be called ‘terrorist violence’, has been justified by the outcomes – ie. the end justifies the means. For example the wars for the right of collective self-determination – anti-colonial nationalist struggles - terrorist violence was used in the national liberation of French colonial Algeria, in French colonial and then US backed Vietnam, in British Mandate Palestine and in apartheid South Africa. When we in Australia condemn terrorism we forget that we are the beneficiaries of our earlier use of ‘terrorist violence’ in the dispossession of Aboriginal people as is the US in its Indian wars of dispossession. Moreover human rights have been previously sacrificed by Western states in the name of nationalism or higher values. Thus the French Generals who used counter-terrorism and torture in the Algerian war of national independence continue to justify its use in the name of protecting civilisation almost 50 yrs after the event (Shatz 2002). As the Amnesty International Report 2003 comments ‘governments around the world appeared to take on board the message that human rights standards could be jettisoned in times of emergency’. While terrorism is destructive of human rights counter-terrorism, its opposite, does not necessarily restore human rights.

State & Non-State Terrorism

The reason why the “T-Word” has been misused is because of its definitional vagueness and its rhetorical impact. To describe an act of political violence as terrorism is to declare it illegitmate and immoral. However it is important to distinguish between state terrorism and non-state terrorism, if only because the latter now monopolises all discussion. In addition it is important to recognise that the discourse on terrorism and security is about the justification of counter-terrorism measures. In the name of national security counter-terrorism seeks to ensure the protection of citizens through defensive policing at home and/or offensive military intervention abroad.

Over the past two decades state-terrorism has been a major international issue continuing the protection of the rights of individuals against unjust state law or oppression established by the UDHR in 1948. Human rights law has been used to ‘fight terrorism’ by stripping those who conducted state-sponsored terrorism of their impunity and bringing them to justice in Latin American courts and in the Inter-American Commission for Human Rights. Crimes against humanity committed by perpetrators of state terrorism have also been tried in the special international criminal tribunals for the former-Yugoslavia and for Rwanda and in different European courts. State terrorism and crimes against humanity were even used to justify military-humanitarian intervention in Bosnia and later in Kosovo which Pres. Clinton described as the ‘first human rights war’.

One reason why state terrorism goes unrecognised is that often it ‘masquerades as justice’ (Tigar 2001). Non-state terrorism is seen as unethical, politically illegtimate and illegal because its political aim is to produce atrocity, a spectacle of violence that rejects the political legitimacy of the status quo. It does this by producing victims through indiscriminate killing of innocents. For Australians is non-state terrorism is ‘terrorism’ indelibly defined by the international terrorist attacks of September 11 2001 and the Bali nightclub bombings in October 2002.

Since the 1970s international terrorism has proven difficult to contain because of its changing character. In fact international laws aimed at the prevention and punishment of terrorists and terrorism actually avoided trying to define it until the late 1990s. Until then anti-terrorist legislation was indirect and focused on the regulation of the aviation industry, the weak link in worldwide transport. [i] It identified criminal acts such as hijacking, taking hostages and bomb attacks without even mentioning the term ‘terrorism’ which only first appeared in international legislation in the ‘international convention for the suppression of terrorist bombing (1997)’ and ‘the international convention for the suppression of financing of terrorism’ but neither defined terrorism. It was really not until the post-September 11 anti-terrorist legislation that terrorism was defined as an act of violence which targeted civilians for the purpose of political subversion of the state - to ‘intimidate a population, or to compel a government or an international organisation to do or abstain from doing any act’. [ii] This definition effectively broadened the potential number of acts identifiable as terrorism and introduced ‘intention’ as a criteria for the prosecution of individuals or groups who might want to radically change political, economic and social organisation of countries. In Australia the ‘Terrorism Bill’ and ‘ASIO Bill represent legislative initiatives to enhance the counter-terrorism powers of the state against non-state terrorism. [iii]

After September 11 non-state terrorism is now imagined as ‘globalised terrorism’, terrorism that is extremist, networked, highly symbolic and clandestine. ‘Globalised terrorism’ assimilates all terrorist violence making the WTC attacks, the bombing of a Jerusalem bus, the Bagdad UN truck bombing politically related events. Irrespective of whether or not the perpetrators of terrorist violence are part of international networks with common aims ‘globalised terrorism’ effectively assimilates diverse forms of political violence with the consequence of unifying and amplifying the threat. Differences are further de-politicised by essentialising the terrorist act ignoring the political project behind it thereby reducing terrorism to a problem of security and counter-terrorism policy for the state.

The emergence of ‘globalised terrorism’ has presented the state with the challenge of ‘globalising’ its national security policy. This ‘war against terrorism’ entails globalising national security through enhanced policing powers at home to conduct surveillance and to detain ‘suspicious’ citizens for periods without trial and the projection of military force abroad -war, military intervention- abroad to defeat terrorists or their supporters. The international coordination of anti-terrorism legislation has reinforced the ‘transnational border’, already under construction through the harmonisation of refugee and asylum policy (Humphrey 2002), and the use of pre-emptive war abroad is an expression of the globalisation of state power as a strategy of managing risk and security. As well as direct intervention this involves ‘security assistance’ to regimes who will serve US national security interests for which their human right’s record are ignored. [iv] The purpose of Australia’s intervention (invited along with Pacific Forum countries) in the Solomon Islands is national and regional security – to prevent a failed state being used as a haven for terrorists.

Security & Risk Society

The political significance of the emergence of ‘globalised terrorism’ is not just its challenge to state security but the fact that it touches some deep anxieties and uncertainties in contemporary life. On the one hand there are the uncertainties and risk that have emerged out of the social precariousness of institutionalised patterns of existence and on the other the fear of apocalyptic violence and world ending events we have collectively lived within the post-Holocaust and post-Hiroshima and post-Nagasaki by nuclear bombs.

Ulrich Beck identifies the contemporary era as ‘risk society’. He argues that risk has become an organising principle of a globalising world. Risk comes from the social precariousness of institutionalised patterns of existence. What has occurred with the emergence of the ‘risk society’ is that the concept of risk has reversed the relationship of past, present and future. The past loses its power to determine the present and instead future possibilities increasingly determine decision-making. The concept of risk becomes ‘a peculiar intermediate state between security and destruction, where the perception of threatening risks determines thought and action.’ [v] Risk society is 'an epoch in which the dark sides of progress increasingly come to dominate social debate.' [vi]

The pervasiveness of risk is not because life is now inherently much more risky but because in modernity, for experts and lay people alike, ‘thinking in terms of risk and risk-assessment is a more or less ever-present exercise, of a partly imponderable character’ (Shaw 1995). In modernity risk is pervasive and unsettling for everyone; no one escapes. But as well as being unsettling it is also a way of managing the future. ‘Thinking in terms of risk ... is also a means of seeking to stabilise outcomes, a mode of colonising the future’ (Shaw 1995).

Because there is an increasing gap between the globalising world we live in and individual experience of it there is a greater sense of personal anxiety and uncertainty. As we are constantly pushed into the future the past becomes less and less able to anchor social life and values. From the perspective of individuals, and even national societies, globalisation is experienced as something that is happening to us rather than something we are in control of. [vii] As Zygmut Bauman observes the ‘deepest meaning conveyed by the idea of globalisation is that of the indeterminate, unruly and self-propelled character of world affairs; the absence of a centre, of a controlling desk, of a board of directors, of a managerial office.’ [viii] But its consequences are not the same everywhere. There is an increasing polarisation between the globalised (highly mobile) and localised (trapped) worlds and a breakdown in communication between them. And as human experience becomes increasingly bifurcated in these segregated worlds fears and discontent grow. Risk increasingly becomes the organising principle by which governments, even wealthy and powerful ones, seek to manage global complexity.

In ‘our risk aversion culture’ we expect to live in comfort and security. [ix] The idea of safety first is so entrenched in Western cultures that the term ‘accident’ is now seen as inappropriate to describe events causing injury which are increasingly viewed as ‘preventable’. As a consequence our expectations are that nothing should go wrong and if it does it should have been prevented – ie. someone is responsible and liable. But there is a growing gap between the expectation of greater security and protection at the individual level and increased risk at the global systemic level. Terrorism only heightens the individual sense of insecurity by revealing governments’ inability to guarantee ‘individual security’. The stream of non-specific terrorism warnings we receive from governments in the form of travel alerts or vigilance advice – Be Alert, Not Alarmed – heighten risk consciousness (and fear) and make individual security the primary measure of national security. The intensification of focus on individual security as a strategy of national security is shaped by a postmodern moment - ‘the only visible continuity for the individual is the body - hence the centrality of body cultivation in postmodern life’ (Shaw 1995).

The ‘war on terrorism’ is also driven by an almost religious preoccupation with apocalyptic violence and catastrophic endings of out age. The apocalyptic impact of September 11, rammed home by its real-time visual coverage on international television networks, was seductive in conjuring up the sense that we are living in a new era of ubiquitous and even world-ending violence. This new ‘globalised terrorism’ is experienced as, an act of God, something that is beyond human control like floods, earthquakes and fires, The well-known effects of violence which collapse time into the present and make violence seem ubiquitous merely reinforce the experience of epocal change. The same technologies of globalisation that forge the symbiosis between television and terrorism also amplify the effect of violence.

The fear of apocalyptic violence from WMDs was the major justification for pursuing pre-emptive war against Afghanistan and Iraq. However this fear of the emergence of a ‘new global terrorism’ using WMD has been present from the early 1990s, especially after the first WTC bombing in 1993 (Simon & Benjamin 2000). September 11 made this fear a reality and has undermined the premises of contemporary global life and human experience in the West. Firstly, that violence and atrocity happen in Other places and to Other people, and secondly, that the threat of apocalyptic violence could be contained within a balance of nuclear deterrence (terror) managed by (rational) states, what Feldman (1995) calls ‘the logics of violence of modernity’. The September 11 attacks demonstrated that the international order could no longer be preserved by states holding a monopoly over the use of violence because non-state groups threatened to produce mass atrocities in places hitherto largely untouched by terrorism.

Counter-terrorism as ‘war against terrorism’ conjures up the threat of apocalyptic violence and catastrophic events (bad endings) and thereby heightens our consciousness of the uncertainties of world risk society. In this new political environment security is now talked about as a matter of war and self-defence not law and justice. ‘Globalised terrorism’ is reduced to a question of national security but paradoxically in a globalised world this has to be pursued by internationalising national security policy. But rather than reinforcing the international institutions built to promote national security through collective security resort to pre-emptive war is increasingly waged outside the norms of human rights and international humanitarian law undermining the very legal and inter-governmental structures such as the UN established to promote global security.

While ehe US (UK & Australian) justification for pre-emptive war is the weakness of the UN system to effectively counter the growth of the new global terrorism the actual impact of pre-emptive war is to transform international relations and the terms under which any state can realise national security and achieve profound political and social transformation in the societies targeted. The character of these pre-emptive wars as grand big budget projects which overstate their benefits, understate the risks and proceed with little accountability resemble Bent Flyvberg (et al. 2003)’s concept of ‘mega-project’ - the promotion of multibillion dollar construction megaprojects which systematically and self-servingly misinform parliaments, the public and the media to get these projects approved and built. The formula for approval, to get them accepted by the public, involves underestimated costs, overestimated revenues, undervalued environmental impacts and overvalued economic development effects. Flyvberg describes them as based on rent-seeking behaviour and they usually involve a degree of delusion because close scrutiny would stop these projects ever getting off the ground.

Pre-emptive war in the name of national security has become a ‘mega-project’ aimed at mobilising billions of dollars on highly speculative outcomes - defeating terrorism, democratising Iraq, achieving Middle East peace, and eliminating WMDs. The paradox of the megaproject is that while they are presented as instrumental solutions to big political problems they are ultimately publicly funded projects with little accountability always resulting in enormous cost blowouts with no certainty they will deliver their promised benefits. What characterises these war projects is the lack of risk accountability omitting their real costs which have to include peacekeeping and reconstruction as well as the military campaign. They are politically driven projects which ultimately rely on a risk bearing public.

The Afghanistan and Iraq wars can be understood as megaprojects which involved massive mobilisation of people and resources transnationally to bring about political and social transformation through deconstruction and reconstruction. The commitment was based on the idea of a threatening disaster - the expansion of international terrorism with the increasing likelihood of the use of WMD. In both Iraq and Afghanistan there remain serious security problems which are undermining the reconstruction and nation-building projects. In addition the cost of peacekeeping and reconstruction is escalating – eg. the growing cost of the US military and nation-building operations in Iraq has reached $4 billion per month alarming the US Senate. During the military campaign against Blitz, the former head of UNSCOM, when asked about whether he thought the US would find WMDs responded, “Well before, that was a $64 million question, that’s what it cost to run UNSCOM annually, now it’s a $64 billion question, that’s the cost to conduct the war). ] As with the construction megaprojects war is a joint government and private industry venture (providing the materiel, services, training etc) with considerable benefits for a wide range of US corporations especially the oil industry. Who will pay for these risk capital adventures? Taxpayers and increasingly world bodies such as the UN and other states. The desire to internationalise the reconstruction efforts is not just a question of the US getting its ‘fighting troops’ out and replaced by cheaper (and more expendable) peacekeeping troops from India, Turkey and others. Burden sharing is a strategy for globalising its own national security risks. According to a recent report the US overseas military deployment is overstretched with 370,000 troops in 120 countries out of an active force of about 491,000. Others can be mobilised - 136,835 Reservists & National Guard - but Pres. Bush cannot afford the costs, financial or casualties. [x]

The WMD controversy in the megaproject of the Iraq war is instructive about the centrality of risk as the justification of going to war. The question of WMD was the issue through which the US and the UK attempt to get UN Security Council backing for the invasion but failed - that war against Iraq could be justified as an act of self-defence. The present UK inquiry into the death of David Kelly, the biological weapons scientist, reveals the centrality of heightened risk matched by diminished accountability, especially the use of secret intelligence sources to justify decisions to go to war, in war as a megaproject. The PM Tony Blair’s claim that “Saddam has existing and active military plans for the use of chemical and biological weapons, which could be activated within 45 minutes” [xi] is under intense scrutiny and it has been revealed that at least one of his advisors, Jonathan Powell, war warned against exaggeration “We will need to make it clear in launching the document that we do not claim that we have evidence that [Saddam] is an imminent threat.”

For Australians the Iraq war has been a Teflon war because so far there have been no casualties. Yet the real costs of the megaproject Iraq war are only just becoming apparent and we (the public) are all going to bear the costs. The escalation of terrorist attacks to weaken US commitment to remain, to scare off international agencies involved in reconstruction and to intimidate Iraqis leaders participating in the national governing council will see an increasing drive from the US to share the burden of costs through internationalisation and Australia will probably be asked to make a greater contribution. This will bring greater costs and probably casualties that were fortunately avoided in the invasion phase.

This is not so much a new imperialist age in which the US is unilateralist in its national security policy but one of ‘Empire Lite’ – Michael Ignatieff’s term for the insufficient exercise of power to realise the goals of human rights and democratisation through intervention. If we understand war as a megaproject then effectively what the US has achieved is a huge demand on other nations to internationalise the ‘stabilisation’, democratisiation and rebuilding of Iraq. The success in the war has created an outcome in which the risks will rapidly being shared – recruitment of peacekeeping troops, financial backing, UN collaboration. The struggle at the moment between the US and UN is the extent it will be on US terms. In other words war as a megaproject has been used to dramatically re-shape international relations and the terms of global security by displacing national security risk onto others.

Pre-emptive war as counter-terrorism has changed the international security system not merely by undermining international law and the regulatory role of the UN Security Council. It has made the national security of first world states the main issue of international security. And within these states the issue of individual security has become the primary referent of national security. In the 1990s the main threat of political violence was the threat to populations in the third world from the impact of failed states. Then the demand was to protect human rights and human life through humanitarian intervention. Now with the spread of the threat of terrorism to the first world the security focus has shifted to become how to protect individuals. As security and human rights concerns have have shifted from the third world to the first world with the advent of ‘globalised terrorism’ so humanitarian intervention has been transformed into pre-emptive war.

Conclusiuon

The growing misuse of the ‘T-word’ is happening as a result of counter-terrorism policies towards ‘globalised terrorism’. However while terrorism is rightly condemned as transgressing core human rights counter-terrorism is not the reverse, the celebration of core human rights values. It is in our collective interest as citizens to ensure that counter-terrorism not only enhances security but upholds the values and institutions it seeks to protect.

Counter-terrorism has now become the major focus for national security policy in Australia and in the West. The threat of ‘globalised terrorism’ it addresses is an aspect of the darkside of globalisation and the growing sense of uncertainty and anxiety about contemporary life. It provides of focus for risk thinking on the one hand and the fear about apocalyptic endings on the other. ‘Globalised terrorism’ as an intentional risk makes visible in a spectacular way the invisible risk we live with daily (Humphrey 2003). Politically it brings to the forefront ‘risk thinking’ as a way of organising contemporary social complexity, a way of colonising the future.

Counter-terrorism as national security creates a sense of ‘emergency’ at home and abroad. Policing and military power are put forward as solutions to the increased risk of ‘globalised terrorism’. However counter-terrorism seeks to achieve the impossible, a risk free world for our risk aversion culture. It conceives of national security as a strategy to broach the gap between individual security and global insecurity. Its solution though is not to make national security a question of global security but the displacement of risk onto others. The concept of war as a ‘megaproject’ captures this process – you get the multibillion project of war to fly by emphasising the gravity of the threat and the enormous benefits of the objectives while minimising the risks and actual costs. Thus war against Iraq was politically sold as a way to remove the possible threat of Iraq’s WMD, to remove Saddam Hussein’s dictatorship and to bring about democratisation and to transform the Middle East. As the costs and casualties of occupation and reconstruction mount daily in Iraq the strategy is to internationalise the burden, to redistribute the risk onto others.

Counter-terrorism as a strategy as a national security policy lacks political imagination because it is trapped in the risk discourse in which the future becomes an organising principle. It does not offer a shared future but one that is narrowly focused on a highly individualised sense of security. Human rights provides a way re-imagine the future based on a set of shared values and rights for everyone.

References

Amnesty International Report 2003, 2002 in Focus Report, 'Counter-terrorism' and human rights, URL http://web.amnesty.org/report2003/focus2002_1-eng

Barbara Adam, Ulrich Beck & Joost van Loon (eds) (2000) The Risk Society and beyond: Critical Issues in Social Theory, London: Sage Publications.

Bauman, Zygmut (1998) Globalisation: The Human Consequences, Cambridge: Polity,

Beck, Ulrich (1995) Ecological Politics in an Age of Risk, Cambridge: Polity, p.

Brown, John (2002) ‘It’s a Crime’, Le Monde Diplomatique, February, p.13.

Feldman, Allen (1995) ‘Ethnographic states of emergency’, Caroline Nordstrom & Antonious C.G.M. Robben (eds) Fieldwork Under Fire: Contemporary Studies of Violence and Survival, University of California Press, Berkeley/LA/London, 1995. pp. 224-253.

Flyvberg, B., Bruzelius, N. & Rothengatter, W. (2003) Megaprojects and Risk: An Anatomy of Ambition, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Furedi, Frank (2002) ‘Refusing to be terrorised: Managing risk after September 11th’, A Global Futures Publication.

Humphrey, M. (2002) ‘Humanitarianism, Terrorism and the Transnational Border’, Social Analysis, 46(1), 117-122.

Humphrey, M. (2003) ‘Terrorism, Risk & Globalisation’, Australian and New Zealand Reinsurance and Finance Journal,26(2): 8-13

Norton-Taylor, Richard & Watt, Nicholas (2003) ‘No 10 knew Iraq posed no threat’ The Guardian Weekly, 169(9): 1.

Shatz, Adam (2002) ‘The Torture of Algiers’, The New York Review of Books, XLIX(18): 53-7.

Shaw, Martin (1995) ‘The development of ‘common risk’ society: a theoretical overview’, Paper delivered at seminar on 'Common risk society', Garmisch-Partenkirchen. URL http://www.sussex.ac.uk/Users/hafa3/crisksocs.htm

Simon, Steven & Benjamin, Daniel (2000) ‘America and the New Terrorism’, Survival, 42(1): 59-75, p.71.

Tigar, Michael E. (2001) ‘Terrorism and Human Rights’, Monthly Review, November, URL http://www.monthlyreview.org/1101tigar.htm

Williams, George (2003) Press Club Telstra Australia Day Address, 29 January 2003, URL http://www.law.unsw.edu.au/events/AustraliaDayAddress-Terrorism.html

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[1] Presented at the ‘Terrorism and security law’ seminar, Wednesday 27 August 2003, as part of the ‘Globalisation and Human Rights Seminar Series’, The Australian Human Rights Centre, UNSW Faculty of Law.

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[i] John Brown (2002) ‘It’s a Crime’, Le Monde Diplomatique, February, p.13.

[ii] Brown, ibid.

[iii] These refer to the Security Legislation Amendment (Terrorism) Bill 2002 (‘Terrorism Bill’ and the ASIO Legislation Amendment (Terrorism) Bill 2002 (‘ASIO Bill). See George Williams , ‘Australian Values and the War against Terrorism’, Professor George Williams Press Club Telstra Australia Day Address, 29 January 2003, URL http://www.law.unsw.edu.au/events/AustraliaDayAddress-Terrorism.html

[iv] ‘The War on terrorism’ and Human rights: Aid to Abusers’, Federation of American Scientists, URL www.fas.org/terrosim/at/docs/Aid&Humanrights.html

[v] Barbara Adam, Ulrich Beck & Joost van Loon (eds) (2000) The Risk Society and beyond: Critical Issues in Social Theory, London: Sage Publications, p.213.

[vi] Ulrich Beck (1995) Ecological Politics in an Age of Risk, Cambridge: Polity, p.2

[vii] Zygmut Bauman, (1998) Globalisation: The Human Consequences, Cambridge: Polity, p.60.

[viii] Bauman, ibid, p.59.

[ix] Frank Furedi (2002) ‘Refusing to be terrorised: Managing risk after September 11th’, A Global Futures Publication..

[x] ‘Officials Debate Whether to Seek a Bigger Military’, New York Times 21 July, 2003.