For more on suicide murders

[David Farber <dave () farber net>]

Begin forwarded message:

From: "J.M.Sykes" <j.m.sykes () ntlworld com>
Date: July 18, 2004 12:24:26 PM EDT
To: farber () cis upenn edu
Subject: For more on suicide murders

For more on suicide murders, New Scientist had an interesting feature  
and
editorial on the subject in vol 182 issue 2447 - 15 May 2004, page 3.  
Those
who have access to the archives can find the editorial comment at
http://archive.newscientist.com/secure/article/article.jsp? 
rp=1&id=mg18224470.200,
which links to the feature at
http://archive.newscientist.com/secure/article/article.jsp? 
id=mg18224475.900.

From the editorial:

"As numerous studies have confirmed, a major reason why organisations  
turn
to terrorism is the perception that their homeland is being occupied by  
a
foreign power. This is especially true for suicide terrorism, which  
almost
without exception has only been used as part of a systematic campaign to
persuade a government to withdraw from territory the group considers its
own."

From the feature article:

In the face of such unfathomable contradictions it is comforting to  
imagine
that suicide terrorists - even those who are mothers or teenagers - are
different to the rest of us. One popular assumption is that they are
homicidal or suicidal maniacs; another that they are poor and ignorant  
with
little prospect of a decent future; another that they are driven to act  
by
unbearable political oppression; a fourth that they are religious  
fanatics,
usually Islamic. These notions are widely affirmed by analysts and
politicians. They are also wrong on almost every count.

While suicide terrorists invariably come from oppressed communities,  
recent
research by psychologists, anthropologists and others suggests that  
they fit
none of the other common profiles. They are no less rational or sane, no
worse educated, no poorer and no more religious than anyone else. "They  
are
like you and me," says Rohan Gunaratna, head of terrorism research at  
the
Institute of Defence and Strategic Studies at Nanyang Technological
University in Singapore. What this amounts to is in many ways more  
alarming
than the ubiquitous misperception of the suicide bomber as fanatical. It
means that, in the right circumstances, anyone could be one.

Killing yourself while killing your enemy is not a modern idea. It was
practised against the Romans in 1st-century Judea by Jewish Zealots,  
and by
the Islamic order of Assassins in the Middle East from the 11th to 14th
centuries. Japanese kamikaze pilots changed the course of the second  
world
war (though not in the way they would have hoped) by flying their planes
into enemy ships.

The modern era of suicide terrorism started in April 1983 when  
Hezbollah,
under the cover name of Islamic Jihad, attacked the US embassy in Beirut
with a truck-bomb, killing 63. The tactic has since been used by dozens  
of
groups around the world, most prolifically by Hamas and the Liberation
Tigers of Tamil Eelam (otherwise know as the Tamil Tigers). Altogether  
there
have been some 500 suicide attacks around the world since 1980.

All this has given academics studying the psychology of suicide bombers  
and
the environments in which they act a wealth of data to draw on. And  
they are
overturning some persistent myths. Take the idea that terrorism is born  
of
poverty and lack of education, the basis of almost all the US's foreign  
aid
programmes. "We fight against poverty because hope is an answer to  
terror,"
said President Bush at a UN development conference in Monterrey,  
Mexico, in
2002.

Yet in a study of Hamas and Palestinian Islamic Jihad suicide terrorists
from the late 1980s to 2003, Claude Berrebi, an economist at Princeton
University, found that only 13 per cent came from a poor background  
compared
with 32 per cent of the Palestinian population in general. In addition,  
more
than half the suicide bombers had entered further education, compared  
with
just 15 per cent of the general population. And in a paper published  
last
year in the Journal of Economic Perspectives (vol 17, no 4, p 119),
economist Alan Krueger of Princeton University and the Russell Sage
Foundation in New York and Jitka Malecková of the Institute for Middle
Eastern and African Studies at Charles University in Prague, Czech  
Republic,
showed that Hezbollah militants who died in action in the 1980s and  
early
1990s were less likely to be impoverished and more likely to have  
attended
secondary school than others of their age.

What of the idea that suicide terrorists are simply suicidal? Ariel  
Merari,
a psychologist at Tel Aviv University in Israel and perhaps the foremost
expert on Middle Eastern terrorism, says he used to believe this. But  
when
he studied the background and circumstances of every suicide bomber in  
the
Middle East since 1983 he came to an unexpected conclusion. "In the  
majority
you find none of the risk factors normally associated with suicide,  
such as
mood disorders or schizophrenia, substance abuse or history of attempted
suicides," he says. Scott Atran, an anthropologist at the Institute for
Social Research at the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor, agrees.  
"There
is no psychological profile whatsoever for suicide terrorists." There  
have
been highly disturbed suicide bombers - Raiyshi, the mother who blew  
herself
up in Gaza, had been ostracised by her parents and family and was  
depressed,
according to Eyad El Sarraj, chairman of the Gaza Community Mental  
Health
Programme - but they are exceptional.

The link with religion is more complicated since most Islamic terrorist
groups use religious propaganda, largely the promise of paradise, to  
prepare
recruits for suicide missions. Yet suicide terrorism is in no way  
exclusive
either to religious groups or to Islamic culture. Robert Pape, a  
political
scientist at the University of Chicago, compiled a database of every  
suicide
attack from 1980 to 2001, 188 in all (American Political Science  
Review, vol
97, p 343). He found no direct connection between suicide attacks and
religious fundamentalism. As he points out, the leading perpetrators of
suicide terrorism, the Tamil Tigers, are a Marxist-Leninist group whose
members are from Hindu families but who are themselves hostile to  
religion.
Merari has shown that 22 of the 31 suicide attacks in Lebanon between  
1983
and 1986 were carried out by secular organisations. Moreover, one of the
first suicide bombers to attack Israeli forces in the Middle East was  
Loula
Abboud, who defied all the stereotypes: she was a secular, middle-class
19-year-old from a Christian background who blew herself up in front of  
a
group of Israeli soldiers in Lebanon in 1985.

What, then, would lead a sane, rational, educated and comfortably-off  
person
to do something so irrational and extreme? The key, many researchers  
agree,
lies with the organisation that recruits them. In the modern history of
suicide terrorism it appears that every mission has been authorised and
planned by a resistance group. "Suicide terrorism is an organisational
phenomenon," confirms Merari. "An organisation has to decide to embark  
on
it."

The decision to engage in suicide terrorism is political and strategic,  
Pape
says. What is more, the aim is always the same: to coerce a government,
through force of popular opinion (apart from a few isolated cases,  
modern
suicide terrorism has only ever been used against democracies), to  
withdraw
from territory the group considers its homeland. That certainly applies  
to
the 9/11 terrorists, who considered the US an occupying presence in the
Middle East because of its military bases there and its backing for  
Israel.
It also holds for groups who attack democracies indirectly, by attacking
those who support them. The ongoing attacks on police stations in Iraq  
are
an example.

This raises the question: why do some groups resort to suicide terrorism
while others do not? Why, for example, did the IRA not use suicide  
bombers
when all the conditions seemed set for it: an occupation, as the IRA  
saw it,
by a democratic government, and a resistance organisation whose members  
were
already bombing civilians and martyring themselves for their cause  
through
hunger strikes? One researcher, who cannot be named, went undercover in
Northern Ireland at the height of the conflict by posing as a terrorist  
from
an Islamic group, and asked an IRA commander this question. "He replied  
that
it was against their culture, that their people would turn against them.
Hunger strikes were the furthest they could go."









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