OPINION: Innocent victims of evil ideology

Over the past week, there have been two devastating terror attacks. The Nairobi shopping mall shootings included many Western casualties and have been widely reported. The other attack, on a church in Pakistan, has barely rated a mention.

A cynic might suggest Western media regard the shedding of the blood of brown-skinned Catholics by the Tehrik-i-Taleban Pakistan ("Student Movement of Pakistan" or the Pakistani Taleban) as less newsworthy than the murders of Westerners by the Somali Harakat al-Shabaab al-Mujahideen ("Movement of Striving Youth" or al-Shabaab). But that is a discussion for another time.

What matters now is that we have two sets of victims struck by effectively the same perpetrator inspired by the same demented ideology. Whether the Pakistani Taleban or al-Shabaab, what we have is a global ideology seeking to impose its own demented political theology by force.

Like its al-Qaeda colleagues, the Pakistani Taleban rarely discriminates on the basis of religion. Though calling itself an Islamic group, it will happily spill Muslim blood. Shia mosques and neighbourhoods have been subjected to suicide bombings.

Sunni security personnel, soldiers and innocent civilians have been blown to bits by suicide bombers.

But its most recent attack on the All Saints Church at Kohati Gate in Peshawar deliberately targeted one of Pakistan's most disadvantaged faith communities. The service had just ended and the 400 worshippers were leaving the building when two suicide bombers detonated their devices.

Eyewitnesses reported around 100 parishioners lay in pools of blood. At least 80 were dead, more then half of them women and children.

It was the worst attack on Christians in Pakistan's history.

The church was built in 1882 on the design of a mosque, with a dome and minarets. It is one of a handful of churches that service some 60,000 Christians in Peshawar.

So why did this happen? Kamal Siddiqui, editor of the Express-Tribune, writes:

Pakistanis are dying in large numbers, mostly at the hands of religious militants who insist that their war is with America and not with us. One does not understand the logic of this. But it is an ideology that finds favour with many. 

Pakistan is a country where there is too much tolerance for intolerance. On the same day as the church bombing, a mob in the Punjabi city of Sialkot threatened to remove the minarets of an Ahmadi house of worship. The Ahmadis are a small sect regarded by law as non-Muslims. Their houses of worship cannot be called mosques.

When the mob threatened to attack the Ahmadi building, police themselves tore down the minarets.

And so a church in Peshawar can have minarets but not a Ahmadi house of worship.

Pakistan is a country in which all kinds of excuses can be found for division. The Taleban need not try very hard to sow chaos. The chaos is already there. So often Pakistanis complain about American drone attacks. And rightly so. But more Pakistanis are murdered in sectarian violence than by drone missiles.

The Taleban temporarily ruled parts of Pakistan before being driven out by the army. In this respect, they have something in common with al-Shabaab in Somalia.

According to a 2011 report by Ron Wise of the Centre for Strategic and International Studies, the militia started its life aligned to a moderate (or rather, somewhat less extreme) Somali Muslim party called the Islamic Courts Union (ICU).

Before that Somalia was a basket case where competing warlords committed all kinds of atrocities against civilians.

Religious leaders in the Somali diaspora are almost unanimous in their condemnation of al-Shabaab. In Minnesota, home to the largest Somali community in the US, local imam Abdul Hashi told journalists, "This type of activity, the killing of innocents, has no basis in, or relationship to Islam," and cited the Koran: "Whoever kills one soul, kills all of humankind, and whoever saves one soul, saves all of humankind."

Which makes the actions of al-Shabaab and the Pakistani Taleban pure evil.

Irfan Yusuf is a Sydney lawyer. First published in the NZ Herald on 26 September 2013.

CRIKEY: Somali politics is just as much about clan as it is religion ...

What drives young second and third generation men living in relatively comfortable surrounds to involve themselves in an overseas conflict whose nuances they have little or no understanding of? Certainly the AFP, NSW and Victorian Police and the NSW Crime Commission have been asking these questions during the seven months of their investigation into a possible attack on an Australian army barracks.

The front page story in The Australian today provides some answers but also too many unanswered questions. According to Victorian Police Commissioner Simon Overland, publication by The Oz posed ...

... an unacceptable risk to the operation and an unacceptable risk to my staff.

It’s a serious allegation to make against a paper whose editorial line so frequently flexes its cultural warrior and national security muscles. On the other hand, it’s unclear what dangers newspaper reporting could pose to 400 heavily-armed investigators who cordoned off entire streets.

Some reporting and analysis showed a laughable ignorance of Somali and/or Muslim cultures. Cameron Stewart writes of the group of Melbourne taxi drivers and construction workers ...

... having little understanding of Somali politics or theology.

Probably the same could be said for all those involved in the final version of Mr Stewart's story that went to print.

The reports place enormous emphasis on terms like "Islam" and "Muslims" and "wahhabi". But Somali politics is just as much (if not more) about clan as it is religion. There’s no evidence al-Shabaab (the group linked to the alleged proposed attack) or any other of the warring factions in Somalia have risen above the clan-based loyalties that have divided this nation for decades. Still, there's no doubt that non-Somali Muslims and Somali kids with little understanding of clan undercurrents could be attracted by the lure of pan-Islamic rhetoric.

What really made me almost fall off my chair was this sentence describing the al-Shebaab group:

Its followers shun alcohol, cigarettes, music and videos, choosing an austere,
violent interpretation of Islam.

Most Muslims I know (including myself) shun alcohol (though I'm just a teetotaller, not a teetotalitarian) and cigarettes. Avoiding music and naughty videos also isn't uncommon among Muslims, though largely for similar reasons as conservative Christians. Thankfully our law enforcement and intelligence services don't use such indicators to identify potential terrorists or else they'd be taking Fred Nile into custody.

(Furthermore, the Sufi Islamists fighting al-Shabaab shown in the alJazeera English video below would be just as opposed to alcohol, cigarettes and certain forms of music and video.)

This kind of pedestrian theological speculation really isn't helpful, especially when it involves the kind of simplistic analysis you'd expect from tabloids. I guess Andrew Bolt and his buddies will have lots of fun speculating on how having the wrong ethnicity and/or religion turns you into a terrorist.

First published in Crikey on Tuesday 4 August 2009.

Words © 2009 Irfan Yusuf




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VIDEO: What is happening inside Somalia?

The following al-Jazeera video shows three Somali perspectives on the ongoing conflict in Somalia that involves al-Shabab in conjunction with a host of opposition forces. How often do you see Somali perspectives in Australian media? Here is the text accompanying the video:

As the crisis continues anti government fighters have been capturing key towns and villages. Fighting has killed around 70 people in Mogadishu in the last few days alone. And members of the Al-Shabab group took the town of Jowhar on Sunday. Just who exactly are the players this time around - and what do they want - as their country spirals into seemingly endless discord and division?

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COMMENT: Extraordinary asylum stories ...

The Daily Telegraph may see fit to publish racist comments about persons of Somali heritage. However, its fellow News Limited paper The Australian has published a more nuanced feature piece on Melbournites of Somali heritage in its Weekend Magazine.

A large number of Somalis migrated to Australia as refugees. Many have witnessed horrific violence in their home country, which has been locked in a vicious civil war since 1991. I cannot even begin to imagine what impact these experiences must have on Somali migrants today. Perhaps the best way to appreciate this is to cite passages from the March 23 story, authored by Drew Warne-Smith and titled New home, new hope:

Jama came to Australia in 1996, aged 12, with his mother, four brothers and three sisters. Like so many Somalis, his family had fled the capital, Mogadishu, after the civil war erupted in 1991. He remembers sitting on the crowded roof of a truck as it drove south towards Kenya, dead bodies littering the side of the road.

They were five years in a refugee camp in Kenya, awaiting asylum; a camp where rape and theft were commonplace and school comprised 50 kids in a room with one adult. His father was killed by Kenyan soldiers near the Somali border in 1993. He doesn’t know how or why.

Landing in Australia, a place his friends at the camp had teased him was “the last place on Earth”, Jama felt disarmed. Literally. No one was holding a gun. And no one looked scared, either. People seemed free to do anything and say anything, not that he could understand them.

Less than a year later, after studying English for six months at a language centre, he was sent to high school in Brunswick, placed in Year 7 according to his age. He could barely understand the teacher, let alone learn or contribute. Embarrassed, resentful, he began wagging days.

Soon he was hanging out with other African kids doing the same. Ignoring his mother’s pleas, he dropped out altogether in Year 9, then returned to school but never got as far as Year 11. He didn’t attend the mosque either, nor say his prayers. And he began drinking alcohol, a taboo in Islamic culture.

Then came the nightclubs and the fights. Stealing. Run-ins with police. A 5cm scar over his right eyebrow tells of being glassed in a brawl at a club in Ringwood. But Jama wasn’t scared of anyone, not here in Australia. Not after what he’d seen in Africa. He had no father, no discipline, no moral compass, and not much hope either. He had cut loose from his own culture and he had little hope of embracing a new one. Within Melbourne’s Somali community, Ahmed Jama became known as one of the Lost Ones ...

Some may say that Jama is an exception. After all, don't these boys all have fathers who can teach them good manners? The answer can be found in this frightening statistic.

About a quarter of all Somalis in Victoria – about 4000 – live in a family without a father, according to research by the Somali Australian Council of Victoria.

“The fathers are dead, or fighting, or they left Australia to return to Somalia, or they work overseas. And there is a tendency for teenagers in those families to become lost,” Ibrahim says.

But that's just one story. What about all the other Somali families? Meet Abdulle Hussein, a former lieutenant-colonel in the Somali Army.

He and Shukri had three children under four years old when they fled the Baidoa region, northwest of Mogadishu, in 1991. For three days and three nights they walked without stopping, until they reached Ethiopia about 140km away. Soon after, their youngest son died from illness in the suffocating heat. They buried him and kept walking. Six months and 4000km later they wandered into a refugee camp in Kenya, where they waited two years until being accepted into Australia.

Hussein glances at his 15-year-old son Said, sitting quietly in the corner. “They have no idea what it took to come here,” he says, without any trace of sadness or bitterness. Such hardship is unremarkable among those who came here.

Another family, I’m told, lost two sons escaping Somalia. A militia group kidnapped the eldest – being old enough to carry a gun – and they never saw him again. A crocodile killed the second as they crossed a river by night. The father still draws pictures of his boys to stop the memory of what they looked like from slipping away.

Really, who can imagine such grief, let along endure it? These experiences beggar belief. Fleeing a civil war only to be eaten by a crocodile. A stolen son, probably fighting for those who tried to kill his parents, most likely dead himself. Relatives already killed by bullets and knives. Burying a baby on a roadside.

I will also learn of Hussein Mumin, a Somali turned street kid, who saw his father and brother murdered, having already lost his mum. Rejected by a devout community unable to cope with how far he had strayed, he would be killed too – stabbed to death in a domestic argument. And as Barbara Chapman, his social worker and friend, tells me – when these refugees arrive, there are no government services to screen or treat them for their trauma. Yet we act surprised when they drop out of school, or pull a knife, or clash with police, or retreat to their own culture. The surprise, she says, is that they function at all.

Who can imagine, let alone endure, such grief? And we can hear so many other stories from those desperately risking their lives to reach our safer shores. Should we resent them for their efforts? Should we demonise them?