Learning little from history
By Huma Yusuf
Is anyone else feeling an uncanny sense of deja vu? It seems as if political actors across the globe conspired last week to remind us that history does in fact repeat itself. Looking back at events that have recently unfolded, it becomes clear that the powers that be have little interest in learning from past mistakes. A lack of historical perspective, which is an early sign of both ignorance and arrogance, may yet turn out to be one of the biggest problems of this millennium. Allow me to elaborate with some examples.
A familiar chorus of mudslinging involving our intelligence agencies could be heard. The Afghan government has explicitly accused the ISI of supporting terrorism in the region, while the Indian government has called for the dissolution of the ISI after the attack on its embassy in Kabul. On Tuesday, Pakistan’s Foreign Ministry denied all such charges, and accused Afghanistan of cooking up a crisis.
This back-and-forth in the media about the Pakistani intelligence agency’s alleged involvement in terrorism is, no doubt, familiar. For years, India has complained about the ISI supporting unorthodox “freedom fighters” while Pakistan has blamed RAW for any unseemly event that occurs within its borders (including, implicitly, the recent string of bombs in Karachi). At a time when regional governments should be collaborating at the highest level to counter the shared menace of militancy, such name-calling and agency-bashing seems tasteless and unproductive. Our longstanding dispute with our neighbour to the east should have taught us, by now, not to provoke a similar stalemate with our neighbour to the west.
Indonesia is currently in the process of making the same mistakes that Pakistan has been suffering the consequences of for about two decades. Last month, the Indonesian government issued a decree that prevented followers of the minority, unorthodox Ahmadi sect from spreading its doctrine and threatened those who continued to proselytise with jail time. The decree was issued in an attempt to satiate the demands of extremist Islamists who are on the rise in a country still struggling to be a secular democracy. Observers suggest that the decree was politically motivated, as President Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono is hoping for the backing of Islamic parties when he stands for re-election next year.
Whatever one’s religious perspective on the Ahmadi community might be, one cannot deny that their persecution in Pakistan was the first step in a long march that resulted in the systemic marginalisation of other religious minorities, including Christians and Hindus. Religious intolerance in our country has spread like a cruel virus, making it vulnerable to the rise of the extremism that we are struggling to contain today. Meanwhile, the decision taken by many Pakistani rulers to pander to the religious right at election time – from Zulfikar Ali Bhutto to Pervez Musharraf – has only ever strengthened their base and contributed to an increasingly prejudiced and fanatic society. Why the Indonesian government seems eager to replay this sorry history on their turf remains unclear to me.
Moving towards the west, we can see Russia and the US reigniting the barely doused flames of Cold War rhetoric. The sabre-rattling has commenced over the proposed US missile defence shield, which is to be deployed in the Czech Republic and Poland. The US government insists that the shield is intended to counter “rogue states” such as Iran and North Korea. But Russia is convinced that the shield compromises its own defence systems and is in fact part of a ploy to undermine its rising might.
Toeing the same aggressive line as his predecessor, President Dimtry Medvedev showed on Tuesday that he was committed to seeing Russia re-emerge as a global powerhouse. He said not only that Russia “will need to react … adequately” to the deployment of the US anti-missile system, but also that any US-led moves to integrate former Soviet states such as Georgia into NATO would be resisted. In a time when the world faces new challenges – ranging from the war on terror to climate change and energy dependency – a reversion to old antagonisms such as the Cold War certainly seems like a step in the wrong decision.
Not to be left behind, the US is also threatening to resurrect a problem, clearly having learnt nothing with the passage of time. The Justice Department is considering a proposed policy – aimed at rooting out terrorists before they strike – that will institutionalise racial and ethnic profiling. The proposed revision to what are known as “attorney general guidelines” will allow the FBI to investigate people without any evidence of wrongdoing, relying instead on their race, ethnicity, and travel habits (for example, frequent trips to countries known for terrorist activities). Analysts agree that the proposal is aimed at facilitating the investigations of Muslims, Arabs, and other racial/ethnic minorities.
Racial profiling is considered unconstitutional in the US and even President Bush, who has taken extreme steps in the war against terror, has spoken out strongly against the practice. But the implementation of such a policy would no doubt have wide-reaching and longstanding social ramifications. The institutionalised targeting of Muslims, for example, would eventually seep down into American society. The cultural trend – which already has momentum – of thinking that Islam and terrorism are synonymous would eventually become normalised.
Given America’s past and ongoing problems with racial profiling, it is surprising that the government is willing to revisit the issue in such a flagrant manner. After all, the struggle to stem racial profiling with regards to African-Americans has been difficult and has met with only moderate success. Campaigns to decouple the mental association people have between blackness and criminality are underway even now. Even the legacy of Japanese internment camps – to which 110,000 Japanese nationals and American-Japanese were forcibly relocated on the basis of their ethnicity and nationality after the Pearl Harbour attack during World War II – is only beginning to be grappled with at this point.
So while governments ignore historical antecedents, history relentlessly repeats itself. To end on an optimistic note, though, I will point to an example where there is a chance of learning from history and moving forward to a potentially better future. The International Criminal Court’s recent prosecution of Sudan’s president for the genocide in Darfur of 35,000 people and the persecution of 2.5 million refugees is a provocative move. As the international community thinks through how to respond to the ICC’s request for an arrest warrant for President Omar al-Bashir, it should be intent on rewriting the mistakes made in Liberia, Yugoslavia, Rwanda and countless other sites of humanitarian crisis. We should see this as an attempt to pen a new version of the horrifying histories of crimes against humanity. The move may be controversial, but it does offer us the opportunity to write a new chapter in a global narrative that is threatening to become repetitive.
The writer is an analyst who recently graduated from MIT’s Comparative Media Studies programme. She was previously features editor at an English monthly. Email: huma.yusuf@gmail.com
July 17th, 2008 | Category: Islamophobia, Racial Profiling
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