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An example of successfully dealing with terrorists
The war on terror is now the lens through which America's foreign, and sometimes domestic, policy is seen. The debate rages on about the best way to tackle this. The ACLU accuses Ashcroft of trampling on our liberties, and Ashcroft accuses the ACLU of "weakening our resolve and aiding our enemies". Unfortunately, much of the debate is drowned by spin on both sides. Complicating the situation is the feeling that this is a completely new problem, and history doesn't seem to have anything to say about what course worked (or didn't work) in the past.I want to draw attention to one example of successfully squashing terrorists. Back in the eighties and nineties, there emerged a separatist movement in the state of Punjab in India. A radical faction of Sikhs wanted independence from India to establish their own Sikh state called Khalistan. Khalistan would be ruled according to the law laid down in Sikh scriptures. The Indian administration did not acquiesce to their demands and the separatists resorted to violent means to go about establishing their state. It was widely believed that they received covert support - training, arms, and ammunition - fro Pakistan. Their militancy grew until the entire prosperous state of Punjab was brought to its knees. The separatists didn't particularly care about their targets, and many of them were Sikhs themselves. It wasn't safe to travel through Punjab after dark anymore. One of the most common kinds of attacks (I remember seeing this on the news almost every other day) was when a few militants would stop a bus full of travelers and simply gun them down - all of them. Prime Minister Indira Gandhi was probably the first to take a hard-line approach toward the problem. She appointed K.P.S. Gill the top cop in Punjab. He had a reputation as a tough, no-nonsense cop. To this day, he is seen as the one man who essentially single-handedly rooted out militancy from Punjab. At the time, there was a huge outcry against his no-mercy, hardline stance toward militants, about how he circumvented due process and violated the human rights of alleged terrorists. Thankfully, he had the sanction of Mrs. Gandhi herself, and was virtually untouchable - he continued doing his job as he saw fit. Things came to a head in 1984, when the top brass of the separatist movement, with the army hot on their heels, ran and hid in the Golden Temple. The Golden Temple, in Amritsar, the capital of Punjab, is Sikhism's holiest shrine. Mrs. Gandhi gave the go-ahead for Operation Blue Star, during which the Indian army sieged the Temple, and after a bitter fight with many casualties, rooted out the hiding militants. The operation had been described by various parties as a massacre by the army, and by others as a necessary, tough choice forced upon the army by the course the militants took. The militants had hoped that the untouchability of the shrine would protect them. They were wrong - the general who commanded the operation, and a good fraction of the soldiers who were part of it, were Sikhs. Perhaps those events can only be judged in hindsight, today. Today, Punjab is prosperous and peaceful. Nobody is scared of traveling at night. Most people now look back on militancy in Punjab as a bad nightmare, firmly in the past, and unlikely to repeat itself. The Punjab problem was localized to a particular region, and it was nowhere close to the scale of the assault mounted by today's terrorists. But there are clear parallels. There is also a lesson to be learned about how to deal with terrorists. Posted by: Vivek 2003-08-24 |
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