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     The MaximsNews Global Pundit, Ian Williams, is also a regular columnist for the London Weekly and a former speechwriter for British Labour Leader Neil Kinnock. Ian is available for Media Interviews  on the London bombings: IanWilliams@MaximsNews.com

   The MaximsNews Global Pundit

London & Srebrenica

A Tale of Two Cities

by Ian Williams 

The MaximsNews Global Pundit is also a journalist, U.N. Correspondent for The Nation and the past president of the United Nations Correspondents Association. 

                              IanWilliams@MaximsNews.com

          UNITED NATIONS - 8 July 2005  / www.MaximsNews.com / While there is a lot of fuss at the United Nations about a definition of terrorism, the London attacks certainly fit former British Ambassador Sir Jeremy Greenstock’s definition – you know it when you see it.  

The bombings in London, as if the daily carnage in Iraq weren’t enough, are a stark reminder that there are among us people who have no compunction against killing innocent men women and children – to whom they have never been introduced.  

That is not as facetious as it sounds. 

No more than the hijackers on September 11 did these killers know who they were targeting. And apart from a sanguinary demonstration of fatal ill will, it is difficult to see how their misdeeds advanced their cause at all. 

Assassination is different from this kind of random terror. Even if it is as immoral as any other murder, there is a certain rationality to it. It is aimed at particular individuals, intended to send a message to others who share a similar position whether professionally or personally. 

In contrast, the victims of the London and New York attacks, statistically speaking, almost certainly included both Muslims and Christians. While public transport use is fairly common across the social scale, the attackers could be reasonably certain that few high ranking officials would be on the London tube or buses. 

Certainly, in London, we can assume that half or more of the victims opposed Tony Blair’s war in Iraq, and far more than half thought that George W Bush is the worst president the US has ever had, except perhaps for those old enough to remember Ronald Reagan. 

Does such religiously inspired terror produce any political results? A rational terrorist works on the principle of provoking the authorities into overreacting and alienating the general population. On a world scale that is what the Bush administration has done.  

However, even if he had planned the end result of uniting the Muslim world against the US, I imagine Bin Laden sitting in his cave with his Pathan pals watching his satellite TV and having pre-paradisiacal fits of ecstasy every time he saw his picture on Fox or CNN – which was every day until the Iraq invasion. 

He is now almost certainly miffed that Bush seems to have forgotten all about him and diverted all the troops to Iraq to attack Saddam, a very secular Muslim who had nothing to do September 11.  He certainly could not have predicted it.

In the case of London, the attack not only diverted attention from Bush’s falling off a bicycle (was he chewing gum at the time, one wonders unkindly) but relieved the pressure to come to some realistic agreement on global warming. It may have revived Blair’s rapidly sinking and irrational plans to introduce identity cards in Britain, but in general is unlikely to spur even a mild British version of the PATRIOT Act.  

Even if Bush’s speech tried to convey that impression only a week ago, the British knew all along that Iraq had nothing to do with the War on Terror and even Tony Blair never tried to pull that one.  

The wannabe Al-Qaeda faction that claimed the dubious credit for the London bombings evoked Afghanistan and Iraq as their reason. Strangely they did not invoke a much more potent event, which proved that Muslims do not have a murderous monopoly on religious mayhem. 

We are approaching the tenth anniversary of the Srebrenica massacre, where Orthodox Christian Serbs massacred up to eight thousand people who spoke the same language but were identified as Muslim Bosnians. 

It did not matter to their Serb nationalist murderers that these were very secular Muslims, who probably ate their way through Ramadan and drank raki with their neighbors whenever the opportunity offered.  Indeed their very lack of fervor many have helped Al-Qaeda overlook the event. 

This massacre was not the work of a few deranged fanatics. It was a carefully arranged bureaucratic exercise, involving heavy logistics and planning. Even after they had been killed, the work went on, with bodies being strip mined from mass graves to be reburied elsewhere.  

I suspect that if large sections of any community in London had any inkling of who the perpetrators of the bombing were, then they would convey this information to the police one way or another. 

But in ten years, there has hardly been any break in the phalanx of silence from the Serb nationalists. 

Out of all those soldiers, militia, and police that shot them, the drivers of the buses that took the condemned to the killing fields, the bulldozers that buried them, the backhoes that exhumed them and the truck drivers that carried their bodies to new charnel pits, only a tiny handful have come forward. 

The care they took to destroy the evidence shows that they were aware that others at least may have questioned their ethics. Did their own consciences stink the way their clothes must have done when they finished their work? Or were they scared of the consequences of speaking out? It is only in recent months that Serb officials have accepted that anything untoward happened at Srebrenica, let along that it was evil. 

We know that Karadzic and Mladic are still at large, sharing with Osama Bin Laden a bemusing immunity from US intelligence, which  as we know, can find weapons where no one else can, and which can airlift suspected terrorists from anywhere in the globe to Guantanamo Bay.  

Suicide bombers by definition can’t be caught and do not need to be hidden – and tend to take the secret of who facilitated their crimes along with them. 

Murderous generals and politicians and their minions acting with impunity and protected by whole communities keep the whole cycle of impunity moving. 

Ten years is too long for them to be free. 

          IanWilliams@MaximsNews.com

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