Keeping things in perspective

Osama bin Laden is dead.

The difficulty of doing a column like this is sometimes an event transpires that is so monumental and internationally significant that it forces you to look outside your sphere of interest to think about things that you may not ordinarily contend with. I’m no expert on terrorism or counter-terrorism, nor can I attest to having any particularly keen interest in military strategy beyond its political dimensions. Furthermore, it’s not as if all has been quiet on the African front. With the death of Saif al-Arab in Libya, the increasing unrest in Burkina Faso and the Ugandan government’s attempts at detaining Dr Besigiye in Uganda, it’s been a rather eventful political week in many African countries.

Yet, it doesn’t take an expert to realise that the passing of bin Laden is a big deal, and will have significant ramifications for many African countries. From Dar es Salaam to Nouakchott, al Qaeda has proven that it has growing roots on the continent, and increasing support in the form of like-minded organisations like al-Shabab in Somalia. With the dubious distinction of having been both a victim and a harbourer of terrorist cells, and given the government’s notoriously lax and rotten policing structure, Kenya is unfortunately a likely target for any form of retaliation from the group. For now, it is likely that many Kenyans echo the sentiments of the chair of the 1998 Bombing Survivors Association, in welcoming the news, while expressing a wish for due legal process.

The important question now is not determining the scale of the significance of bin Laden’s passing – it is evidently monumental. The trouble is defining the exact nature of the significance so that we can tease out an appropriate response. The sight of US citizens pouring out into the streets dancing and celebrating, cheering at football games, or writing headlines like ‘We won the match and we got Osama’ feels instinctively inappropriate. For one thing, a country with a long history of fighting organised crime should know better than any other that cutting off the head of such an organisation rarely leads to it’s collapse. In the same breath, it’s not like al Qaeda has been operating as a highly centralised operation. News emerging from Abbottabad reveals that the compound from which bin Laden managed his operation had no telephone or Internet connections, meaning that any communication between terror cells must have been laboured and elaborate. In that context, we have to wonder if cutting off the head will only make each part of the structure more autonomous. As I said, I’m no military expert, but it just seems to me that the entire thing is going to be far more complicated than simply taking out Osama.

More than that however, there’s something remarkably tasteless about celebrating the death of another human being, regardless of how evil he or she may be. Since the Second World War, it seems that those who study those who make war have become increasingly obsessed with the notions of absolute right and absolute wrong, as if anything to do with humans can ever be that simple. We all agree that there must be some kind of baseline measure of good and evil against which we should moderate the need to invade other nations to protect civilians, or to overthrow regimes as in Libya, but there is hardly any consensus as to what that measure is. If you polled Zimbabweans and Libyans on who between Gaddafi or Mugabe was more deserving of ‘enforced regime change’, it is unlikely that there would be one clear winner. Yet just last week, one of these men was in a compound was apparently targeted for assassination and the other was receiving Communion at the Vatican. Can a system predicated on such inconsistent morality ever really claim ‘justice’ in the death of another human being?

Now, this is a difficult case to make without sounding ‘soft on terror’, so allow me to confirm here and now that bin Laden has not an iota of sympathy or understanding from me. It’s just that withholding sympathy does not preclude the possibility of seeing past over simplified notions of good and evil, and recognising the danger that a reductionist knee-jerk reaction actually poses to the process of consolidating any possible gains that could be made from this. As a colleague pointed out, the dancing in the streets is really more telling of the depths to which public morality has fallen than any thing else, and much like the invasive scrutiny that travellers are subjected to at the airport, is more a victory for them than it is for us.

Al Qaeda, like Nazism and Fascism before it, is an ideology, and it takes more than bullets and bombs to fight ideologies. It’s interesting how over the last 10 years this one man has come to embody all that is evil for so many people around the world – our generation’s Hitler, if you will. Still, the Second World War dragged on for almost six months after Hitler committed suicide; the significance of bin Laden’s passing will not become apparent for some time. Celebrating in the streets implies a sense that the war on terror is finally over. It’s a horribly inaccurate set up to a terrible disappointment.

I’ve written before about the responsibility of Kenya’s silent majority in moderating the tone of the public debate in that country. The silent majority in the US now faces a similar task. Noting the significance of the moment, now is the time to pour water on any over-enthusiastic expressions of accomplishment, significantly to avoid forcing groups like Hamas to harden their positions in order to maintain some semblance of legitimacy with their specific constituencies. Obama has gone further than his predecessors in hitting at al Qaeda, but he now has a responsibility to manage the expectations of his people and to prevent this moment from being hijacked by the voices of extremism in order to forestall any equally extremist reaction from groups like Hamas and al-Shabab.

Bin Laden's death is perhaps the ultimate act of retribution, and no one can fault anyone for seeking that out. But there's a difference between justice and retribution. Although both notions are used interchangibly, in my mind there’s a difference between the object of both activities. Justice is for the people who have been wronged and is the process of trying to restore that which has been damaged or destroyed. Retribution on the other hand is for the rest of us who have to make sense of the despicable behaviour of others. So how can you seek out justice in a situation in which no action can ever restore that which has been damaged? You can’t. So we make do with retribution. But that retribution gives us no cause to celebrate because we are forever conscious that it will never restore that which has been broken.

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