Terrorism and the Politics of Naming

Michael Bhatia

• Publisher: Taylor & Francis
• Year: 2013
• eBook ISBN: 9781317969853
• Edition: 1
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: Military & Maritime History
• Index: History

Previously published as a special issue of Third World Quarterly, this volume assesses the nature, power, role and function of names in global politics and the international media.

Names are not objective, they accrue subjective associations, for example 'Terrorist' has a very different connotation to 'Freedom-fighter'. The contributors seek the truth beneath the names assigned in an effort to remove the obscurity created by the power of 'the politics of naming' to the reality of the situation, taking examples from Al Qaeda, Russia's demonization of the Chechens and naming in the Israeli-Palestine conflict, among other important contemporary debates. Terrorism and the Politics of Naming makes a substantial contribution towards elucidating the power of naming in the discourse of conflict and will be of great interest to students and scholars of political philosophy, political theory, and politics and the media.

Fighting words: naming terrorists, bandits, rebels and other violent actors

MICHAEL V BHATIA

On 15 May 2003 a new front opened in the conflict between the Philippine government and the Moro Islamic Liberation Front (MILF), The Mayor of Davao City, located on the southern island of Mindanao, argued that President Arroyo should label the MILF terrorists under the belief that: 'They have taken so many lives of innocent civilians, which is inexcusable. No one knows when or where they will strike. It is about time this group should be branded terrorist before they go beyond the bounds of rebellion.' In response, Eid Kabalu, a MILF spokesman, stated that the use of such a label would indicate that the 'government is closing its door to the peace process and [intends to] pursue a military solution', to result in a 'bloodier war'. The degree of weight, and potential offensive power, of this description is further seen in his comment that: 'We have been threatened that we will be pulverized, bombed out of existence and now they're using this terrorist label. We have been threatened enough and nothing can scare us enough.'¹ Implicitly referring to the USA and reflecting wide internal opposition to this potential discursive shift, Vice-President Teofisto Guingona asserted that a change in the government's characterisation of the MILF was not 'for the foreigner to do'. A week later, during a state visit by Arroyo to Washington, which coincided with an artillery and air assault against the MILF, President Bush said of Arroyo: 'She's tough when it comes to terror; she fully understands that in the face of terror, you've got to be strong, not weak. The only way to deal with these people is to bring them to justice. You can't talk to them. You can't negotiate with them. You must find them.'² Almost a century earlier, the US military government in the Philippines' response to the first Moro rebellion, occurring from 1901 to 1913, featured distinctly similar accounts of savagery, fanaticism, disorder and banditry.³ With regard to the latter, the November 1902 Bandolerismo Statute classified all forms of internal resistance as banditry and labelled any armed group brigands.

For the MILF, as well as for others, words were seen to be of equal power to bombs. While the Philippine government wishes to assign the label terrorist in anticipation of the MILF's transformation, the MILF have clearly identified the offensive potential of this description and indicated that the result of such name-calling would be a functional escalation of the conflict. This engagement with the rhetoric continues, both by governments labelled part of the 'axis of evil' and by the Anti-Coalition Forces in Afghanistan (ACF—the new name used by the Coalition/International Security Assistance Force (ISAF) to encompass Al-Qaeda, the Taliban and those members of Hizb-i-Islami still following Gulbuddin Hekmatyar). Indeed, in 2004, a poster or 'night-letter' appeared on the wall of an NFO compound in Jalalabad, Afghanistan, declaring:

To the brave Afghanistan Mujahid Nation! The USA, the head of unbelievers and the root of crime...attacks the weak Muslim countries to capture them and then creates its own evil government. The supreme leaders, correct Mujahideen, were arrested and titled with different bad names.⁴

A similar complaint was made by Ayatollah All Khamene'i, Iran's religious leader, when he argued that the USA and Israel 'are fighting Islam by giving other names to their adversary. For instance, they expand the meaning of terrorism so as to crush liberating movements.'⁵ While the MILF has no connection with Al-Qaeda, the Taliban or Iran, all three of these cases reveal that movements attach significance to words, and that names are core areas of dispute in armed conflict. In this competition over the legitimacy of violent acts, these groups seek to refute or even appropriate the words and names used against them in order to win the hearts, minds and support (either tacit or active) of the population. In the case of the statement by the ACF, rhetorical offence at the proposed maligning of their leadership was quickly followed by a rhetorical offensive of their own: 'If Jihad was obligatory against the Russian forces then is it not obligated against US forces terrorist acts?'⁶ All these examples strongly contradict the old childhood axiom of 'sticks and stones' for, in contemporary armed conflict, 'names' do matter and are seen to 'hurt'. Discourse is thus a tool for armed movements and a battleground and contested space in contemporary conflicts. The politics of naming is about this contest, examining how names are made, assigned and disputed, and how this contest is affected by a series of global dynamics and events.

'One man's terrorist is another man's freedom fighter'—the phrase clearly vies with Mao's 'the guerrilla must move amongst the people as a fish swims in the sea' and 'political power grows out of the barrel of a gun' as that most commonly associated with insurgencies and civil wars. Thus, for the layperson, the variability of interpretation—the potential that a portrayal is biased—is immediately associated with how groups and acts are described. The purpose of the discursive conflict is to attain a victory of interpretation and ensure that a particular viewpoint triumphs. While the counter-arguments of the MILF and ACF rarely echo outside their immediate locality, it does indicate that there are strong (and richly nuanced) contests over words occurring within these conflict areas. The above accounts reveal that the 'Global War on Terror' has occurred not only on the various battlefields defined by the Bush administration (from Afghanistan to Iraq, Georgia and the Philippines), but on web- and editorial pages, in the halls of the UN General Assembly, and on streets and in cafés around the world. As a result, it appears that the Bush administration is not only engaged in a physical war (involving military interventions, seizures and assassinations, interrogations and surveillance, and financial targeting) but also in a dispute over discourse. The pronouncement of a 'war on terror' has forced many to verbally negotiate and assert who they are, who they are allied with, and who they are against. Moreover, this is the new dominant framework in which both governments and non-state armed movements present their acts. Indeed, a transnational element has again been transplanted onto a series of preexisting local disputes, as occurred during the Cold War. From Uzbekistan to Colombia, from the Philippines to Algeria, the conflict over 'names' and 'naming' is becoming furious.

The articles in this issue seek to provide insight into the contemporary and historical conflict between movements and governments over names—the labels and descriptions given to actors, motives, events, ideologies and places. In doing so, the involved authors have employed a variety of approaches. Although 9/11 and the language of terrorism (of acts and agents) serves as an immediate introductory core, many have sought to broaden the inquiry, situating each conflict in relation to the previous words used by and against former colonial authorities, and in relation to former descriptions such as bandit, criminal, subversive, rebel and any number of different local euphemisms or dysphemisms. Some contrast external perceptions of a movement with how the group views and understands itself, as occurs in the articles on Al-Qaeda, Hizbullah and the Sandinistas in Nicaragua, while on the battlefield, as is the focus of the article on Israeli snipers and the Al-Aqsa intifada. A series of other articles extends the examination to how naming affects attempts at political reconciliation and peace negotiations, as is the case with the contributions on Sri Lanka and Chechnya.

The goal of this introductory article is to serve as a review essay and identify some of the core background themes and theories through which the 'politics of naming' and other forms of discourse conflict can be examined. It is divided into three sections: nature, power, and role; function; and ethics. The central unifying theme is the relationship between the actual nature of a movement and the name applied, particularly in terms of the attempt to identify the essence or true nature of a movement and how this relates to other dissenting or surrounding factors. Once assigned, the power of a name is such that the process by which the name was selected generally disappears and a series of normative associations, motives and characteristics are attached to the named subject. By naming, this subject becomes known in a manner which may permit certain forms of inquiry and engagement, while forbidding or excluding others. No doubt such simplifications allow people to both engage with and understand a complex world. However, the need for simplicity can be rapidly appropriated and taken advantage of by those with their own political agenda. Indeed, the long historical relationship between the naming of opponents, empire and colonialism, as well as the manner in which the current global media frames armed conflict, only provide further reason to doubt the truthfulness of the names assigned. Many governments, both in the West and those subject to internal armed contest, cannot be relied upon responsibly and ethically to name their opponents. Again, in the case of the MILF, both President Arroyo and President Bush have sought to associate, amalgamate and compress the MILF with the Abu Sayyaf group and Jemaah Islamiyah, constantly arguing that the MILF needs to 'reject terror' (although it has yet to accept it) and referring to its bases as 'terrorist lairs' and terrorist training camps.⁷

Most authors in this volume are not confident of the ability of any particularly label or interpretive lens to adequately encompass the purpose, activities, local relevance or ideology of a given movement. Far too often complex local variations, motives, histories and inter-relationships are lost in the application of meta-narratives or dominant academic approaches to understanding and assessing conflict. In the case of the former each conflict is seen through whatever classificatory lens has recently been adopted to categorise, label and aggregate violence in the outside world, whether as evidence of communist expansion or Islamic fundamentalism. In the case of the latter, far too often, names, words and discourse are viewed as objective representations of fact in much policy-oriented research on conflict, with those works examining and challenging vocabulary typically consigned to the realm of critical theory. In contrast, the following introduction, as well as the other articles in this issue, is an attempt to show how naming and discourse is immediately relevant to conflicts and conflict resolution.

The power of naming: nature, truth and transmission

To name is to identify an object, remove it from the unknown, and then assign to it a set of characteristics, motives, values and behaviours.⁸ Names can fulfil a similar role as narratives, images, euphemisms and analogies. All serve as a natural reaction to surplus and abundant information, with the use of these and other 'knowledge structures' to 'order, interpret, and simplify'. For the recipient or audience, names, much like analogies, 'help define the nature of the situation confronting the individual', 'help assess the stakes' and 'provide prescriptions', which are then evaluated in terms of 'their chances of success' and 'their moral Tightness'.⁹ For Plato, names should be assessed according to their 'quality of showing the nature of the thing named', and it is thus necessary to 'learn from the truth both the truth itself and whether the image is properly made'.¹⁰ However, while determining the basis for assessing names, Plato remains sceptical that any name could meet these criteria, for they are but imitations and partial reflections of a form. In the end the relationship between the name provided and the 'true' character of that described is often tenuous. A name may provide truth to an extent, and perhaps even a truth, but it cannot reveal the complete 'truth' of an object by encompassing all aspects and facets of that identified. As Talcott Parsons argues in his examination of selectivity, the assigned name may be selectively true, but may 'not constitute a balanced account of the available truth'.¹¹ While a name may reflect the core or ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Notes on Contributors
• 1. Fighting words: naming terrorists, bandits, rebels and other violent actors
• 2. Imaging terror: logos, pathos and ethos
• 3. Al-Qaeda—terrorists, hypocrites, fundamentalists? The view from within
• 4. Savagery in democracy's empire
• 5. Bandits and blanket thieves, communists and terrorists: the politics of naming Sandinistas in Nicaragua, 1927 – 36 and 1979 – 90
• 6. Liberation struggle or terrorism? The politics of naming the LTTE
• 7. Terrorists, bandits, spooks and thieves: Russian demonisation of the Chechens before and since 9/11
• 8. Savage wars? Codes of violence in Algeria, 1830s – 1990s
• 9. Israeli snipers in the Al-Aqsa intifada: killing, humanity and lived experience
• 10. Words as interventions: naming in the Palestine – Israel conflict
• 11. Know thy enemy: Hizbullah, 'terrorism' and the politics of perception
• 12. Themes in official discourses on terrorism in Central Asia
• Index