The ‘terrorist’ is no fire-breathing dragon
In executing the 'Bali bombers' – Amrozi, Mukhlas and Samudra – on 9 November 2008, the Indonesian government seems to have fulfilled their desire to become martyrs. However, the executions demonstrated a lack of understanding of the motivations of those who conduct such attacks. The 7 July bombing of the Indian Embassy in Kabul, the 13 September blasts in Delhi, the 20 September bombing of the Marriott Hotel in Islamabad, the recent 26 November attacks in Bombay…the list in Southasia is expanding rapidly. And of course it was the LTTE in Sri Lanka which first engaged in systematic use of suicide bombers. The understanding of what makes a 'terrorist' is now a subject of research among academia worldwide. Stuart W Twemlow is a professor of psychiatry at the Baylor College of Medicine in Houston. An author of a number of books on the psychoanalytic understanding of 'terrorism', he is also a founding editor and editor-in-chief of The International Journal of Applied Psychoanalytic Studies, as well as president of the International Association for Applied Psychoanalytic Studies. In Delhi to attend a conference on hate and violence, he was interviewed by Rakesh Shukla about the making of a 'terrorist'.
How do you perceive 'terrorism' and 'terrorists'?
I see the 'terrorist' as an offspring of the prevalent social system. Fear, horror and shock which transfixes are characteristics of terror. I saw a woman four years after she had escaped from her husband who used to keep her chained to a chair, and she was still terrified that he would kill her. That is domestic terrorism, and the prevalence is 18,000 out of 100,000 families in the US alone. In the middle category are school shooters, classified by the FBI as 'anarchic terrorists'. On a bigger scale, terrorists consider themselves to be victims of humiliation by the enemy with incompatible political, religious or personal ideologies. The more terrifying the act, the more transfixing it becomes.