Martin HenryAMONG THE fallen Al Qaida warriors at Tora Bora are a Sudanese Arab, a fighter with a return ticket to Iran and another with a ticket for Rome. A young American was captured among Taliban forces by the Northern Alliance and handed over to the US military in Afghanistan. These warriors are dedicated not to country but to the glory of Islam, as Osama bin Laden their master understands the Faith.
As US President Bush cobbled together a multi-national and multi-faith coalition to fight this faith-based terrorism, Operation Infinite Justice had to be quickly renamed Enduring Freedom so as to not offend Muslim sensibilities, since Allah is the only one, not man, for infinite justice. The month of Ramadan, a period of fasting for Muslims, was a special challenge for the coalition. Several coalition partners, including Pakistan, wanted bombing to end before the onset of Ramadan. The US Government has taken the unprecedented step of hiring an advertising executive to market the message to the Islamic world that the fight against terrorism is not a fight against Islam. Multitudes remain unconvinced and see the forces of Christianity in league with those of Zionism arrayed against Islam in a modern Crusade.
There were great hopes that the triumph of the forces of secular democracy, or those of communism for that matter, would finally banish religious conflicts which have so marred history with savage brutality and untold human suffering. We are witnessing the opposite. The fragmentation of empires and conglomerates of nations has awakened old religious animosities and ethnic hatreds, which more often than not are one and the same. The conflicts of the future will be largely driven by these ancient differences of faith and tribe. Many of the great conflicts of the 20th century, which have been reported by media and interpreted by historians in thoroughly secular terms, have deep roots in religion. It would be hard to identify a conflict today that does not have some underlying religious motives.
The war against terrorism has pushed virtually all other conflicts out of the media limelight.
In any case, the Western media on which we overwhelmingly rely for our picture of the world tend to downplay, or ignore altogether, conflicts in which the western powers have no stake. If we just rove this bleeding world a bit, the long-running civil war in Sudan is a conflict in which the Islamic and Arabic north is seeking to subjugate the Christian and animist black south. In this conflict, slavery is used by the Karthoum government as an instrument of subjugation. Nigeria is racked by strife between Muslims and Christians as many states in the country seek to impose Islamic sharia or religious law. The recent conflict in East Timor in Indonesia involved Muslims and Catholic Christians in a former Portuguese colony. The civil war in Sri Lanka, largely reported as a conflict between the ethnic Tamils of the North and the Sinhalese population over a separate Tamil homeland, involves a clash of Tamil Hinduism and Sinhalese Buddhism.
If one were to be guided by media reports alone it would be very easy to miss the point that the recent slaughter in the Balkans was another breaking out of ancient animosities among Catholic Croats, Orthodox Serbs and Muslim Bosnians. The irreconcilable tensions between India and Pakistan have some roots in the clash of Islam and Hinduism. The long-running conflict in the Middle East has involved the three great Abrahamic faiths of Judaism, Christianity and Islam. The irreconcilable struggle over Jerusalem, the holy 'city of peace' is a battle of religion.
The 1994 genocide in Rwanda , as far as most persons are concerned, was an ethnic clash between the minority but dominant Tutsis and the majority but subordinated Hutus. The role of the colonial church in generating the conditions which precipitated the bloodshed remains largely concealed. The Tutsis, who were already exercising dominance as conquerors, were favoured by the colonial authorities supported by their racist hamitic theory that "everything of value in Africa had been introduced by the Hamites, a branch of the Caucasian race." The stature of the hamitic Tutsi was supposed to resemble "more closely that of a white person rather than that of a negro - in fact, it would not be an exaggeration to state that he is a European who happens to have a black skin."
The Vicar Apostolic to Rwanda Monsignor Leon-Paul Classe wrote a highly influential letter to Georges Mortehan, the Belgian Resident Commissioner dated 21 September, 1927, to urge that "if we want to be practical and look after the real interest of the country we shall find a remarkable element of progress with the Mututsi youth. Born chiefs, the [Mututsi] have a knack of giving orders." Warning against "hesitations and foot-dragging", he wrote again in 1930, "the greatest harm the government could possibly inflict on itself and on the country would be to do away with the Mututsi caste" an action which would deprive the government of "auxiliaries who are born capable of comprehension and obedience". The hesitation and foot-dragging ended. Hutu leaders were replaced by Tutsis. Mission schools favoured Tutsis. The seeds of genocide were sown partly by Church interference.
Cambridge historian John Cornwell has very thoroughly documented how the actions of a single prince of the Church as chief negotiator of concordats in the politics of Europe helped to precipitate not one but two world wars. With respect to the Second World War the blurb of Cornwell's book, Hitler's Pope, announces, "here is the full story of how [Eugenio] Pacelli in fact prompted events in the 1920s and 1930s that helped sweep the Nazis to unhindered power", using "cunning and moral blackmail to impose Rome's power on Germany". Cornwell, a member of the church, had set out with the conviction "that if the full story were told, Pius XII's pontificate would be vindicated" but at the end of his research he was in "moral shock". The material he had gathered "amounted not to an exoneration but to a wider indictment".
Religion can neither be abolished nor cured of the human impulse to impose the "truth" upon others. In a world filled with the clamour and clash of faiths, the pathway to peace is to keep faith away from commandeering the power of the state to impose the "truth", or defend it, by force of arms. Al Qaida, like all its counterparts, lives because it is succoured by some political authority whose power it has bent to its will and service.
Martin Henry is a communications consultant.
