Al Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb took credit for bombing of the United Nations headquarters in Algiers in December 2007, an act that claimed the lives of 17 U.N. personnel. The international community is increasingly recognising the importance of integrating a gender perspective into the global counter-terrorism efforts. Credit: UN Photo / Evan Schneider

By Carmen Arroyo
UNITED NATIONS, Jul 12 2018 (IPS)

Understanding the different way that terrorists target women and how to prevent their recruitment could play a significant role in counter-terrorism efforts, and is gaining increased recognition among the international community.

“Any prevention programme should be fully mindful about its gender implications, and should be tailored toward understanding men and women’s grievances being exploited by recruiters,” Mattias Sundholm, communications adviser to the Counter-Terrorism Committee Executive Directorate, told IPS.

Hundreds of members of civil society and representatives of member states met at the United Nations Headquarters in New York at the end of June for the first High-Level Conference on Counter-Terrorism. During the two-day conference, the role of gender in counter-terrorism strategies was discussed in length. 

A senior European Union official shared with IPS that “the international community is increasingly recognising the importance of integrating a gender perspective into the global counter-terrorism efforts.”

“Gender inequality and corruption, combined with the lack of information, no access to education and lack of understanding of what’s happening on the battlefield seem to play a role in the recruitment of women fighters,” the official said.

Despite the military setback of Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant (ISIL) in many Middle Eastern countries, countering its influence in the media and public opinion, along with Al-Qaeda’s power and Boko Haram’s attacks, remains a top priority for the U.N.

Last year, the General Assembly decided to implement the U.N. Global Counter-Terrorism Strategy and created the Office of Counter-Terrorism, while the establishment of a Global Network of Counter-terrorism coordinators was discussed. The theme of this year’s meeting was “Strengthening international cooperation to combat the evolving threat of terrorism,” with the goal of creating partnerships and finding practical solutions.

Different approaches to recruiting men and women

The way terrorists target men and women is different as they promise them particular rewards they find appealing.

“Extremist armed groups shrewdly exploit gender just as they exploit any other potential recruitment tool. For women, they may dangle the promise of adventure, travel, romance, commitment to a cause, and the possibility of being part of an extended family yet far from the yoke of immediate relatives. For men, the pitches are often more macho, complete with the promise of glory and multiple wives,” Letta Tayler, senior researcher on terrorism at Human Right’s Watch (HRW), told IPS.

Megan Manion, policy analyst with U.N. Women, explained men are often recruited as fighters with a promise that fighters get wives as a reward.  “Extremist groups also offer a salary for services of the fighters.”

But on the other hand, Manion explained, women are promised different things.

“Women join extremist groups together with or to follow their husbands or boyfriends. Women also join violent extremist groups to get the opportunities they will not have in their own communities due to inequalities,” she said.

If terrorism strategies include gender-specific narratives, so should prevention plans.

“Women have a particularly influential role in families and can play an important role in preventing young people from radicalising,” the senior EU official said.

Thus, prevention strategies must raise to the level of terrorist strategies in terms of their nuances. “When extremist groups understand gender inequalities and the impact and power they hold, but we, those who are preventing violent extremism do not, there is a significant issue around identifying and responding to human rights violations, as well as serious security implications and risks,” Manion said.

When asked how prevention strategies should then be framed to be effective, Tayler firmly responded that any successful prevention strategy had to provide the same sense of belonging and thrill that groups like ISIL offered.

“That can only work if states stop marginalising communities and individuals who are vulnerable to recruitment,” Tayler said.

One of the ways to implement gender-specific strategies could be through the strengthening the role of women in law enforcement and policing both in terms of numbers but also on all hierarchical levels, the EU source said.

He argued in favour of reaching out to all communities, especially the de-radicalised ones.

“There is an important role for women religious leaders and local interfaith dialogue to build an environment which is less conducive to violent extremism,” he said.

Some civil organisations, such as the non-profit International Centre for Religion and Diplomacy, are already including religious actors in their counter-terrorism strategies.

Moreover, Sundholm, from the Counter-Terrorism Committee Executive Directorate, added that youth, and in particular girls, “should also be empowered to lead and participate in the design and implementation of prevention programmes.”

Tayler explained that at HRW gender was taken into account when the issue required it. For example, ISIL rapes or the sexual enslavement of Yezidi women require the counter-terrorism strategy to be very gender-specific. Another case would be Nigeria, where “women who managed to escape Boko Haram are reportedly being raped by Nigerian security forces who claim to be their rescuers.” 

What should member states do?

Most experts and policy makers say that counter-terrorism should be the responsibility of U.N. member states, as they control borders and pass laws, which can either give privilege to or marginalise groups. Member states should also take the lead in including a gender perspective into their policies.

“Gender-mainstreaming should be integrated in the work and programmes of both Member States and the U.N.,” the EU source said.

Manion believes that member states hold the key to prevention.

“Repressive laws and lack of security, rule of law or good governance are powerful drivers for radicalisation for women and men,

“They must make sure that the laws they pass to respond to terrorist threats do not impose unreasonable burdens on women, including women civil society organisations who are often working on the front lines to identify and prevent radicalisation and re-integrate returnees,” she added.

However, Tayler warned that while gender should be a critical focus of counter-terrorism efforts, “neither the U.N. nor national governments should assume that being gender-sensitive is a panacea.”

“Ticking off the “gender” box alone is not an effective counterterrorism strategy. Authorities need to address the myriad root causes of terrorism,” she said.   

UN High Commissioner for Human Rights Zeid Ra’ad Al-Hussein. Credit: UN Photo/Jean-Marc Ferré

By Thalif Deen
UNITED NATIONS, Feb 5 2015 (IPS)

The United Nations, which is the legal guardian of scores of human rights treaties banning torture, unlawful imprisonment, degrading treatment of prisoners of war and enforced disappearances, is troubled that an increasing number of countries are justifying violations of U.N. conventions on grounds of fighting terrorism in conflict zones.

Taking an implicit passing shot at big powers, the outspoken U.N. High Commissioner for Human Rights Zeid Ra’ad Al-Hussein of Jordan puts it more bluntly: “This logic is abundant around the world today: I torture because a war justifies it. I spy on my citizens because terrorism, repulsive as it is, requires it.“The space for dissent in many countries is collapsing under the weight of either poorly-thought out, or indeed exploitative, counter-terrorism strategies. " -- Zeid Ra’ad Al-Hussein

“I don’t want new immigrants, or I discriminate against minorities, because our communal identity or my way of life is being threatened as never before. I kill others, because others will kill me – and so it goes, on and on.”

Speaking Thursday at the Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington D.C., Zeid said the world needs “profound and inspiring leadership” driven by a concern for human rights and fundamental freedoms of all people.

“We need leaders who will observe fully those laws and treaties drafted to end all discrimination, the privation of millions, and atrocity and excess in war, with no excuses entertained. Only then, can we help ourselves out of the present serious, seemingly inexhaustible, supply of crises that threatens to engulf us,” he declared.

Last year, the U.S. Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) was accused of subjecting terrorist suspects to “enhanced interrogation techniques”, including water-boarding, sleep deprivation and physical duress.

The Western nations, who have been involved in air attacks inside Afghanistan, Iraq, Syria and Libya, have both justified and dismissed thousands of civilian killings as “collateral damage” – even as they continue to preach the doctrine of human rights and the sanctity of civilian life inside the General Assembly hall and the Security Council chamber.

And, meanwhile, there are several countries, including Jordan, Pakistan and Saudi Arabia, which continue to justify the death penalty in the execution of terrorists and the public flogging of bloggers and political dissenters – as part of the war against terrorism.

Last week, the Islamic State of the Levant (ISIL) was accused of brutally killing a Jordanian air force pilot because Jordan was part of a coalition launching air attacks on ISIL forces.

In return, Jordan reacted swiftly by executing two convicted prisoners – with links to al-Qaeda – as a retaliation for the killing of the pilot.

“It was an eye for an eye,” a Jordanian was quoted as saying.

Last December, 117 of the 193 U.N. member states adopted a General Assembly resolution calling for a moratorium on the death penalty. But the executions have continued.

U.N. Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon, who has publicly opposed capital punishment, says “the death penalty has no place in the 21st century.”

Javier El-Hage, general counsel at the Human Rights Foundation (HRF), told IPS his group applauds the high commissioner’s call for ‘better leadership’ and a ‘global rethink on education’ as the two main weapons the world could benefit from in the struggle against the ‘causes of the worst conflicts and atrocities across the world,’ present and past.

Specifically, on the area of leadership, Prince Zeid called for leaders that are ‘driven by a concern for the fundamental freedoms of all people,’ who fully observe international human rights treaties.

On the educational front, he said children everywhere should be taught what ‘bigotry and chauvinism are,’ the ‘terrible wrongs they can produce,’ and that ‘blind obedience can be exploited by authority figures for wicked ends.’

“As the high commissioner suggests, the worst atrocities of human kind have in fact been caused by bigoted, chauvinist authoritarian leaders representing a fraction or even a majority of a country’s population, but who, through achieving a monopoly in education and information by cracking down on dissent and independent media, pushed radical economic, nationalist, racist or religiously extremist agendas in a way that trampled the rights of minorities and dissenters of all kinds,” Hage added.

For example, nationalist, racist or religiously extremist agendas were used against Jews in Germany, Ukrainians in the Soviet Union, Kurds in Turkey, and against blacks until recently in apartheid South Africa and even most of the Western World until the abolition of slavery.

These discriminatory agendas are still being pushed today against the Uyghur and Tibetan peoples in China and against Christians and different Muslim faiths under theocratic dictatorships across the Middle East, including the ones like Saudi Arabia or Jordan that are friendly to Western democracies, as well as the ones like Iran or Syria that aren’t.

Zeid said international human rights law represents a distillation of humanity’s experience of atrocities, and the remedies to prevent them. But today, leaders are too often deliberately choosing to violate those laws, he complained.

“In the years after the Holocaust, specific treaties were negotiated to cement into law obligations to protect human rights. Countries the world over accepted them – and now alas, all too frequently, ignore them in practice.”

He pointed out that forceful reprisals against atrocities – including attacks on children and “the savage burning of my compatriot the pilot Mu’ath al Kassassbeh” by ISIL – are having limited impact.

“Just bombing them or choking off their financing has clearly not worked… for these groups have only proliferated and grown in strength. What is needed is the addition of a different sort of battle-line, one waged principally by Muslim leaders and Muslim countries and based on ideas.”

Zeid noted a knock-on effect on key civil and political rights in other countries: “The space for dissent in many countries is collapsing under the weight of either poorly-thought out, or indeed exploitative, counter-terrorism strategies. Human rights defenders are therefore under enormous pressure in many parts of the world today…They risk imprisonment or worse in the peaceful defence of basic rights.”

HRF’s El-Hage told IPS throughout the 20th Century, leaders of the Soviet Union and its satellites around the world installed single-party state apparatuses — with strong propaganda machineries and no independent media, instead of open education — that advanced radical economic agendas to the detriment of the majority of their populations.

This not only triggered atrocities, such as mass starvation, which were not a result of direct physical repression of minorities (like the Ukrainian famine), but instead of an economic policy that rejected individual rights and limited the ability of small farmers and business owners to provide for themselves by controlling their own mobility, access to resources, property rights, freedom of information and their ability to associate with others in mutual cooperation.

While promoting the idea that they could help the masses, these authoritarians let the individual members of such masses suffer—even starve, he added.

Edited by Kitty Stapp

The writer can be contacted at thalifdeen@aol.com

A school bombed by the Taliban in Bajaur Agency, Afghanistan. Credit: Ashfaq Yusufzai/IPS

By Thalif Deen
UNITED NATIONS, Jan 8 2014 (IPS)

After nearly 13 years of protracted negotiations, the United Nations remains deadlocked on a proposal to establish a Comprehensive Convention on International Terrorism (CCIT) – even as suicide bombings continue unabated in countries such as Iraq, Syria, Egypt, Afghanistan, and most recently, Russia.

Despite the continued political stalemate, however, the U.N. has set up several expert bodies, including a Counter Terrorism Committee (CTC) and a Counter Terrorism Committee Executive Directorate (CTED), primarily to assist member states in preventing terrorist attacks within their borders and across regions."The urgency and gushing international enthusiasm that existed 10 years ago to conclude a comprehensive convention on terrorism is no longer readily evident." -- Amb. Palitha Kohona

With the CCIT in limbo, a divided Legal Committee of the 193-member General Assembly decided last month to establish a Working Group with a mandate to finalise the treaty as soon as possible.

Since its creation by the General Assembly in 1996, a U.N. Adhoc Committee has also been pursuing the CCIT, described as the mother of all anti-terrorism conventions.

Ambassador Palitha Kohona, chair of the Legal Committee, told IPS the proposed CCIT was intended to provide umbrella cover for situations not already addressed by 13 existing sectoral conventions on terrorism, concluded under the auspices of the United Nations.

“I would say the urgency and gushing international enthusiasm that existed 10 years ago to conclude a comprehensive convention on terrorism is no longer readily evident,” he said.

“And the will to conclude a comprehensive convention has diminished due to a gradual erosion of political will over time,” said Kohona, a former chief of the U.N. Treaty Section.

But he admits there has been marked progress by the United Nations in monitoring and coordinating counter-terrorism efforts worldwide.

Ambassador Asoke Kumar Mukerji of India, the country which initiated the proposal for a CCIT back in 1996, told IPS both the United Nations and the international community have made significant progress in combating terrorism despite the deadlock on the proposed convention.

The negotiations on the CCIT, which began in 2001, have stalled in two broad areas of dissent: the definition of what constitutes “terrorism” and the scope of the proposed convention.

“But the world cannot wait for a resolution of that discussion because every day terrorism is claiming innocent lives worldwide,” the Indian envoy warned.

Mukerji, who has monitored terrorism for over two decades and speaks authoritatively on the subject, pointed out several key achievements, including the creation of intergovernmental and expert bodies such as the Financial Action Task Force (FATF), the Counter Terrorism Action Group (CTAG), the Global Counter Terrorism Forum (GCTF) and the Counter Terrorism Implementation Task Force (CTITF).

In 2006, the General Assembly unanimously adopted a resolution on a global counter-terrorism strategy described as a “major development in the fight against terrorism.”

Since then, there has been greater regional and international cooperation, capacity building, intelligence-sharing, numerous regional workshops and exchange of best practices in the anti-terrorism fight.

The culmination of these efforts was the creation in 2011 of a U.N. Counter Terrorism Centre in Riyadh, with 100 million dollars in funding by Saudi Arabia.

Asked about the stalemate over the inclusion of “state terrorism” in the CCIT, Mukerji said “state terrorism has been overtaken by transnational terrorism.

“Every country is vulnerable to transnational terrorism,” he said, pointing out the November 2008 terrorist attacks on the Indian city of Mumbai, an economic and commercial nerve centre of India, which claimed the lives of over 160.

Asked if the lack of consensus will result in the abandonment of the proposed CCIT, he said all of the building blocks have to be housed under one roof. “That house can only be the United Nations,” said Mukerji, who was India’s chief negotiator in the GCTF.

The existing treaties against terrorism include an international convention against taking of hostages; the suppression of terrorist bombings; combating financing of terrorism and money laundering; and suppression of acts of nuclear terrorism.

Kohona told IPS that while the CCIT has remained divisive, there has been a wide range of other mechanisms put in place by the international community to address the scourge of terrorism, including the adoption of binding U.N. Security Council resolutions under Chapter VII of the Charter.

These include the creation of a number of bodies with specific anti-terrorism responsibilities, and the creation of mechanisms regionally and bilaterally, including on currency flows.

He said member states have also begun to cooperate more effectively with each other in addressing these issues.

“It is also evident that individual countries have developed a higher degree of confidence of their abilities to deal with this threat on their own,” Kohona said.

He said the urgency for concluding a global instrument has diminished over the years as these different and quite effective mechanisms to counter terrorism have begun to exert an increasing impact. Still, Kohona said he would rather be positive about the prospects of a convention being concluded in the future.

Terrorism continues to sow death and destruction in different parts of the world, he said. Suicide attacks, massively deployed in Sri Lanka prior to 2009, have become the weapon of choice.

“The conclusion of a convention will not only provide a U.N.-inspired umbrella to our efforts to counter terrorism, it will also send a clear message of the common will of the international community as it strives to contain and control terrorism,” Kohona said.

In the aftermath of the worst terror attack in East Africa in three years, foreign policy scholars here are urging the U.S. government to rethink its counter-terror policy in the region.

As the number of victims rises to 62 in an armed siege that has held dozens of people hostage in a major mall in uptown Nairobi, many are suggesting that the Somali Al Shabaab militant organisation, reportedly linked to Al-Qaeda, may be stronger and better organised than previously thought.

Just over a year ago, joint U.S.-Kenyan forces managed to expel Al Shabaab from their last stronghold in southern Somalia, leading the U.S. government to call it a success story for U.S. counter-terror policy. But what has taken place over the weekend in Nairobi’s Westgate Mall could suggest otherwise.

“This attack should be seen as a call to action,” Katherine Zimmermann, of the American Enterprise Institute, a neoconservative think tank here, told IPS. “What the attack shows is that the fight against terrorism in Africa has stagnated and that groups like Al Shabaab are much stronger than the U.S. administration thought.”

In coming days, U.S. policymakers may look anew at their counter-terror approach, particularly in Kenya, where the government has been a key U.S. ally.

“What this attack does is strengthen the notion that the region ought not to be seen solely through the lenses of counter-terrorism, sacrificing other equally important issues the international community should address,” Vanda Felbab-Brown, an expert on non-traditional security threats at the Brookings Institution, a think tank here, told IPS.

“Current U.S. counter-terror strategy in the region has focused primarily on targeted attacks against Al Shabaab, while it should have addressed the structural causes of their radicalisation.”

Felbab-Brown cites high unemployment, a weak Somali economy and widespread corruption as the main reasons behind the radicalisation of youths that have joined Al Shabaab. U.S. counter-terror efforts, she says, have devoted little or no attention to these issues.

The U.S. government delivered a total of 445 million dollars in security aid to Somalia between 2008 and 2011, almost 50 percent of total U.S. aid to the country during that period. What seems to be missing from the U.S. strategy, Felbab-Brown says, is “a real effort to improve the Somali economy and urge the government to foster a broader political inclusion of these youth”.

Few analysts would suggest that the issue of counter-terrorism should be left off the agenda in East Africa entirely. But experts in Washington are increasingly urging that U.S. strategy include concrete efforts aimed at strengthening civil society and rebuilding the Somali judiciary system, which remains dysfunctional following decades of civil war.

Following the attack, the U.S. government immediately promised to aid the Kenyan government in the aftermath of the attack.

“We have offered our assistance to the government of Kenya and stand ready to help in any way we can,” Secretary of State John Kerry said Saturday.

No surprise

U.S. counter-terrorism involvement in Somalia began in the early 2000s, during the administration of President George W. Bush. At the time, the U.S. government sought to help both Somalia and neighbouring Ethiopia to topple the Islamic Courts Union (ICU), which at the time was seeking to replace the power vacuum in Somalia with an Islamic regime run in accordance with Sharia law.

Al Shabaab formed during those years as the military wing of the ICU, and it has since sought to expel “hostile forces” in the region. Yet international forces, facilitated particularly by the United States, eventually made significant inroads in the fight against Shabaab militants.

Between 2011 and 2012, the U.S.-backed Kenyan military led a series of counter-terror strikes inside Somalia that resulted in the ouster of the group from Kismayo, a key coastal town known for its access to the oil routes of the Red Sea and Al Shabaab’s last stronghold in Somalia.

The U.S. Department of State welcomed Kismayo’s liberation as the end of the battle and greeted the “African Union Mission’s (AMISOM) success in driving the al-Shabaab terrorist organization out of strategically important population centers” as important achievements for U.S. counter-terror strategy in the region.

But the group, with a membership estimated at around 5,000 militants, was never really defeated, its continued strength now underlined by this weekend’s siege of the Nairobi mall. The Westgate attack is just the latest in a series of retaliatory measures taken by Al Shabaab against its enemies in East Africa, including a raid against a U.N. compound in June.

“The terrorist attack at Nairobi’s Westgate shopping centre was evidently a retaliation by Al Shabaab for the Kenyan military presence in Somalia since October 2011, and a deliberate signal that they are still a force to be reckoned with,” James Jennings, president of Conscience International, a humanitarian aid organisation that worked in Somalia during the 2010-11 famine, said Monday

“It represents a continuation of the violence that has swirled throughout East Africa in the wake of the disintegration of Somalia, a war now increasingly being exported across the region’s borders.”

Other analysts are suggesting that the mall was an attractive target because Westerners, including those from the U.S., frequented it.