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Spanish Daily Says London Attacks Call for Alliance of Democracies

Posted on: Friday, 22 July 2005, 12:00 CDT

Text of unsigned editorial: "Alliance of democracies", published by Spanish newspaper ABC web site on 22 July

Two weeks after the series of attacks that caused the death of 56 people, yesterday London lived through a minor repetition of that day of terrorism on 7 July. Three underground trains and a bus were damaged by small-scale blasts attributed to detonators without explosive charges. The restricted information from the British authorities and the confusing way in which these new terrorist attacks were perpetrated means that uncertainty about the final intention of the perpetrators remains. Clearly, the aim was to spread fear and paralyse London's public transport system, which they fully achieved. But it is still not known if the devices that exploded were only detonators, if the connection to the explosive charges failed or, as was speculated in the moments following the attacks, this was a chemical or bacteriological terrorist act.

Whatever the case, terrorism has arrived once again in a city that is still in shock after the massacre of 7 July and strongly guarded by security forces on permanent alert since that time. The almost identical reproduction of the 7 July terrorist plan shows that indiscriminate terrorism - particular to fundamentalist organizations and carried out by fanatics who don't have an escape plan, because their aim is to act as the detonators of their bombs themselves - cannot be combated as a manifestation of traditional ETA or IRA terrorism. Fundamentalist Islamic terrorism is being cultivated in the back rooms of European cities, among young people who were not exactly born and educated in a "sea of injustice", but rather in democratic, developed and modern societies with regimes that have freedoms and rights unthinkable in their parents' countries of origin and which they are willing to deny to others. This incardination of the terrorists in the societies that they attack and their camouflage as normal citizens must necessarily translate into a rethinking of the fight against terrorism, in which police and judicial measures must be accompanied by effective cooperation with Muslim communities in marginalizing extremist individuals and the doctrines that encourage terrorism. It is not enough for the leaders of these communities to condemn the attacks if their commitment to their host societies does not extend to cooperating with the political and police authorities. In Spain we well know the very high price of a social climate sympathetic to terrorists and how much political effort it has required to make terrorism illegal.

It is a contradiction that one day before the sequel - small, but no less worrying - to 7 July took place, the news came out that Germany's constitutional court had turned down a European Union warrant for a man suspected of collaborating with Al Qa'idah [Mamoun Darkazanli]. These legal objections do not only affect the fight against terrorism but also the very existence of Europe as a common area of security, freedom and justice, where, apparently, terrorists can circulate with more freedom than judges and police officers.

Yesterday's blasts should be considered as a reminder from the terrorists that there is no truce for democracies and they should also be taken as the umpteenth call for the establishment of a true coalition by the societies under threat to establish a common defence of their essential values. The West's arguments about the causes of terrorism - when, in any case, they are just the simple motives that all criminals use to justify themselves - the obsessive tendency of democracies to accept part of the blame for the terrorism they suffer and the reluctance to face the fundamentalist threat as a desire to globally transform the world order, continue to act against the collective security of democratic societies and for that reason, the first alliances that democracies must make is among themselves.

Source: BBC Monitoring European

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