Media Releases
TASA media contact:
Dr Barbara Adkins
Email: b.adkins@qut.edu.au
Phone: +61 7 3864 4664
TASA MEDIA STATEMENT ON ATTACKS ON NEW YORK & WASHINGTON
DC
Released: October 1, 2001
With other Australians, Australian sociologists have been appalled by the recent attacks on New York and Washington DC. We extend our deepest sympathies to surviving victims and to the families of the dead and injured. No political or religious cause can begin to justify the cold-blooded brutality of the attacks and TASA condemns any recourse to terrorist violence, whether unleashed by 'terrorist' groups or governments.
We share the almost universal outrage over the attacks, but as sociologists we also have grave concerns about the emerging global response, including the response within Australia. Under the label of a 'war on terrorism' that response pays insufficient attention to two long-established principles concerning the links between social science knowledge and public policy. The first principle is that no attempt to eradicate a social evil is likely to succeed unless it addresses the social causes of that evil. The second is that policy makers and political leaders must act responsibly in the light of the foreseeable consequences of their action. The global 'war on terrorism' will fail - indeed it may increase rather than decrease terrorist violence around the world - unless it is accompanied by a serious international effort to address the roots of terrorism in global patterns of economic, political and cultural inequality. Those who planned and executed the attacks on the United States may be dangerous fanatics, but their fanaticism is not a sufficient condition of their success. They prosper only because sober and serious members of their communities can quite rationally share with them at least the view that their people are exploited, oppressed and marginalised by the policies of the dominant Western powers, most notably the USA. The link between the two principles is clear enough: it would be irresponsible to pursue a 'war on terrorism' that did not address the roots of terrorism because to do so would quite predictably intensify the resentments on which terrorism feeds and therefore make the problem worse. Social scientists and others who advocate attention to the causes rather than the symptoms of social evils are often ridiculed as 'soft' - on crime or on drugs or on terrorism. However, the long-term and perverse policy failures of politically popular 'wars' on crime and drugs are chilling small-scale warnings of the likely global effects of a one-sided 'war on terrorism'.
Within Australia, the response to the attacks on the United States has raised the question of responsible political leadership in a particularly acute form. The Australian political agenda had been dominated for some weeks by a particularly egregious example of irresponsible leadership: the manufactured crisis surrounding the asylum-seekers on board the Tampa. Australians had been encouraged to fear that their country was under serious threat from waves of queue-jumping 'illegal' arrivals. Senior members of the government, from the Prime Minister down, were more than happy to stir the possum of ethnically-based stereotypes and prejudices to that end. If we assume that members of the government were not themselves motivated by ethnic prejudice, they spoke and acted cynically and irresponsibly, with a stunning lack of concern for the predictable effects of their words and actions on ethnic relations in Australia. It was to be hoped that the attacks on the United States and the understandable anxieties they provoked among Australians would at least bring this disgraceful episode to an end as political leaders made a priority of reassurance and community cohesion. Instead, fears of 'terrorism' were added to the already destructive and divisive mix: the queue jumping illegals came from hotbeds of terrorism and may include terrorists among their number. The reckless opportunism of senior ministers who peddled this line deserves the strongest condemnation from responsible supporters of all political parties, including their own. It is a measure of the failure of responsible political leadership in Australia that senior members of the government addressed rising ethnic tensions in Australia only belatedly and under pressure from two sources. The first was President Bush's markedly and visibly more conciliatory approach to Islamic communities in the USA, while the second was the all too predictable rise in anti-Islamic violence in Australia, notably the burning of a Mosque in Brisbane.
TASA urges the Australian government and other political leaders in Australia to pursue responses to the attacks on the United States that are responsible in the senses discussed here and are informed by well-established social science knowledge. Internationally, this requires pressure for a war on the economic, political and social causes of terrorism rather than a purely military response. Domestically, it requires the government to give overriding priority to measures that will reduce ethnic tension and mistrust while promoting community cohesion, social inclusion and a sense of security for all Australians.
Stephen Crook
TASA President and Professor of Sociology
School of Anthropology, Archaeology and Sociology, Faculty of Arts, Education
and Social Science JAMES COOK UNIVERSITY QLD 4811, Australia