Anti-terror laws, like states of emergency, are apt to being abused by domineering governments, annulling effective progress towards democracy, writes Ayman El-Amir* The post-11 September global war against terrorism has claimed victims much better than it managed to stem the tide of the lethal phenomenon. Individuals, travellers, tourists, businessmen and nationals of different countries and cultures, including those who enjoyed the most liberal laws, have accepted increasingly restrictive legislation as a painful but necessary measure enacted for their own protection. By definition, extraordinary measures are temporary in nature because they are intended for extraordinary circumstances, mostly war situations. However, there has been a rising tendency to use the same practice as a legal instrument by governments to control domestic politics and suppress legitimate opposition. This is what the Egyptian government and its legislators who recently extended the 25-year-old state of emergency for another period of two years have to heed as they prepare to replace emergency law with anti-terrorism legislation. In the past 50 years, many countries have passed this way station and discovered, in retrospect, what a traumatic and costly experience it was. Not only has the abuse of emergency laws set back the process of democratic progress but it also triggered civil conflict during which many atrocities were committed and thousands of innocent lives lost. In most of these countries, particularly in Latin America and Africa, brutal emergency powers exercised by undemocratic governments were dressed up as so-called anti-terrorism laws. One of the most notorious was the anti-terrorism act passed by the all-white parliament of the apartheid-era government of South Africa in 1967. The P W Botha government then was brazen enough to request another act of parliament that would make the anti-terrorism law retroactively effective to 1962. That was the year of the Rivona trials when Nelson Mandela was convicted on charges of illegal activities and sentenced to jail. The retroactive application of the anti-terrorism law made his criminal charges -- resistance against the apartheid system -- a more serious offence that carried a life sentence. He was jailed on Robin Island for 28 years and was only released in 1990 in a move that marked the collapse of the apartheid system. A more recent example is last week's decision by the Myanmar military dictatorship to extend the detention of political opposition leader, and Nobel peace laureate, Aung San Suu Kyi for one more year under house arrest where she had spent the past 10 years of her life. This ruthless decision came despite intense international pressure and an appeal by UN Secretary-General Kofi Annan to the head of the ruling military junta. The struggle of many countries in Latin America for freedom and democracy during the decades of the 1970s and 1980s has left a long trail of blood that is still a vivid memory for both victims and human rights activists. Military dictators who perpetrated genocidal crimes against their own people -- such as Chile's Augusto Pinochet -- are not only haunted by the same memories but are hounded by civil rights groups and by relatives of victims. Sick and frail at the age of 90, Pinochet, who led a CIA-assisted bloody coup d'état in Chile in 1973 and kept the country in his iron grip for almost two decades, is still being legally pursued. In 2004, a Chilean judge found the aging dictator fit to stand trial for human rights abuses and charged him with 10 counts of kidnapping and murder committed during his reign. It was under the powers of a self- styled "anti-terrorism" law that Pinochet and his regime committed crimes of kidnapping, torture, disappearances and murder. While Pinochet is not the only infamous example in Latin America and, indeed, elsewhere in the world, he has now become the standard of human rights abuse against which other dictators should, and would be judged. Argentina, Uruguay, Bolivia and Paraguay passed through similar experiences but expunged their political systems of the same scourge. Chile is now a country with a thriving economy but the outside world remembers it with little more than the stigma of Pinochet's rule. When all is said and done, terrorism remains a challenging problem that claims daily victims and destabilises societies -- the scourge of the 21st century as President Vladimir Putin of Russia called it. It is a threat to democracy in a paradoxical way: as it threatens the security and stability of societies, it may call for special measures to combat it. These measures compromise the civil and human rights of people and the normal functioning of society. When legislated and abused by governments for ulterior political motives, they breed resentment and ultimately play into the hands of the forces they were intended to curb. In other words, anti-terrorism legislation and domestic political agendas should not be mixed. Anti-terrorism legislation adopted by the US -- Patriot Act I and Patriot Act II -- have set a free-wheeling standard for undemocratic regimes around the world to introduce coercive measures for a variety of political purposes in the name of combating terrorism. While the American political system has self-correcting mechanisms, other undemocratic allied regimes do not. As a matter of fact, the extension of Patriot Act II ran into stiff opposition and underwent some changes before being passed by Congress earlier this year. In another context, after the late Swedish Foreign Minister Anna Lindh was brutally murdered by a Serb immigrant in a Stockholm market in 2003, Sweden refused to amend its immigration policies or to introduce anti-terrorism laws. Fighting terrorism involves a delicate balance between firm action based on the rule of law and respect for the civil, political and inalienable human rights. With the rapid proliferation of anti-terrorism legislation, a group of eminent human rights experts -- including special rapporteurs and chairmen of working groups of the Office of the UN Commissioner on Human Rights -- expressed in a 2003 statement "profound concern at the multiplication of policies, legislation and practices increasingly being adopted by many countries in the name of the fight against terrorism which affect negatively the enjoyment of virtually all human rights ..." They drew attention to "the dangers inherent in the indiscriminate use of the term terrorism". This danger became policy enshrined in the Bush-Sharon doctrine that equated all acts of violent resistance by the Palestinians against the murderous Israeli occupation of their territories as unjustified acts of terrorism. That is how Hamas, now democratically elected to government, is being taunted for the clear purpose of extracting concessions from it. People everywhere are caught up in the global war against terrorism. Because of the pervasive environment of fear in which they live, they are willing to cede, reluctantly and temporarily, part of their cherished values of personal freedom and democratic principles under the exigency of circumstances. But people who are struggling to achieve democratic change in a forbidding environment are more vulnerable to extraordinary legislation in the name of combating terrorism under which all democratic practices can be proscribed or prosecuted. South African author and Nobel laureate, J M Coetzee, who now lives in Australia, said in an interview last year, "I used to think that the people who created (South Africa's) laws that effectively suspended the rule of law were moral barbarians. Now I know they were just pioneers ahead of their time." * The writer is former Al-Ahram correspondent in Washington, DC. He also served as director of the United Nations Radio and Television in New York.
