Why suicide bombers?

06/10/2005 15:11 - (SA)

Paris - Suicide bombers, such as those who attacked tourist targets in Bali last week, are driven by motives close to those of members of religious sects which are hard for outsiders to comprehend, experts said on Tuesday.

"They are often young people who get together spontaneously in a desire to avenge the injustice of which they feel the Muslim world in general is the victim," said Scott Atram of the United States, professor of psychology and anthropology at the University of Michigan and a senior researcher at the French research institution CNRS.

"A recruiter notices them and begins to indoctrinate them, to persuade them they are going to play a role in jihad (holy war), the only way to get things to move."

Conviced they are dying for a worthy cause

At the end of the process they are conditioned, isolated, given moral support, convinced they are giving their lives for a cause greater than themselves, and capable of strapping a bomb to their bodies.

And, like the young man in a black T-shirt caught on an amateur video in Bali last Saturday, capable of walking calmly into a restaurant to kill themselves and as many ordinary people as possible.

In the case of Indonesia's Jemaah Islamiyah (JI), believed to be behind the Bali bombings, recruiters "take young people into the jungle and give them a very special religious education", Atram said.

"The message they give them is that there is no more important thing in life than jihad. It's more important than prayers, than fasting, than the Hajj (pilgrimage to Saudi Arabia). And that the most noble thing in life is to die for the jihad. Then it seems perfectly normal to you.

Sect logic

"It's small groups feeding on themselves: you can get people to do anything you want. It's like sect logic. They don't think about the target: they just do it.

"These people don't do it out of hate: they do it more out of love for their own group. They're doing it because they believe they're doing good for their people. They are usually fully compassionate people. I never came across one that was a real nutcase," he said.

According to Philadelphia-based psychiatrist and former Central Intelligence Agency member Marc Sageman "the key is the group. What is outside the group does not really count, they don't really think about it. Whether it's soldiers or people drinking in a bar, it's the same thing."

According to Sageman, who worked for the CIA in Pakistan and interviewed hundreds of jihad members for a book, suicide bombers regard all their targets as guilty: they want to kill evil-doers and do not make distinctions.

Sacrifice the top priority

"You have to forget the European and individualist vision of things. It's another logic. They want to die for the cause and in fact the target doesn't much matter. What counts is the sacrifice."

Contrary to a widespread Western idea, however, suicide bombers are not all motivated by Islam and the promise of paradise, researchers say.

"The world leader in suicide terrorism is the Tamil Tigers in Sri Lanka: a Hindu secular group with territorial demands," said Robert Pape, political science professor at the University of Chicago who has studied 452 suicide attacks since 1980.

"That means that suicide terrorism is not as closely associated with Islamic fundamentalism as most people think. It's not the product mainly of Islamic fundamentalism or any evil ideology independent of circumstances," he said.

Link Here