Andrew Leigh (Fraser, Australian Labor Party, Shadow Assistant Treasurer) Share this | Hansard source

These past few weeks have been a sombre time for communities all over the world. Over recent times, acts of terror have wracked the livelihoods of many and have increased the fear of brutal and unpredictable violence. Events in Paris have particularly shocked and repulsed us. They have also catalysed a sense of unity in confronting those who would see our societies eroded by distrust and hatred.

On 10 October over 100 people lost their lives when two bombs were detonated, at a peace rally, in Ankara. A video shared on social media depicts a group of demonstrators holding hands and chanting just before the first blast goes off in the background sending the crowd running towards the railway station. On 31 October, 224 people in a Russian passenger jet were killed when the aircraft was calculatingly exploded by a bomb, most likely planted before take-off.

This came in a long line of terrorist attacks in Egypt that targeted military, security personnel and tourists in that country. Forty-three people passed away, on 12 November, when a double-suicide bombing was carried out in the central business district of Beirut. Numbers give a surface impression of the damage done in these attacks, and beneath each of these numbers are individual people. Ali Awad, only 14, was chopping vegetables when the first bomb hit the city. Adel Tormous, who would die tackling the second bomber, was sitting at a nearby coffee stand. Khodr Alaa Deen, a nurse, was on his way to work his night shift at the teaching hospital of the American university.

On the next day, 13 November, over 120 people lost their lives in brutal orchestrated attacks in Paris. The combination of mass shootings, suicide bombings and hostage taking resulted in the deadliest attacks, in France, since World War II. Included in those who lost their lives was Claire Camax, mother of two, described as 'someone radiant; an overflowing joy of life', and Ludovic Boumbas, a Fedex employee, who took a bullet to save a woman nearby as he dined with friends to celebrate his birthday.

The massacre, in conjunction with the assault on Charlie Hebdo in January, struck the core of the French cultural psyche, which idealises freedom and reason. Then, less than a week after the Paris attacks, 20 people were left dead in a luxury hotel, in Mali, after militia stormed the Radisson Blu, taking around 170 staff and guests hostage. Among the victims lay Anita Ashok Datar, an international aid agency worker from Maryland and former member of the Peace Corp, and three executives from the China Railway Construction Corp. These people were killed in the context of a previous six attacks, this year, in Mali.

Daesh and similar groups are now responsible for over 1,000 deaths outside Syria and Iraq, but that is a fraction of the deaths they have caused in those two countries. In Syria and Iraq, the loss of life caused by Daesh, over the past year, is estimated at more than 6,000. And over the same time span, in Nigeria, the terrorist group Boko Haram is also estimated to have killed over 6,000 people. The randomness associated with this atrocious loss of life in recent attacks, in places such as Paris, Beirut, Egypt and Mali, has made the power of fear a poignant and pressing issue for people all around the world.

With the diversity of countries and peoples that have been attacked, the sequence of attacks has inspired feelings of shared global vulnerability. We remember those who were carrying out the tasks of the everyday when they were struck down without reason. They were having a coffee, on the way to work to support themselves and their families, preparing food for the day, and holidaying. We remember the victims as people just like us, whose lives were stolen from them. We mourn the victims of the terror attacks around the world in a tone that reflects the relationships we cherish with our own relatives, friends and neighbours. We sense what those communities have lost. We ask ourselves what it means, what is to be done, what is next and where the violence comes from.

Many will have read David Kilcullen's Quarterly Essay 'Blood year'. To read his depictions of the horror in the Middle East, over the past decade, is to be reminded of Goya's masterwork, The Sleep of Reason Produces Monsters. What we see is the spear point of these attacks and the young men and women who become the tools for the politics of terror, the result of reason suppressed and stupefied. It is important, too, that we recognise it is the result of religion co-opted and twisted. I would recommend to the House Graeme Wood's article 'What ISIS really wants', published in The Atlantic earlier this year, and the book Islam and the Future of Tolerance, by Sam Harris and Maajid Nawaz.

Terrorist cells are made up of individuals with their own ideologies and pathologies. But terrorist cells, like terrorism, crystallise out of a complex mixture of social, economic, historical and ideological factors. The sinister alchemy that turns an impassioned youth into a suicide bomber will not be neutralised by force alone. We need to address the causes as well as the outcomes of political terror. We cannot completely obliterate extremism, but nor should be tolerate it. Wherever extremism is pursued—in Paris, Beirut, Jerusalem, London, Bamako, Baghdad or Damascus—it is anathema to the values that underpin free societies of tolerance and diversity.

Eli Berman's excellent book Radical, Religious, and Violent: The New Economics of Terrorism, and Louise Richardson's What Terrorists Want:Understanding the Enemy, Containing the Threat discuss the fact that in order to crush terrorism we need to understand the social circumstances out of which terrorism emerges. This means showing that governments can do a better job of providing social services to help the community that would-be terrorists care about. That might, for example, mean using soldiers to protect aid workers who are building new schools, and perhaps even providing security for girls to attend the school in the months after it opens. By helping governments in developing countries to provide services that are currently being delivered, or disrupted, by insurgent groups, we can simultaneously help the poor and hurt the terrorists. Failed states are the friend of terrorist groups.

An example of this approach of focusing on social service provision and understanding its links to terrorism was discussed by Eli Berman, where he talks about how Egypt's President Nasser undermined the Muslim Brotherhood in the 1950s by nationalising schools and health clinics. By directly providing electricity, health care and welfare services, governments improve the outside options for young people and help dissuade them from taking the wrong road. This is the kind of counter-insurgency approach that David Kilcullen has described as 'armed social work', because it unravels the power base of a would-be terrorist organisation. Of course, our security and intelligence capacity must be sufficient to thwart these eruptions of callous brutality and terror. But we have to work just as hard to defuse the tensions and conflicts that give rise to extremism.

We are up against groups that move towards their goals in a number of different ways: by inciting regional conflict—for example, by attacks inside Iraq and Syria—and by exacerbating the Sunni-Shia fissure through the Middle East. We are up against groups that aim to build relationships with jihadist groups that can carry out military operations across the Middle East and North Africa. They aim to inspire or to assist remote extremist sympathisers to plan and carry out attacks in the West and in countries in our region, such as Indonesia. By pursuing these different paths, such terrorist groups seek to create an atmosphere of chaos and an impression of power that outstrips their actual resources. We know the tracks they are moving along, and we know there is no one way to block this range of activity.

Perhaps we get a clearer view of the victims of terror when the target is a city like Paris. Hopefully we will go on to look closer at the regions and cities in which this kind of violence is becoming grimly routine. Every life that has been lost to terrorist violence compels us to do better in stamping out the causes and the consequences of extremism.

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