Terrorists can be defeated by fighting fear with cooperation

Showing the force of legislative powers by invoking the War Measures Act, Trudeau sent tanks and soldiers in full battle gear into the streets of Montreal to show that the state was mobilized and ready. However, Trudeau avoided wholesale raids on homes (although some were indeed raided).

At the same time, a clear, sympathetic message was delivered by the government that Quebec’s French-speaking locals were right to be disgruntled about feeling like second-class citizens. Trudeau reinforced linguistic and cultural recognition of the minority that the FLQ terrorists were trying to appeal to, so the government undermined their legitimacy.

From the Troubles to Toronto
Crackdowns on communities rarely work without serious consequences. A good example of the failure of a heavy-handed approach can be seen in how successive British governments tried to “solve” Northern Ireland’s violent 30-year conflict with military crackdowns, without addressing underlying community concerns.

Ultimately it was patient political negotiation through the Good Friday Agreement that ended decades of bloodshed.

More recently in 2006, Canada faced a terrorist plot similar to what has been alleged here in Australia this week. A group of eighteen young men – commonly referred to as the “Toronto 18” — were arrested over ambitious though amateurish plans to carry out a series of armed assaults and truck bombings (using a ton of ammonium nitrate purchased on one perpetrator’s credit card). There were even discussions about beheading Canadian Prime Minister Stephen Harper and driving a ute up the steps of the parliament in Ottawa.

The local and federal police forces succeeded in tracking and infiltrating the group, partly thanks to cooperation from the local Islamic community. While some of the men got off with only light sentences (and two of the accused are believed to have died fighting in Syria), Canada has since reviewed its terrorism sentencing and brought in life sentences as a much stronger deterrent.

Community leadership
Crucially, in many of the recent cases of radicalized young men both in Canada and in Australia, members of the Islamic community have often helped to identify the radicals amongst themselves. While many did not agree with the sometimes heavy-handed approach of investigations, they certainly did not want the violence brought to their own communities.

Since the Toronto 18 case, further plots have occurred in Canada but have been quietly thwarted. Last year, two Canadian men were arrested for plotting to derail a passenger train travelling between Toronto and New York – and it was a tip-off from a prominent Toronto imam (Muslim community leader) concerned about the one of the suspect’s behavior that sparked the investigation. As local man Hussan Hamdani explains in this news video:

This was a tip that came from the Muslim community because they had good relations with [the Canadian police], because they had this long-standing bridge-building long before this incident ever took place.

Community cooperation in the UK and Australia has also been vital, as both the former head of international counter-terrorism at New Scotland Yard, Nick O’Brien, and the Global Terrorism Research Centre international director, Greg Barton, have said this week. For example, the 2005 arrests of men in Melbourne and Sydney under Operation Pendennis followed a tip-off from Melbourne’s Muslim community.

Tracking a radical minority
Terrorism is not a new problem. If history teaches us anything, it’s that close connections with any self-defined community — especially one that is having a series of internal problems associated with violence — is a key to effective policing.

In Indonesia and Malaysia, counter-terror measures include cataloguing how radical Islamists are speaking in public and what actions they suggest their followers take.

The authorities know where the threat lies, and allowing the preaching to go on takes away the argument that radical Islam is being stifled. In the meantime, Indonesia proceeds along a path of democratization. That’s certainly not without problems — but for a nation of 250 million people, its democratic progress in less than two decades has been extraordinary.

The good news
If there any upside to this week’s raids and terrorism allegations, it’s that the plotters in Australia don’t seem to show anywhere near the same levels of organizational competence as other terror cells in war zones such as Iraq and Syria. If the police allegation that an order to attack a random Australian citizen was given over the phone is true, that’s hardly a sophisticated way of avoiding detection.

At present, radical Islamic terrorists do not appear to have the capacity to develop well-organized cells in places like Australia or Canada, and will most likely dissipate as previous anarchists and ultra-Marxists did decades ago.

The next big question in all of this is how to de-radicalize. What has worked and what has failed in terms of de-radicalization efforts by various governments? Hopefully, the government is engaged in a careful consideration of this, and has thought about how other countries have handled the problem of domestic terrorism.

Robert Imre is Senior Lecturer in Politics and International Relations at University of Newcastle. This story is published courtesy of The Conversation (under Creative Commons-Attribution/No derivatives).