TERRORISM

We are living in the era of global village in which the technological advancements has turned the whole world into a small village. The nations who were kept apart and afar for so centuries now come to interact with each other from other corners of the world. This new way of life requires changes in the way we think about culture diversity. When we live in a multicultural environment we need to overcome the traditional ways of thinking which provides basis for racism and discrimination. These traditional ways of thinking are the typical stereotypes manner of thinking like “my religion is the best religion and everyone else should convert to my religion”, or “my language is the best language and other languages are not” as well as “my culture is the best and other cultures are the worst”.

We need to emphasize on “freedom of religion” as a basic human right and as well as solidarity of all human beings against crimes such as terrorism and mass murders.

People should wisely react to crimes and should not be deceived by the political traps organized by the political campaigns and projects which aim to divert the public opinion.

Terrorism should not be looked at from the religious and cultural perspective but rather from the perspective of the security of the states and countries in their political sphere considering in mind the questions like “how the terrorism is being used as a political means to reach specific goals in different countries?”

The terrorism in Afghanistan is an aftermath of the cold war in that country which closed the doors of schools for people for 35 years and deprived many generations from quality education and promoted ignorance and illiteracy despite the fact that funded projects used religion as a motivation to defeat USSR in Afghanistan. All these issues paved the way for what we have got today as extremist uneducated armed groups who are called Taliban and still kill people under the name of the race, language and religion. They kill innocent Muslim people of other branch of Islam calling them none Muslims and they murder the foreigners who go to Afghanistan as foreign troops being used and supported by Pakistan.

I think terrorism in Iraq, Syria and in Europe have different dimensions; different political agendas and they follow different objectives but all over the world, it is the Muslim community who are the main target and the main victim of the terrorist attacks and hundreds of Muslims die in the countries like Afghanistan, Syria, Iraq, Palestine and the Middle East.

In Europe, the terrorism draws a line between religions and targets the solidarity of the religious communities to create war between Muslims and Christians or to pave the way for another war, a bigger war, a new world war.

What happened last week in Afghanistan were the same tragic terrorist attacks as the Paris attacks were tragic and shocking. Mass murder of innocent people and taking lives of civilians who have never been part of a war is always a crime no matter in which country or from which religion or committed by which party, it is always condemned and it is always inhuman and a brutal crime whether it happens in Afghanistan, France, Palestine, Israel or in the United States of America or other European countries. The terrorist blind attacks murder both Christian and Muslim innocent people as well as people of other religious groups and cultural background. The color of the blood of Muslims is the same red blood color as the Christian blood. The lives of all human beings are important and should be saved, irrelevant of their religion, race, language or ethnic group.

If a person takes a gun and goes into a cinema and fires at the people, he will kill Christians, Muslims, Buddhists, Hindus, atheists and all the people who are there in that cinema for that particular moment because bullets do not ask and recognize the religion of the people.

Terrorism is a crime that threats the lives of people from all religious backgrounds exactly the same as all other crimes. 

                                                                                                         

If we look at the terrorism from the cultural and religious perspective, the terrorism will succeed in dividing us and murdering us in small religious and cultural groups, using us against each other.

The Paris attacks of the last week were the same attacks which happen almost every month in Afghanistan taking the lives of many innocent people who walk on the streets.  

Last week there were seven people murdered brutally by the ISIS in Afghanistan including men, women and children. They were taken hostage for one month and then brutally murdered and the government did nothing to save them because they were Hazaras, a minority group who has always been murdered and have historically always suffered in Afghanistan and have always been suppressed by the Pashtun rulers, but this time the reaction of the civil society was totally different.

One of the victims who were beheaded was a 9 year old girl called Shukorya but got famous for Tabassom (which means smile) because of her photo in which she smiled very innocently. She was so cute and innocent. The demonstration is called “Smile Revolution” now on the internet.

The civil society of Afghanistan took the coffins of the victims and wrote some slogans such as “Taliban terror us, and the presidential palace support them”, “Today terrorism kill us and it is our turn to die, tomorrow is yours”, “Silence against a crime is another crime”, “Death to those politicians who do nothing to save civilians from terrorists” and millions of people from different ethnic groups, Hazaras, Pashtuns, Tajiks, Hindus and Sikh citizens of Afghanistan marched on the streets of Kabul towards the presidential palace carrying the coffins and  shouted on the streets “We want a responsible government”. It was almost a revolution in Afghanistan. Everyone from every religion and every ethnic group united against the terrorism. They reached the presidential palace and broke in the presidential palace. The bodyguards of the president of Afghanistan shot and wounded seven people but they did not give up. They were inside the presidential palace with the headed bodies till midnight and after their representatives were asked inside by the president and promised to bring further changes for the security, they calmed down. Almost every ethnic group shouted that “I am Hazara” in the demonstration. They said it is not about Hazaras being murdered brutally, it is about us, it is about human beings murdered brutally for no reasons. Why would this happen to someone who travels from one city to another one?  The demonstrations began in different provinces and cities of Afghanistan and continued for many days.

In order to eradicate terrorism from a state, it is very important for the countries to pay attention to the following issues:

·         Solidarity of all religious communities including Muslims against crimes and terrorism

·         Differentiating between criminals and religious minorities

·         Decreasing the level of xenophobia and other forms of phobias at the state level

Starting communication and talking about the un-discussed issues from the perspective of rights and laws to bring more transparency and responsibility for the communities.

Freedom of religions

The states need to recognize the basic human rights and ensure that no one will suffer because of his believes and religion. This will pave the way for a country based on justice and fair treatment of individuals by the state. This will lead to security and multi-literal respect among different minority groups in a country. People of different cultural and religious groups will feel safer and will begin to support the solidarity against the crimes and terrorism.

Human Rights

Ensuring human rights is the basic fundamental infrastructure for a safe, secure, a just and fair environment.

Xenophobia

Xenophobia is a form of fear from a specific group of people who seem to be strangers to another community (for example from Muslims, from Christians, from Hindus, from Buddhists, from Moroccan people). It is actually constructed in our minds based on stereotypes and cliches.

Stop DDP (Dirty Destructive Politics)

Some of the politicians use terrorism to achieve their personal goals and objectives. Civilians get murdered to create an idea in the public opinion and to make people believe something and give permission to the governments to release more funds or to act as criminals to suppress and marginalize a specific group of people. People need to know how to analyze the political events and criminalized campaigns through advantages and disadvantages of the events. For example in the Paris terrorist attacks, which political group benefited the most? And which group was the most disadvantaged group? This analysis can be very useful in finding the main reasons of the most political crimes. It can be also achieved through looking deeply in the impacts of such attacks on the public opinion and its results for the specific groups of people in the long run.

Improve RCP (Responsible Constructive Politics)

In a remote village in Afghanistan, two groups of armed men were fighting each other and killing each other and destroying houses and infrastructures of the village. A new leader came in and said, stop killing each other and instead let me introduce you the new responsible and constructive politics. Each group can bring their proposals for creating new libraries, new bridges and new houses for the people. Every group will have a chance to compete in the quality of the works they perform. The one who does the best job will get more chairs in the parliament. They stopped fighting and started making new things for that village. Now the village has dramatically changed and both parties have their representatives in the parliament. They got rich and now they defend their rights through laws, lobbying and negotiations.  We all have a chance to contribute to stop war and promote peace in our environment, in the work place, in our country and in the world.

Equality

All the people living in a country should be treated equally by the state; otherwise the discrimination and unjust treatment will contribute in motivating people to join terrorist groups. That is why the equal treatment of all by the state is very important in terms of security and safety of the nation states.

 

Justice

Justice is the most important factor in security of the states. If the most intellectual people are not making decisions at the state level which can be accepted for all people of different cultural backgrounds, this can lead to insecurity and chaos in that particular state.  

Humanity as a platform

Religions are too small platform to meet the needs of a country at the state level. We need a bigger platform to include all cultural backgrounds.

Political pressure explodes

Minorities in all countries of the world suffer from being marginalized and discriminated. These discrimination and other forms of injustice and low level of providing services to these minorities will make the minorities even more distant from supporting the central government decisions.

The right leaders (stupid political leaders destroy human achievement)

Political leaders play an important role in guiding a nation to the right path of development through co-existence and accepting and appreciating the differences rather than putting different cultural groups in fight with each other for personal benefits.

Avoiding Stereotypes and Clichés

People are thinning mostly based on clichés and stereotypes. This way of thinking will lead to social unrest, social disorder and insecurity because the people who think based on stereotypes and clichés, they will also decide based on those false assumptions.  

Cultural Diversity Management

Multi-cultural countries need culture diversity management programs to promote understanding among people of different cultures and different ways of thinking. Multicultural countries often get problems in managing different cultures and that makes people of one culture better off in the cost of others. Such kind of situations will lead to inequalities and inequalities will bring instability and insecurity.

Dimensions of the cultural diversity

As per the Hofstede there are two types of cultural dimensions, the primary and the secondary. Most of the problems arise among people from different culture backgrounds when they are not aware of the culture diversity dimensions.

If the people get to know all these dimensions, there will be less chance for war because the understanding will be promoted and the differences will be accepted.

Crimes have no religion

Criminals do not represent a cultural or religious group; they represent criminals in every society. What the media is doing now is to relate a crime to a culture groups and to put pressure on a group of people. This is a big mistake and will lead to wars between people from different cultures.

Media bias

Media has a mission, a mission to spread the real news without political, religious and geographical bias and to stop sending hatred messages, instead spread the real situation news in a balanced and pre-impact evaluated manner.  Otherwise public opinion diversion against a minority group will happen and the credibility of the media will go under question. No one will believe what they hear.  Therefore the media neutrality is a very important issue.

Change the way you think

Do what you have not done yet. If you are a Muslim go to the Church and talk to your Christian brothers and sisters and if you are a Christian go to the mosque and talk to your Muslim brothers and sisters and understand their situation and their miserable living conditions.  

Ignorance and poverty

Ignorance and poverty are the cause of most of the crimes that happen in the 21 century. Those who commit crimes are mostly ignorant and poor people who are being deceived by others and motivated mostly by politics or money.

The impacts of terrorist attacks on the lives of refugees

Muslim refugees escape and leave their own countries mostly because of the same terrorism to seek refuge in Europe while they are affected and vulnerable of suspicion, mistreatment, misconceptions and misjudgments of the European citizens when they get into Europe.

When a terrorist attack happens, the media turns against all Muslim community and describe all Muslims as terrorists. Every individual Muslim refugee is being called at least once by the people around him as a terrorist and that makes the problem even worse. Almost 99 percent of Muslims believe that Taliban and ISIS are not Muslims because what they do is not accepted or confirmed by the Islamic scholars and they are being called as criminals in the Islamic countries too.

Muslims hate them because they believe they are using only the name of a religion for political purposes and not any of their actions and activities are considered Islamic.

There is no religion in the world which encourages its followers to murder innocent civilians including men, women and children. Religions always emphasize on co-existence, peace and helping other fellow human beings but what these terrorist groups are doing merely represent a community not a culture or a common belief and has no place and support among Muslim people in Europe.

Those who commit crimes are subject to punishments according to the laws of the counties but no one has the right to arrest or mistreat or misbehave other fellow human beings because of the crimes of another person. We should not generalize and look at the crimes as a group oriented activity or a culture based activity.

If a person steals something, it does not mean that all his family members are thieves. Crimes are individual acts and its impacts, it’s responsibly and punishment should also be directed to that individual who commits the crimes rather than being referred to his family, community, cultural group or to a circle of people who might believe in the same religion.  

     

What makes Afghan refugees vulnerable along their ways into Europe?

An Afghan scholar has traveled the long journey from Afghanistan to Europe crossing many borders of different countries along with the Afghan refugees to see how dangerous this journey is and what are the main problems of Afghan refugees while crossing borders of countries mostly on foot, a journey that takes months or years without a specific destination. It is a journey for a safe place, a run for the life, a run to find peaceful environment with kind people. This journey is one of the hard decisions for the Afghans to make because it requires a lot of money and may take all of the properties and housing accommodation and the lands they have in Afghanistan as well as the amount of they might have managed to save so far. Most of them don’t have the money yet. They borrow from a friend or they thing they can yearn it on the way of the journey by hard work as labor in the host countries. They begin to cross Pakistan, Iran, Turkey, Greece, Croatia, Hungary, Austria, Hungary, Germany, Belgium, France, Italy and the UK.

This journey may require a whole life time to reach and for many they will never reach to where they wanted to go and they end up in prisons of these countries or drown in the Mediterranean Sea.

If they don’t die on the way, they have to face a lot of problems and challenges they have never heard of or they have never experienced before.

In this article you read about these challenges which take the lives of human beings on the way of their journey for a safe place. This article is supposed to serve as highest safety measurements for the refugees to let them know of the problems on the way so that they can save their lives by not being so naïve and unaware of these problems.

The countries on the way are not full of nice and kind people. There might be some racist, xenophobe Islamophobe, and chauvinist people who will try to create problems for the refugees. They may invite them for a free ride inside a refrigerated truck and if they fall in that trap, they will die for sure.

The first thing they should know is that once you are inside the European countries, you are not allowed to work which means you will not have income and it means you don’t have anything to eat.  

The European countries have got very good laws for workers and employers but they are all on the paper or they are being used only for the citizens of European countries but not for the refugees. The refugees from Afghanistan face these problems in all over European countries:

No work permits

Most of the young refugees from Afghanistan who come to Europeans countries, they mostly do not receive papers to make them recognized as refugees for 5 to 10 years and therefore they do not exist and they do not have the rights to work and earn a living.

Exploitation

Those refugees who come from Afghanistan, in case if they get a work permit, but they have not been to school there in Afghanistan during the war and thus they do not know their basic human rights. They are mostly being exploited by the firms and companies who hire them by different means. They are paid less than the minimum wages or they do not receive the same rights as the citizens of the European countries, for example they will not have the same paid leaves which is recognized the law of the relevant country or they are asked to work longer hours than the usual norms or they are given unspecified load of work to make them work instead of many other labors.

Low salary

All the Afghan refugees who work for other organizations receive the same minimum salary which is 1200 Euro per month. Despite the fact that those who live under the poverty line in European countries and earn less than 16000 Euro per month are exempted from paying the taxes but still the poor Afghan refugees are paying heavy taxes despite living under extreme poverty conditions, earning the least amount to survive. Those refugees who have managed to start a private business, they are also subject to heavy tax burdens as well as higher prices of energy and accommodation which will in turn lead to bankruptcy in the long run.

Food intervention

They easy role is that you should not eat what you are offered from the unknown people because many Afghan refugees died on their way through food contamination or food poisoning.

Most of the refugees from Afghanistan employed by the private organizations are deprived of food subsidy checks available for all other workers. On the other hand they receive some kind of extra food intervention as fruit and nuts which are not examined to be healthy. They are mostly collected from the other workers extra food which cannot be consumed by the citizens of the European countries and given to the refugees. There are special food-aid-programs designed only for the refugees and the food stuff comes in the conserved cans labeled as NOT FOR SALE in the markets and only for refugees. There should be a firm to check the quality of such food stuff to make sure that they are edible and not harmful for human consumption.

Health intervention

The refugees from Afghanistan in European countries are being vaccinated at the different stages. Vaccination is a process in which people are injected some level of microbes to get immunity against that specific microbe. Vaccination can also be misused to expose and inject refugees a higher level of microbes to make people sick by injecting different levels of different kinds of microbes inside their bodies. The current situation and the high level of hatred and xenophobia in Europe, there is a highly risk of misusing health intervention against the refugees which requires the attention of the relevant governments to protect their citizens.

There is a totally different health system for the refugees in Europe. The refugees receive different kinds of medicines and treatments than the European citizens. For example, the Afghan refugees without income receive genetic medicines while the European citizens receive other sorts of medicines.

When the refugees go to the drugstore in Europe, there are two types of medicines, type A is for the European citizens while the types B is for the refugees. Type B is the genetic medicines. The Europeans believe that it is a discrimination against refugees and they believe the type B is counterfeit and cheap medicines while no one really knows what the genetic medicines refer to. 

Such kind of double standard and discrimination is an obvious breach of human rights and Geneva Convention.

No safety norms and standards or minimum standards

Safety measures are there for the protection of the labor force but in European countries most of the norms and standards are being used against the health and well-being of Afghan refugees. For example the safety caps and safety shoes for the construction workers are the best way to protect labors from unpredictable accidents on the work-site but if they are old and used by 30 to 40 people before and never cleaned could be infectious for the Afghan refugees. Unfortunately we have witnessed that Afghan refugees receive such kind of old foot-ware and safety clothing and uniforms which brings so many diseases to Afghan refugees without any kind of attention because it will cost money for the relevant organizations.

Lack of information about International Labor Organization and its conventions

The conventions of the International Labor Organization are one of the ways which can improve the work conditions of the Afghan refugees in Europe. The organizations which employ foreigners should be aware of the international norms and standards for the improvement of the work conditions. They should also understand the basic rights of the workers as well as the human rights.

Discrimination in labor markets

Afghan refugees have little chance of getting a normal job in the European countries. There is a high level of discrimination against Afghan refugees. Only minor jobs and no one else is ready to do that will be given to Afghan refugees with minimum salary.

Afghans try their best to learn the languages but the language is used as a means to justify the high level of discrimination against them.  

Lack of transparency of laws

When the Afghans get a work contract, the contracts are not inclusive of all details and that makes it difficult for Afghan refugees. For example the work-site and work location is not clearly mentioned so that the organization can take them to anywhere they wish to work. The norms and standards to volume of work are not clear so that the organizations can ask them to do the most they can and sometimes more than the ability of a person. For example if it is excavation in the construction sector, there should be a fixed measurement and norm for the ability of a labor to show how much can a person excavate during a normal working day. If it is not clearly mentioned, then the workers can be exploited beyond the norms and abilities of a normal working day.

Racism and Chauvinism in the labor market

Work opportunities are allocated based on race, religion and color of skin and language preference. That makes the citizens better off with the Afghan refugees are as usual less chance to get a job. The companies and firms who want to employ refugees will give the chance to other refugees who are closer to them rather than the Afghan refugees.

Lack of privacy

The Afghan refugees have no privacy in the private lives because in the most of the European countries, the owner of the apartment has another key and the manager of the building has another key. When the Afghan refugees get out of their apartment, others can go inside the apartment which makes Afghan refugees very vulnerable and insecure. The Afghan refugees should mention all these issues in the contract and make the other parties responsible for having a key, as if something happens for the Afghan refugee, the owner and the key holders should be held responsible.