Editorial

Security

Politics

World

Letters

Sports

Obituaries

Archives

by Michael Roberts

The recent terrorist bomb attack in Karachi in front of the hotel at which the New Zealand cricket team were staying raises a set of critical issues for the cricket world. The New Zealand team were shocked by the event. As Steven Fleming's recent report reveals, those who witnessed the carnage found it a "haunting experience" and were not inclined to devote their energies to cricket. That sentiment provides a solid reason for quitting the country.

Indeed, I would go further and note that our reviews of the reasons for abandoning the cricket should also encompass the feelings of the Pakistani cricketers. Though Snedden, the Manager of the NZ team recognised this, media reports in cricketing outlets did not make any meaningful references to them. This silence, I hold, is not happenchance and marks a peculiar parochiality in what is considered to be global reportage.

This incident, remarkably, has been the third occasion that New Zealand cricketers have been exposed in some way to the effects of bomb blasts. The second of these moments, chronologically speaking, took place on 11 November 1992 when an LTTE suicide bomber on a motor bike rammed the car bearing Clancy Fernando, the Commander of the Sri Lanka Navy, in front of the Taj Samudra Hotel in Colombo where the New Zealand cricketers led by Martin Crowe were housed. So what we saw was a strike on a military target in a civilian zone. The assault on the senses to those who came upon this scene would not have been pretty, but was not as severe as the scenario in Karachi.

The worst of these incidents, however, was the first occasion on which New Zealand cricketers, among them Martin Snedden, were exposed to this form of politics. That was on 4 April 1987 when they were playing a test series in Sri Lanka. A bomb in the gear box of a Ford Cortina car placed at the Central Bus Stand in the Pettah by one of the Tamil Eelamist organizations wrought massive havoc.

Is Pakistan dangerous for foreign cricketers?

This was a purely civilian target. The bomb was so placed as to render the car fragments into shrapnel, so the result was horrendous: 113 people were killed and over 700 were injured. This was Sri Lanka's version of September 11th.

The New Zealanders were not in the immediate vicinity and there was no suggestion anywhere that they were endangered. Neither were the Sri Lankan cricketers under threat. But the tour was abandoned. For good reason: no Sri Lankan felt like playing or watching cricket in the circumstances. As a generalisation, it could be said that South Asians do not shroud death and avoid the sight of dead bodies as firmly as people in the Western world. Buddhism encourages reflections on bodily decay.

But that scene of carnage in the Pettah was horrific even at camera distance. I was Sri Lanka then and the pictures on television were as devastating as sickening. As such, the general mood thereafter was not conducive to cricket. Such sentiments embraced the New Zealand cricketing tourists.

Having granted that there were reasonable grounds for the abandonment of the Third Test Match between Pakistan and New Zealand, I would add provisoes and suggest that more careful thought and consultation with the Pakistani cricketers may have served everyone better. Whatever the outcome of the debate on this point, I insist here that we must carefully evaluate the event and not allow the impression to gain ground that the cricketers would have been in danger if they remained in Pakistan. Snedden and the NZ team, regrettably, came to this conclusion. Likewise, while attentive to the fact that the NZ cricketers were not the target, Western media discussions of the situation have frequently indicated that the NZ team would have been in danger if they stayed on. Such a reading has been specifically presented as one reason for their departure.

By admitting that there is no protection against suicide bombers, a fact that Asians know only too well, the Pakistan authorities inadvertently supported this position. But there are two related questions that one must address in any rational evaluation of bomb attacks: namely, (a) who are suicide bombers likely to target? and (b) why should cricketers ever come within their range of targets? It is imperative for the ICC and the cricketing establishments to review specific incidents in ways that grapple with such questions and are at the same time attentive to their own assumptions and prejudices.

This article is a clarification of underlying prejudices in the West that I consider typical without being pervasive. My position is straightforward; I assert that the situation in Pakistan NOW is not intrinsically dangerous for ordinary Western tourists or for cricketers. It is only Westerners who are linked to the American and Pakistan establishments who will be targets. Indeed, Karachi now, immediately after such an attack, will be safer than before or safer than it will be in 2003. Such attacks are not even monthly events in Pakistan, let alone everyday happenings. They call for long-term planning. More critically, since the cricketers were not targets, the likelihood of them being in the vicinity of another (unlikely) bomb blast would have been one in a billion.

That Western commentators and bureaucrats should treat Pakistan as a dangerous place for Westerners in general is indicative of a mix of conservatism, parochialism and ignorance that is quite disconcerting. It is a thickness of mind that is promoted by a species of ethnocentrism that in turn reproduces the prejudices and the parochialism that are integral to the inspiration.

In today's world, after September 11 and the Western media's orchestrated parroting of American and Israeli pictures of "the Palestinian terrorist" (thus obscuring the Israeli state terrorist), a specific figure haunts the subterranean cellars of the "Western mind". This image is that of the "Fanatical Muslim".

The Fanatical Muslim has replaced the figure of the Cannibal and the Primitive Black that featured as a prominent strand in the travel literature reproduced by Europeans who ventured beyond their domains in the centuries sixteen to nineteen. Justin Lichterman's recent article on the Pakistani scene in TheWicket.com is just one illustration of this brand of contemporary demon-creation.

I assume for the moment that there is no hidden political agenda in his intervention and take his comments at face value. His reference to "a lunatic fringe" is but one illustration of a perspective that treats the perpetrators of the Karachi killings as mindless fanatics.

This kind of assessment is counter-productive and misleading. Indeed, the assessment borders on the mindless and tells us more about Lichterman than his subject of conversation. The killers may be awful blokes, but mindless they are not. Their targets are not random or a matter of sudden whim.

Terrorist Logic

I speak here on the foundation of some research experience in the study of racial pogroms and what is called "communal violence" in Asia. Indeed one of my interests is the subject of "zealotry". But even without such a background, a common sense position should lead any person to raise three overlapping questions when evaluating an atrocity of the type that occurred in Karachi: why was that specific target selected? Why that specific site of attack? and why did it occur on such and such day? In brief: whom? where? and when?

My speculative answer to the two recent atrocities in Pakistan is that they were not happenchance selections: a Christian church frequented by American embassy personnel and French scientists and engineers producing submarines for the Pakistan state. The latest reports indicate that the French government may also have been one of the "enemies" held in view. The same organization may not have been responsible for both attacks, but the choice of victims points to perpetrators from a particular world. This is the world of the Pakistani Jihadi, extremist Muslims hostile to USA, its allies and the present Pakistani regime's role in global and local politics.

Both sets of victims were soft targets, albeit symbolic ones. Such choices point to the relative weakness of these underground terrorist outfits, though that is hardly comforting to those killed or crippled in such atrocious ways. In the Karachi incident I speculate that the choice of site and moment may conceivably have been influenced by the presence of the NZ cricket team at a neighbouring hotel. Their response would be marked globally and would therefore maximise the media publicity.

When the Commander of the Navy was assassinated in Colombo in 1992, the LTTE commanders carefully chose a spot outside the Taj Samudra Hotel in Colombo at a moment when the NZ team under Martin Crowe were residing there. What better publicity for their cause and their capacity.

At the present moment with the Karachi case the constituency which the killers are addressing is not only the West. Indeed, the West may well be a secondary market. It is the Muslim world that such terrorists are speaking to. Since a significant number of Muslims from the Indian subcontinent, whether expatriates or resident in their lands, are cricket followers, an attack in the vicinity of cricketing teams is an attractive proposition.

From the point of view of a "terrorist" organization the best trick is to effect such an act without hurting the cricketers themselves. This achievement was secured in Karachi. If the logic of terrorist groups and liberation movements leads them to select strategic targets or symbols of their arch enemy, what of individual fanatics' among the jihadi or some body of people? That is, what about those who act on their individual motivations without the foundations of an organization? Is there any guarantee that they will not hit out at some Western tourist in Pakistan, among them some cricketers who happen to be, say, in some shopping mall?

My answer is simple and two-fold. There can be no hundred per cent guarantee. But can anyone guarantee that the coach bearing the Sri Lankan cricket team in England will not meet with a traffic accident? Does the fact that there have been five major train accidents in UK in the last five years prevent people from making train journeys? Do the occasional incidents of school massacres in USA, and the potentiality for copy-cat action in the loony, psychiatry-ridden American world, deter American parents from sending their children to school? Did tourists not visit Tasmania in the months that followed the Port Arthur massacre? Would you guarantee that the plane in which I travel next will not plummet from the sky because of technical failure?

In short, to demand "guarantees" of safety for players is to demand the impossible and to leave unexamined the meaning of the word. Any talk of "a guarantee" is a rhetorical trick that obscures deep-seated anxieties that over-ride rational evaluation. My rhetorical questions in the previous paragraph are intended to generate reflection. The answer to these questions is that we proceed on our journeys despite the possibilities of accident or killing because we are familiar with the terrain and are prepared to take a small risk. It is the lack of familiarity with the Asian scene and a whole range of assumptions that lead people to magnify the risk.

Such unfamiliarity is compounded by abysmal geographical knowledge. Scenes of a violent demonstration in one city within a vast county like Pakistan are read as evidence of massive and continuous political turmoil everywhere. It is as if disturbances in Brisbane render Melbourne a dangerous destination for a foreign tourist. As such, extreme fears are created among many Westerners who then respond to bomb blasts in Asian countries by refusing to entertain the thought of entering such lands. That is a luxury individual tourists are free to entertain. But cricketers are not mere tourists and have international obligations to their peers in other lands and to the cricketing world at large.

The unfamiliar and its magnitudes

It is because places like Pakistan, Sri Lanka and India are not familiar terrain that bomb blasts lead so many Westerners and West Indians to read the event and its potentialities in such magnified and fabulous ways. The whole land and its people assume the shape of demons and hobgoblins.

With some exceptions, cricketers are among the most parochial of individuals because their concentrated focus on the game precludes wider interests beyond, perhaps, sex, golf, betting, conversation and cards. That is, their knowledge of politics and other lifeways is limited. This broad generalisation, I stress, applies as much to the Asian cricketers as those in other lands. Few have the experiential knowledge and ability to read a situation of sporadic violence in the manner displayed by the White Zimbabweans and South Africans on their Sri Lankan visits.

I suspect that this comment applies to many cricketing administrators. Not many have the vision of a Peter Macdermott (New Zealand) or a Tim Lamb (MCC). Most are likely to run for cover in the notorious style so indelibly lodged in the annals of cricketing history by Warren Lees, Graham Gooch and Mike Gatting.

All sorts of demons

Images of all sorts of demons take root in such circumstances and are supported by everyday talk in the Western world. The "Muslim Fanatic" or "suicide bomber" becomes the latest devil in the firmament. In challenging this generalised image and asking cricketers/cricket administrations to examine their assumptions, I reiterate a position I have held since September 11. I note here that for sometime I had sketched out within my mind an article on "Faint Hearts in Cricket." I have simply not had the time to write it up and there is no space to elaborate upon it here.

But in summary let me present three assertions. In my view it was utterly inexcusable (1) for the New Zealand cricket team to abort their tour of Pakistan in September 2001; (2) for the West Indians to insist that their tour should be shifted to Sharjah; and (3) for Messrs Caddick and Croft to opt out of the English tour of India. The last two decisions were as lily-livered as irresponsible. I shall clarify these positions in a subsequent essay, but let me emphasise here that the recent bomb blast has not changed my opinion on these three actions one jot.

It follows that my comments on any decision by the Australian Cricket Board to jettison or amend their scheduled visit to Pakistan will draw severe criticism from this voice, a small voice though it be. That would be to show the same lack of acumen and cowardice displayed so vividly in 1996 when West Indian and Australian boards/cricketers backed out of their World Cup commitments in Sri Lanka. Ask Keith Stackpole, the Zimbabweans and the Kenyans about the "dangers" they encountered in Darkest Lanka in that month of March, 1996! Other than the dangers of overeating, their answer would be "nil."

News | Business | Features | Editorial | Security
Politics | World | Letters | Sports | Obituaries

Produced by Lake House
Copyright 2001 The Associated Newspapers of Ceylon Ltd.
Comments and suggestions to :Web Manager