Motives of suicide bombers probed

Motives of suicide bombers probed

Michel Moutot, Agence France-Presse/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."

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 Jamaah 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.

"It's small groups feeding on themselves: you can get people
to do anything you want. It's like a 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.

"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.