War on terrorism should focus on root causes: Experts

Muninggar Sri Saraswati, The Jakarta Post, Jakarta

International experts have called for a new pattern of cooperation among governments across the globe in their fight against the root causes of transnational crime, saying no single country would be able to win the war against it alone.

Hans-J Geissmann of the German-based Institute for Peace Research and Security Policy at the University of Hamburg criticized world leaders for only tackling the "symptoms" of many transnational crimes, including terrorism.

"We know the risks we are dealing with. But the problem is we have only dealt with the symptoms so far," he said after presenting his speech to close the Second German/Asian Dialogue on Security Policy in Jakarta on Tuesday.

Geissmann said the governments should deal with the root causes of the problems, and find a new kind of international cooperation.

Some 30 participants of the two-day meeting from 11 countries agreed that the root causes of transnational crimes included poverty, injustice and social disorder.

"We need to find a new kind of cooperation in international relations, something that we are lacking now," Geissmann said.

He also pointed to some "private actors", which he blamed for inciting injustice in the world that led to hatred, radicalism and fundamentalism.

Many countries, he said, only focused on handling specific issues -- which are all the symptoms of transnational crimes.

"We now learn that these specific issues are linked to each other. Interference of various issues, which now have already become complex, must be brought back into balance," Geissmann said.

Similarly, researcher Kusnanto Anggoro of Indonesia's Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS) said the dialog concluded that aside from political commitment, the governments should respectively translate their policies of eradicating transnational crimes into practical measures.

"Each country faces its domestic problems in implementing the policy," he argued, adding that each government needed international support to fight transnational crimes.

Kusnanto hopes such dialogs would continue in the future in a bid to explore possibilities to root out terrorism and other global crimes.

"Perhaps, we need to involve decision-makers in further dialogs in the hope that they would be willing to accommodate our proposals," he said.

Earlier on Monday, Rainer Arnold, a member of the German Parliament, told the same forum that all countries should respond positively to calls for fighting the root causes of transnational crimes.

Governments needed to enact consistent security policies of disarmament, arms control, and non-proliferation and resolutions of regional conflicts, he said.

Arnold said it would not be enough for them to merely work on global disarmament and settling regional conflicts.

Maj. Gen. Sudrajat, the director general for defense strategy at the Indonesian Ministry of Defense, concurred, saying that a change in security perspectives was essential to cope with terrorism.

"We can no longer use coercion to fight terrorism and extremism. It should be faced with ideology. We should also promote moderation," he said.