A year after the 11 March bombings, Heba Raouf Ezzat* finds Madrid far from quiet This March, people gathered in Madrid to commemorate the victims of the terrorist attack that blew up four commuter trains during the morning rush hour on 11 March last year. Only a modest number of the families of victims showed up. Many preferred to mourn in silence and solitude. The reason was as simple as it was political. The attack took place last year only three days before the elections where the centre-right party of former prime minister Jose Maria Aznar lost at the polls, and the Socialists under Jose Luis Rodriguez Zapatero won. Three decades after the death of the dictator Franco, Spanish democracy has never been so tense, with both parties attacking each other viciously, and neither making any attempt to play it polite. Aznar accuses Zapatero of political manipulation of the attacks and scoring a false victory, while the latter responds by accusing Aznar of deliberately destroying the official computer records that would have proved that the former prime minister deceived voters and mishandled the crisis to initially blame it on the Basque separatist organisation ETA. Yet one year after the attacks Spain was neither calm nor quiet. Meanwhile, from 7 to 10 March over 250 academics and experts and around 40 heads of state and prime ministers gathered in Madrid to discuss the "Future of Democracy under the War on Terrorism". The event was held by the Club of Madrid, a forum founded in November 2001 by 55 former heads of state and government. The event concluded the work undertaken by the 17 workgroups debating on the conference website for three months, and that have produced reports on topics ranging from the root causes and underlying factors of terrorism (psychological, political, economic, religious and cultural), to how to confront terrorism (policing, intelligence, military, financial and legal responses). Special attention was given to the democratic responses, with seven groups focussing on issues of human rights, accountable governance, the role of international institutions, citizens as actors, civil society and the different strategies against political violence. Sessions in the main hall gathered all participants from the workshops to listen to officials and politicians defend democracy against terrorists on one hand, and against governments that violated the law to fight terrorism on the other. It was good to hear Americans and Europeans (including Madeleine Albright) stress that the United States policy of human rights violation could only breed more violence and create more terrorists. It is now left to real politics to respond accordingly and change the course. Not surprisingly, Arab and Muslim heads of state paid the same lip service, stressing that democratic responses and respect for the rule of law were the best means to combat terrorism. While in the workshops there was a consensus that terrorism also pertains to state terrorism, no such acknowledgments were made in the main sessions, which largely avoided any harsh criticism of states that use violence against dissidents and abuse the war on terrorism to delay democratic reform. It was striking how Israel managed to avoid the issue of its own state terrorism even during the session on terror and the Arab- Israeli conflict. But why wonder, given that the Arab presence was minimal and predominantly official. Soft power was seen by many experts in the working groups as the preferred means to combat terrorism. The majority agreed that political inclusion and democratic change can minimise the power of terrorists, and that current legal constraints and regulations are enough to fight them. If the price of the war on terrorism would involve undermining civil liberties, then the terrorists would have won, said the prime minister of Norway, whose government was a main sponsor of the event. Though there was a heavy presence of American academics and civil society representatives, there was very limited official presence. Perhaps the administration saw no need for it since both George W Bush and Condoleezza Rice had visited Europe late February and returned to the US with the impression that they had improved cross Atlantic relations. One of the main outcomes of the Madrid conference was a keen will to have an annual summit on democracy, a will reflected in the discussion groups on civil society. The groups' report pointed to three cases of recent human rights violations in Iraq, Tunisia and Azerbaijan, and called upon the Club of Madrid to push for an investigation into those cases. An Alliance of Global Citizens was established to function as a network for the different entities of human rights and civil society present at the summit. Its role would be to empower the average citizen and to take inspiration from the people of Madrid who came to the streets after the attack to show solidarity against terrorism and whose response to terrorism was not to go to war against another country (or two) but to change their government and withdraw from the alliance of the war on Iraq. Their civil response and democratic answer to terrorism was deemed to have set an example for others. The role of the average citizen in the change towards democracy and democratic governance is also a missing factor in the equation of the process of change in the Arab world. If terrorism targets innocent citizens so does state terrorism which spreads a culture of fear that would not allow people to feel empowered enough to exercise pressure for change or come out to defend their civil liberties against terrorists. The politics of democracy at this very moment of globalisation, east and west, north and south, should be a politics of presence rather than representation. Electoral processes are crucial in any democratic system, but what is more crucial is the presence of citizens at a local level and on a day-to-day basis, demonstrating a determination to be heard and responded to by governments that ignore their presence. The voices that reflected this and were present at the summit came from all over the world including Palestine, Brazil, Argentina, Korea, Tunisia, Egypt, Zimbabwe, Nigeria, Sri Lanka, and many others to discuss the future of democracy in the street, the future of democracy in the structures, and even the future of freedom of speech on the Internet that has been used by terrorists to network. The message was clear: Democracy is at risk and it is only through fighting any illegal or emergency measures that use terrorism as the pretext to violate human rights that democracy can survive. * The writer is a political scientist at Cairo University.
