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Endless opinion pieces
about the Boston Marathon bombings have flooded the media following the
incident and eventual arrest of a suspect and the death of another
suspect.
US President
Barack Obama was careful not to use the word “terror” or “terrorism” as
he spoke at the White House after the deadly attack, although an
administration official said that the attack was being treated as an act
of terrorism.
As the first
suspect was shot dead by the police, the second suspect — Dzokhar
Tsarnaev — was captured alive and identified as one of the ethnic Chechen
brothers who had lived in Dagestan, which abuts Chechnya in southern
Russia. They had been in the US for about a decade and were believed to
be living in Cambridge, Massachusetts.
Apart from
the coverage of the world media, an act of terrorism was never expected
to happen on this special annual event and above all, in a society where
both socio-economic wellbeing as well as security measures are relatively
stable. This tragedy shatters the myth that “failed states pose a great danger to global security”, which
has had substantial influence in directing American foreign policy for
decades. The Boston attack was an example of the fact that acts of
terrorism do not always happen within failed states, as previously
evinced in the tragedy of Connecticut. So what went wrong in American
society?
American
society consist of multi ethnic people, yet it is a country that lately
has felt overwhelmed to cope with the increasingly booming immigrants who
come to the American mainland. Of course, the immigrants have come from
different countries with different social backgrounds and some may have
arrived from countries categorized as failed states.
In his book
Who Are We? The Challenges to America’s National Identity (2004), Samuel
P. Huntington shatters the notion that the country is, as is often
repeated, “a nation of immigrants” bound together to the American creed
as the core American identity. He further defines the American creed as
embodying the “principle of liberty, equality, individualism,
representative government and private property”.
Huntington
argues that it was during the 1960s that American identity began to
erode. This was the result of several factors, among them, the beginning
of economic globalization and the rise of global sub-national identities,
the easing of the Cold War and its end in 1989 that reduced the
importance of national identity, attempts by candidates for political
offices to win over groups of voters and the desire of subnational group
leaders to enhance the status of their respective groups and their
personal status within them.
Now, as the
mixture of subnational identities from different backgrounds and social
traditions across the globe are living together on the American mainland,
obviously social frictions are always visible, either because of economic
sentiment, different social traditions or norms that sooner or later
would instantly alienate a particular community. The principle of
liberty, equality, individualism, representative government and private
property has resulted in the loss of communal solidarity and the ethnic
minority either feels alienated or subordinated.
The feeling
of “being alienated”, being “the other” brings out the solidarity of “the
other”, as they have the same feeling and form an exclusive community.
Often this community goes beyond the ordinary community and later on
could create an extreme mindset, which may stimulate radical action.
Living in an environment that highly respects human rights, particularly
freedom of the individual and freedom of expression, indirectly gives
rise to community organizations that actually emerge from the alienation
of identity.
In one
interesting tweet of Dzhokhar Tsarnaev, from his Twitter @J tsar, he
comments about the role of minorities in the United States. “There are people that know the truth
but stay silent & there are people that speak the truth but we don’t
hear them cuz they’re the minority.”
What we learn
from this tragedy is that Indonesia, with 240 million people and 34
provinces with various tribes and ethnicities, is potentially in an
identity crisis; especially because our slogans such as “Unity in
Diversity” have increasingly been forgotten as they are regarded as a
legacy of the authoritarian New Order regime. Some cases, like the
violence against the Ahmadis in Cikeusik and the two attacks on Shiites
in Sampang are only a few manifestations of alienation of identity
occurring in our homeland.
Of course, we
Indonesians hope that what happened in Boston will not occur in our
country, but with the same potential for identity crisis, we need to take
a lesson. The Boston bombings should inspire policymakers, security
apparatus and social activists to map out regions prone to horizontal
conflicts and take measures to prevent escalation of the rifts into acts
of terrorism. ●
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