Johann Hari: Why suicide bombers die with a smile

Roll up, roll up, read the same old story all over again. The occupation of Palestine has murderously enraged a gang of its victims, and a group of zealots have taken matters into their own hands. They have committed a series of suicide killings: more deaths, more weeping mothers, no progress.

You may have missed this particular story though; their weapons were daggers (they slit their own throats after killing scores of their occupiers), and the perpetrators were Jews resisting Roman occupation in the first century AD.

As suicide bombs incinerate victims from Chechnya to Jerusalem to Casablanca, our understanding of suicide bombing is still cluttered with myths and half-truths. The biggest falsehood is that suicide bombing is an exclusively Muslim phenomenon. Two-thirds of the suicide killings committed in the past two decades were not committed by Muslims.

The pioneers and masters of contemporary suicide bombing are the Tamil Tigers. They have killed a Sri Lankan president and an Indian prime minister - and they are Hindu nationalists seeking independence from Sri Lanka.

Half the suicide bombings in Lebanon since 1983 were by secular communists opposing Israeli occupation.

And British men have been murdered by non-Muslim suicide killers in living memory: kamikaze pilots were a key part of the Japanese war effort from 1943 on. They were followers of Shintoism.

Once we have dismissed the notion that Islam is inherently fanatical and murderous, we must look for other causes. Many Israeli and American writers claim that a sick Arab culture that venerates death is responsible.

Suicide bombers, they say, are simply nihilists. One US columnist offers a typical view: "These people have no political agenda beyond the desire to bring death for its own sake. We are witnessing an outbreak of political insanity. It has no more cause than a guy who goes mad slowly and has to be taken to the nuthouse."

This belief is comforting but untrue.

Like a battered wife who kills her husband, suicide bombers are reacting in an illegitimate way to legitimate grievances.

The Versailles Treaty and the injustices it imposed on the German people were a necessary ingredient in the rise of Nazism; the present miseries of the Arab world are giving rise to a strain of Islamofascism.

This obviously does not excuse either. I hate jihadists as much as anyone. Indeed, I might hate them even more because, given that I am gay and I have Jewish relatives, the al Qaeda thugs who killed innocent people last week believe that I, too, should be killed: not just once but twice over.

But we must be honest. The suicide bombers we confront today are reacting to real problems, albeit horribly. Far from being nihilism, suicide bombing is a desperate attempt to effect political change. It is an act of hope, however perverted.

Survivors of these attacks usually report that the bombers die with a smile - and this is not to do with the belief that they are going to heaven, because secular and Hindu bombers do the same.

In the developed world, we find this notion of optimistic suicide hard to understand. The notion of subsuming yourself in a collective cause to the extent that you gladly give up your own life to advance the interests of the group seems incomprehensible to a culture based on the self-determining individual.

The cause of these killings is not individual madness - something Westerners can relate to - but collective despair in the Arab world, a phenomenon harder to understand.

This despair - which suicide bombers believe, according to the surprisingly upbeat notes and videos they leave behind, that they can reverse - is caused by the tyrannies that have reduced the Arab peoples to living in a cultural, political and economic bog.

This tyranny is partly the work of Arab dictators, partly of the Western governments that have backed them, and partly of a self-imposed, internal cultural tyranny.

A group of Arab intellectuals investigated the problems for the United Nations last year, and the report is unbearably bleak.

"Arabs today feel monitored. [Their governments and peoples] show a lack of hospitality to anyone of free spirit, anyone who is a dissident, anyone who is different," explained Fouad Ajami, who was on the commission.

There is no free exchange of ideas, no entrepreneurialism, no science.

The extent to which the Arab world has sealed itself off from cultural interaction with the world is breathtaking: last year the Spanish translated more works of literature into their native language than have been translated by Arabs into theirs in the thousand years since the reign of the Caliph Mamoun.

The biggest victims of this are Arabs themselves.

Israel has, in this sea of autocracies, become a unifying force, a helpful demon. Of course, the Israeli occupation of Gaza and the West Bank - where 40 per cent of Palestinian children are suffering from malnutrition, and the Israeli Army is killing civilians at an intolerable rate - contributes, and it is legitimate for Palestinians to resist this with violence directed at the Israeli military (but not civilians).

Important though ending the occupation is, however, it is only a small aspect of the overall repression that is breeding these killings.

There are 280 million Arabs, and fewer than three million in the occupied territories. Why is there such a disproportionate amount of rage expended on the Israeli occupation, when Arabs everywhere are tyrannised?

We need to help all Arabs, not just Palestinians, with ways to influence politics short of blasting themselves to pieces. This is why it is so important that Tony Blair and George Bush hold firm to the commitments they gave to help to establish representative, democratic government in Iraq.

International policing, although able to prevent many of these killings, will never be able to stop every bomber getting through. The only long-term way to deal with suicide bombing is to provide alternative, democratic outlets for Arab political anger.

Al Qaeda and Hamas don't want democracy - indeed, they loathe it - but a democratic, self-determining Arab world would not breed suicide-murder because such a world would not be humiliated, dejected and barren of achievement.

The fundamentalists of al Qaeda would find themselves short of recruits if the young men they prey on have real economic and political opportunities.

To achieve this goal, which seems today as unfeasible as an entirely democratic, peaceful Europe must have seemed in 1943, would require a massive intensification of effort on the part of our own governments, and not just in Iraq.

The Arab peoples will have to achieve democracy for themselves, but we can reverse our shameful Cold War history and help - in our own self-interest if not out of benevolence. We are in a strong position to do so: Arab economies depend on our trade and, especially in Egypt, on our aid.

Even if Blair and Bush only see through the commitments they have already made, in a decade there will be two independent Arab democracies: Iraq and Palestine. Democracy has a habit of being contagious.

This is the only real yardstick for progress in the war on terrorism, and only this outcome would mean that the Iraq war will - in the long term - have made us all safer.

- INDEPENDENT