Koranic duels ease terror
By James Brandon | Contributor to The Christian
Science Monitor

http://csmonitor.com/2005/0204/p01s04-wome.html

SANAA, YEMEN – When Judge Hamoud al-Hitar announced
that he and four other Islamic scholars would
challenge Yemen's Al Qaeda prisoners to a theological
contest, Western antiterrorism experts warned that
this high-stakes gamble would end in disaster.

Nervous as he faced five captured, yet defiant, Al
Qaeda members in a Sanaa prison, Judge Hitar was
inclined to agree. But banishing his doubts, the
youthful cleric threw down the gauntlet, in the hope
of bringing peace to his troubled homeland.

"If you can convince us that your ideas are justified
by the Koran, then we will join you in your struggle,"
Hitar told the militants. "But if we succeed in
convincing you of our ideas, then you must agree to
renounce violence."

The prisoners eagerly agreed.

Now, two years later, not only have those prisoners
been released, but a relative peace reigns in Yemen.
And the same Western experts who doubted this
experiment are courting Hitar, eager to hear how his
"theological dialogues" with captured Islamic
militants have helped pacify this wild and mountainous
country, previously seen by the US as a failed state,
like Iraq and Afghanistan.

"Since December 2002, when the first round of the
dialogues ended, there have been no terrorist attacks
here, even though many people thought that Yemen would
become terror's capital," says Hitar, eyes glinting
shrewdly from beneath his emerald-green turban. "Three
hundred and sixty-four young men have been released
after going through the dialogues and none of these
have left Yemen to fight anywhere else."

"Yemen's strategy has been unconventional certainly,
but it has achieved results that we could never have
hoped for," says one European diplomat, who did not
want to be named. "Yemen has gone from being a
potential enemy to becoming an indispensable ally in
the war on terror."

To be sure, the prisoner-release program is not solely
responsible for the absence of attacks in Yemen. The
government has undertaken a range of measures to
combat terrorism from closing down extreme madrassahs,
the Islamic schools sometimes accused of breeding
hate, to deporting foreign militants.

Eager to spread the news of his success, Hitar
welcomes foreigners into his home, fussing over them
and pouring endless cups of tea. But beyond the
otherwise nondescript house, a sense of menace lurks.
Two military jeeps are parked outside, and soldiers
peer through the gathering dark at passing cars. The
evening wind sweeps through the unpaved streets,
lifting clouds of dust and whipping up men's jackets
to expose belts hung with daggers, pistols, and mobile
telephones.

Seated amid stacks of Korans and religious texts,
Hitar explains that his system is simple. He invites
militants to use the Koran to justify attacks on
innocent civilians and when they cannot, he shows them
numerous passages commanding Muslims not to attack
civilians, to respect other religions, and fight only
in self-defense.

For example, he quotes: "Whoever kills a soul, unless
for a soul, or for corruption done in the land - it is
as if he had slain all mankind entirely. And, whoever
saves one, it is as if he had saved mankind entirely."
He uses the passage to bolster his argument against
bombing Western targets in Yemen - attacks he says
defy the Koran. And, he says, the Koran says under no
circumstances should women and children be killed.

If, after weeks of debate, the prisoners renounce
violence they are released and offered vocational
training courses and help to find jobs.

Hitar's belief that hardened militants trained by
Osama bin Laden in Afghanistan could change their
stripes was initially dismissed by US diplomats in
Sanaa as dangerously naive, but the methods of the
scholarly cleric have little in common with the other
methods of fighting extremism. Instead of lecturing or
threatening the battle-hardened militants, he listens
to them.

"An important part of the dialogue is mutual respect,"
says Hitar. "Along with acknowledging freedom of
expression, intellect and opinion, you must listen and
show interest in what the other party is saying."

Only after winning the militants' trust does Hitar
gradually begin to correct their beliefs. He says that
most militants are ordinary people who have been led
astray. Just as they were taught Al Qaeda's doctrines,
he says, so too can they be taught more- moderate
ideas. "If you study terrorism in the world, you will
see that it has an intellectual theory behind it,"
says Hitar. "And any kind of intellectual idea can be
defeated by intellect."

The program's success surprised even Hitar. For years
Yemen was synonymous with violent Islamic extremism.
The ancestral homeland of Mr. bin Laden, it provided
two-thirds of recruits for his Afghan camps, and was
notorious for kidnappings of foreigners and the
bombing of the American warship USS Cole in 2000 that
killed 17 sailors. Resisting US pressure, Yemen
declined to meet violence with violence.

"It's only logical to tackle these people through
their brains and heart," says Faris Sanabani, a former
adviser to President Abdullah Saleh and
editor-in-chief of the Yemen Observer, a weekly
English-language newspaper. "If you beat these people
up they become more stubborn. If you hit them, they
will enjoy the pain and find something good in it - it
is a part of their ideology. Instead, what we must do
is erase what they have been taught and explain to
them that terrorism will only harm Yemenis' jobs and
prospects. Once they understand this they become
fighters for freedom and democracy, and fighters for
the true Islam," he says.

Some freed militants were so transformed that they led
the army to hidden weapons caches and offered the
Yemeni security services advice on tackling Islamic
militancy. A spectacular success came in 2002 when Abu
Ali al Harithi, Al Qaeda's top commander in Yemen, was
assassinated by a US air-strike following a tip-off
from one of Hitar's reformed militants.

Yet despite the apparent success in Yemen, some US
diplomats have criticized it for apparently letting
Islamic militants off the hook with little guarantee
that they won't revert to their old ways once released
from prison.

Yemen, however, argues that holding and punishing all
militants would create only further discontent,
pointing out that the actual perpetrators of attacks
have all been prosecuted, with the bombers of the USS
Cole and the French oil tanker, the SS Limburg. All
received death sentences.

"Yemeni goals are long-term political aims whereas the
American agenda focuses on short-term prosecution of
military or law enforcement objectives," wrote Charles
Schmitz, a specialist in Yemeni affairs, in 2004
report for the Jamestown Foundation, an influential US
think tank.

"These goals are not necessarily contradictory, with
each government recognizing that compromises and
accommodations must be made, but their ambiguities
create tense moments."

Some members of the Yemeni government also hanker for
a more iron-fisted approach, and Yemen remains on high
alert for further attacks. Fighter planes regularly
swoop low over the ancient mud-brick city of Sanaa to
send a clear message to any would-be militants.

An additional cause of friction with the US is that
while Yemen successfully discourages attacks within
its borders on the grounds that tourism and trade will
suffer, it has done little to tackle anti-Western
sentiment or the corruption, poverty, and lack of
opportunity that fuels Islamic militancy.

"Yemen still faces serious challenges, but despite the
odd hiccup, we sometimes have to admit that Yemenis
know Yemen best," says the European diplomat. "And if
their system works, who are we to complain?"

As the relative success of Yemen's unusual approach
becomes apparent, Hitar has been invited to speak to
antiterrorism specialists at London's New Scotland
Yard, as well as to French and German police, hoping
to defuse growing militancy among Muslim immigrants.

US diplomats have also approached the cleric to see if
his methods can be applied in Iraq, says Hitar.

"Before the dialogues began, there was only one way to
fight terrorism, and that was through force," he says.
"Now there is another way: dialogue."




___________________________________________________________
Trial Yahoo! Mobile for FREE and win 3 dream holidays.
http://www.yahoo.co.uk/trip