Global Word to Terrorists: You Killed
My Beloved
March 20, 2005
By
GLENN COLLINS
They
are still aggrieved. And they are not going away.
The families of the victims of the 2001 terror
attacks have been a powerful force in Washington and New York. Their
vocal persistence and moral suasion forced the White House to accept
an independent investigation on the attacks of Sept. 11, and they
doggedly monitored the subsequent hearings. Then, they helped
overcome White House reluctance to appoint a national director of
intelligence.
Arnold Roth addresses the Bogota Congress | Click the
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In Manhattan and Albany, the families have been
important in shaping plans for a World Trade Center memorial and in
preserving remnants of the site that were fated to be buried under a
basement garage.
But now the families are taking on their newest and
possibly most daunting challenge: to make common cause with
thousands of other international victims, not only to foster mutual
support, but also to discredit global terrorism itself.
Some have already proffered aid and expertise to
victims' groups from other countries. Others believe that by
doggedly continuing to tell their heartbreaking stories of pain and
remembrance, they can put a human face on those who have died.
In this way, they say, they hope to challenge
terrorists' attempts to stereotype victims as infidels, capitalist
tools or ciphers lacking humanity.
Ultimately some of the families hope that in bringing
their high-powered advocacy to a new level, they may make it more
embarrassing, or even impossible, to romanticize or legitimize
terrorist acts.
"It would be the height of arrogance for the 9/11
families to think that our experience is so unique that it isn't
connected to victims beyond our borders," said Thomas Rogér, one of
the founders of Families of September 11, whose daughter Jean was a
flight attendant on the hijacked plane that hit the north tower.
Mr. Rogér said his group was interested in working
with foreign victims of terrorism not only to provide assistance but
also "to support international initiatives which can slow down or
stop the spread of terrorism."
Robert McIlvaine, whose son Robert was killed in the
north tower, said he hoped for "a link to other countries and other
stories, so that ours can become an overwhelming voice."
He added, "Telling our stories gives the victims
dignity, and helps make real the pain of the survivors."
The family members are not unmindful of their past
effectiveness. "We have been given a special voice by virtue of the
people who died," said Bruce Wallace, whose nephew, Mitch Wallace, a
court officer, was killed in the collapse of the north tower. "None
of the congressmen or senators would let us into their offices if
there weren't dead people marching beside us. So we feel some
responsibility for using that voice to change this world."
And so, some victims even hope they might be Paul
Reveres to the world.
"Telling people what happened to us helps them
realize that it can happen again," said Tony Rose, a retired United
States Army sergeant major who was wounded when Flight 77 crashed
into the Pentagon. "I think we'll be saying, 'You could be next.' "
In Bogotá, Colombia, last month, four members of
Sept. 11 families' organizations - as well as Mr. Rose and two
representatives of the 1995 Oklahoma City bombing victims' groups -
spoke openly about their losses at a conference attended by those
who experienced terrorist attacks in Colombia, Indonesia, Israel,
Spain, Northern Ireland, Chile, Argentina and Beslan, Russia.
Many at the gathering of 1,500 people, the second
International Congress on Victims of Terrorism, had been maimed in
attacks, and dozens walked with the assistance of crutches or canes.
Some, blinded by bombs or land mines, attended with their guide
dogs.
The scope of terrorism in Colombia alone "really
knocked me back," said Mr. Wallace, a science teacher at John Dewey
High School in Brooklyn.
The Colombian president, Álvaro Uribe-Vélez, who
addressed the conference, estimated that 20,000 of his citizens a
year are killed in terrorist attacks or kidnappings. "That amounts
to six times the number of people we lost on Sept. 11th every year,"
Mr. Wallace said.
Mr. McIlvaine, who attended the conference as a
member of Sept. 11th Families for Peaceful Tomorrows, said: "I feel
badly about losing my son. But here I was talking to a severely
burned mother who lost her three sons, and I thought, what am I
complaining about?"
The dozens of sometimes fractious Sept. 11 groups are
disparate in their politics - some opposing, some favoring the Iraq
war - but, Mr. Wallace said, "There is a bond between us that is
beyond politics."
Many are opening global connections to other victims.
Mr. McIlvaine said his family group hoped to organize an
international victims' conference in the United States in the next
year. Mr. Wallace, part of the same group, said the organization has
reached out to a Northern Ireland group, Families Acting for
Innocent Relatives, and has started a dialogue with the terrorism
victims' group in Colombia, "and we are asking them, very simply,
'How do you think we can help you?' "
At the Bogotá conference, Mr. Rogér had discussions
with the former prime minister of Spain, José María Aznar, about
"moving from the national scale to the international scale," Mr.
Rogér said. Another organization, the World Trade Center United
Family Group, has corresponded with victims of the March 11, 2004,
train bombing in Madrid.
There is evidence that monetary settlements for the
victims' families are being used to fuel some of the groups'
international efforts. For example, the United Family Group and an
allied organization, the Coalition of 9/11 Families, made
contributions following the Asian tsunami.
"We reached out to our families, and so far we've
raised $142,000 for a hospital in Sri Lanka," said Anthony Gardner,
executive director of the United Family group, whose brother, Harvey
Joseph Gardner III, died in the north tower on Sept. 11.
Some in victims' groups said they hoped that they
could help stop what they see as the news media's fascination with
terrorists, who, they charged, are rewarded with attention for their
attacks.
Arnold Roth, whose 15-year-old daughter,
Malki, died in a
suicide bombing in Jerusalem, said he was appalled when
television news producers wanted to pair him in interviews with the
father of the bomber who killed his daughter.
"It is an entirely bogus comparison, creating a false
symmetry between the person who did the killing and the victim," he
said. "It betrays a factual and moral confusion in the media that
leads to the dehumanization of the victims."
But in moving into a grander arena, the families are
inevitably confronting issues involving the political use of victims
and the debate over the role of state terrorism.
At the conference, Juan Pablo Letelier, whose father,
Orlando Letelier, a former Chilean foreign minister, was killed by a
bomb in Washington in 1976, set by Chile's military dictatorship,
denounced his father's death as a "case of state terrorism" where
"the victims were called terrorists."
Certainly the American academic who was most in
disfavor at the Bogotá conference was one who was not invited to
attend: Prof. Ward L. Churchill of the University of Colorado at
Boulder, whose essay about the 2001 terrorist attacks said that the
"technocrats" in the twin towers were "little Eichmanns," referring
to the Nazi leader Adolf Eichmann.
His response to 9/11 families' criticism is perhaps a
harbinger of the opposition they may face as they move into the
international arena.
"Sept. 11th was a natural and inevitable response to
what the U.S. is doing in the world," Professor Churchill said.
"I do not see theirs as an effective strategy," he
said of the victims' groups. "What they are doing is self-indulgent.
They focus on the incredible value of 3,000 Americans while ignoring
this mountain of corpses elsewhere. The United States has no right
to bomb innocent populations."
Furthermore, Professor Churchill said, there "are
mitigating circumstances" for terrorism. "People can be driven mad
by what is done to them," he said.
But Kenneth Thompson, whose mother, Virginia, was
killed in the Oklahoma City bombing, said that terrorists do not
have the patience to work for democratic change or the courage to
fight under arms, attacking only unarmed, unsuspecting people, for
which "there is no excuse."
Donald R. Hamilton, vice president of the National
Memorial Institute for the Prevention of Terrorism in Oklahoma City,
added, "Gandhi and Martin Luther King proved that you can have a
successful revolution without attacking the innocent."
William Frazer, director of the Northern Ireland
group, said that "there is no good terrorism or bad terrorism,"
adding: "The activity itself must be labeled despicable. It is only
about death."
Victims at the conference gave an abundance of
testimony on this point, and the organizers' Web site,
www.usergioarboleda.edu.co/congresovictimas, carries the text of
its manifesto condemning global terrorism.
Dozens of Colombians described killings and woundings
by the country's narco-terrorists, paramilitary groups and bandits.
And Colombian journalists described how their colleagues had been
assaulted.
The 9/11 family members acknowledge that they are in
for a long struggle. "For the rest of my life," Mr. McIlvaine said,
"I would like to give a voice and a face to the victims from the
United States - and from everywhere."
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