Author:
Publication: The Straits Times
Date: June 22, 2004
URL: http://straitstimes.asia1.com.sg/news/story/0,4386,257320,00.html?
Introduction: Islamic Militants
Record Gruesome Killings And Post Them On Web To Get Media Coverage
There has been a progression in
the terrorists' exploitation of images to announce and dramatise their
killings.
Beheading has been adapted widely
by Muslim radicals for killing enemies in recent conflicts in Algeria,
Bosnia and Chechnya, experts said.
But the executioners of Wall Street
Journal reporter Daniel Pearl in Pakistan in 2002, Pennsylvania businessman
Nick Berg in Iraq on May 11 and aviation engineer Paul Johnson in Saudi
Arabia on Friday have turned the act into propaganda by using digital cameras
to record the spectacle.
On Friday, the grisly images were
posted on the Web for a global audience, including Westerners for whom
decapitation is particularly shocking.
The Site Institute - a Washington
organisation which tracks terrorist groups - located on Friday an Arabic-language
communique about Mr Johnson's killing accompanied by grim photographs of
the murder on a website set up recently using the free service provided
by Geocities, a subsidiary of Yahoo!.
Said Site analyst Josh Devon: 'Terrorism
doesn't work unless the media is involved. Shooting someone isn't necessarily
terrorism.
Beheading someone and posting it
on the Web is terrorism.'
In Mr Pearl's case, video footage
of the murder was delivered to the US consulate in Karachi. Only later
was it posted on the Internet and aired in part by CBS News.
The video of Mr Berg's killing was
posted immediately on the Web, provoking a storm of grief and outrage.
Mr Johnson's killers managed to
draw even more attention by announcing in their Web posting on Tuesday
that he would be killed in 72 hours if their demands were not met.
'Here, we had the countdown: This
guy was alive, but yet we knew he was doomed as the 72-hour countdown went
on,' said Mr Robert Thompson, a media and culture expert at Syracuse University
in New York.
The combination of ritual murder
with digital communications 'is this bizarre collision of worlds'.
He said the Internet had a powerful
pull for terror groups because it allowed instant, international distribution
to groups that otherwise could not broadcast their message through traditional
media.
He said terror groups had been savvy
enough to recognise, however, that only the most violent, most graphic
events will draw attention.
'You can't put just anything on
the Internet and expect people to pay attention,' he said.
'I can think of few things other
than a beheading that is able to singularly focus people's attention.'
Mr Marc Sageman, a former CIA officer
and author of Understanding Terror Networks, said decapitation had been
used widely by militants in Algeria, Chechnya and Bosnia.
'This has become the ritual way
of slaughtering infidels,' he said. 'That's the way you slaughter animals,
so I suppose it's a way of saying infidels are no better than animals.'
While beheading went out of use
long ago in the West, the Saudi government still uses it for executing
men and occasionally women for serious crimes, occasionally including religious
crimes such as blasphemy.
The government's senior executioner,
Mr Muhammad Saad al-Beshi, gave several media interviews last year, bragging
that his sword is 'very sharp. People are amazed how fast it can separate
the head from the body'. -- LAT-WP
