RE: [nukkad] Bin Ladin

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Osama bin Laden , A Profile - Kajal Basu

What incentive to come to rest do you offer a man who wants nothing except 
absolution through martyrdom? A bullet in the head will be welcome. And it's 
anyone's bet that when Saudi renegade Osama bin Mohammed bin Awad bin Laden 
is finally frozen in the civilised world's headlights, as he inevitably will 
be, he will go down with a hymn in his heart, unperturbed by the carnage he 
has wreaked that has made him today a legend more awesome than Carlos the 
Jackal or that other paradox, the filthy rich mentor of a terrorist 
organisation: Giangiacomo Feltrinelli, the millionaire malcontent who 
bankrolled the Italian Brigate Rosse.

Like bin Laden, Feltrinelli was grimly incorruptible and a hands-on urban 
terrorist whose grouch with the system was never quite explainable, given 
that he could more than afford to be neither hands-on nor terrorist. 
Feltrinelli wrote the definitive terrorists' manual that bin Laden 
undoubtedly uses as a bible. After all that glory, Feltrinelli's body was 
discovered emasculated by a mistimed bomb he had been trying to attach to a 
power pylon in northern Italy.

Bin Laden has somewhat more money and muscle than Feltrinelli. Feltrinelli's 
concerns were worldlier and more anarchic, not theocratic, and he never made 
it to the top of the "World's Most Wanted" list. The best, or worst, that he 
did was shoot down two carabinieri outside a poor bank in a poor Italian 
village plaza.

Bin Laden is, on the other hand, an anatomy of awesome statistics: at 44 
years old, worth between US$ 250-300 million (family money worth over $5 
billion, but he has been given his share and ripped of any further legacy); 
a bounty of US$ 5 million on his head (soon to be doubled, according to 
reports); before Black Tuesday, bin Laden's bomb attacks in 1998 at the US 
embassies in Kenya and Tanzania alone had killed 224 people and injured 
4,000; his attrition rate is the highest of any terrorist in the world: his 
group, the al-Qaida (Arabic for "The Base") kills an average of 125 people 
per attack, compared to the six per attack that is the average of the next 
best terrorist group in the world, the Palestinian Hamas.

With such a CV, what forgiveness? The world's worst - and best - are usually 
born unheralded. Osama was the 17th of 52 children born to a wealthy Saudi 
banker, Sheikh Mohammed bin-Awad bin Laden, and his 10 wives. His birth, in 
the al-Malazz neighbourhood of al-Riyadh in the Arabian Peninsula in 1957, 
is not yet a pilgrimage - but it will be, the moment he is martyred, as he 
will be by the vengeful US.

To both the Islamic orthodoxy and contemporary hotbloods, Osama bin Laden's 
icy violence has a certain genealogical validation: his father, having built 
the mosque at Mecca where the Kaabah is located, and the mosque at Medina, 
is doubly blessed. Osama sold himself to the conservative Saudi royalty by 
doing restoration work on the Dome of the Rock at half the cost price (and 
still, inexplicably, like Milo Minderbinder in Catch-22, made a killing).

But Osama's family, according to Sa'ad al Din Ibrahim, journalist and social 
sciences professor at Cairo's American University, has little access to 
Saudi royalty. Despite its wealth, it is considered marginal in top Saudi 
society. Of all the members of his family, he is the only one who's gained a 
measure of cognisance, and for all the wrong reasons. In a sense, then, it 
is through jehad that Osama bin Laden seeks to legitimise his upbringing.

He used this connect with the pure to do what most orthodox Muslims would 
balk at - play the world's corporations like a lute and fill his kitty. Bin 
Laden's rise to the romantic pedestal of being the world's most wanted man 
wasn't giddy: he worked at it for a decade starting 1979. In the early 
1980s, like other bloodwarmed young Saudis who saw the compleat Evil Empire 
in the Soviets, joined up with the proto-Taliban, the American-backed 
mujahideen hyper-armed with $6 billion worth of state-of-the-art weaponry 
and trained to waste themselves on the Russians in Afghanistan.

By the time the fighting in Afghanistan was over, bin Laden was a human 
Humvee made of Islamic fundamentalism, millionaire with nothing to spend on, 
and serious muscle in search of flexing. He had also built up the ideology 
that fuels him today, a proselytising Islamic dogma that sees the US-Israel 
combine as the Arab world's "external archenemy", his war-rant the 
"Crusader-Jewish alliance".

His extremism got him exiled and stripped of citizenship from Saudi Arabia 
in 1991, the year the Gulf War hewed the region into the pro- and anti-US 
camps that exist to this day. Moving to Sudan, he bought himself a place by 
investing millions of dollars and employing thousands of poor citizens in 
essentially charitable, non-profit ventures. Early 1992 saw him issuing a 
fatwa - not valid by religion, but do the youngbloods care? - against 
American installations in Saudi Arabia and Somalia. In 1993, the al-Qaida 
killed 18 US Army Rangers in Somalia and bin Laden capped the occasion by 
saying, "If someone can kill an American soldier, it is better than wasting 
time on other matters."
In 1996, pressured by the pro-US Arabian syndicate, Sudan threw him out. 
Nevertheless, said Abd-al-Bari Atwan, editor-in-chief of the London-based 
Arabic daily, Al-Quds al-Arabi, "Currently, he does not want to fight the 
(Arab) regimes. He wants to fight the Americans, who are protecting these 
regimes."

Travelling feather-light, bin Laden stoically relocated to Afghanistan; 
today, he operates his vast and Byzantine financial empire from the dry 
cave-bunkers of Kandahar. And, living like the ur-ascetic beloved of all 
faiths, he weaves layers of legends around himself.

Like all warriors of the faith, bin Laden has one legend of his own making 
that he feeds off. Battling the Russians in Afghanistan, he and his group of 
35 men at the al-Ansar Lions' Den are said to have held their ground for two 
weeks of fierce fighting. The Russians threw everything they had at him, 
including helicopter gunships. Bin Laden had no Stingers to stave them off, 
but he dug in till the Taliban irregulars arrived.

One of his defining peeves is that after the US armed the Afghan mujahideen 
for its own self-serving purposes, it tried to pressure them to form an 
entirely alien machinery of governance, a "secular government". Bin Laden 
believes that the Taliban movement came to the mujahideen's and the Arab 
world's rescue. The Taliban endeared themselves to him by "defeating" a 
US-supported Afghan government that was intrinsically heretical, that had 50 
per cent of its members from among, he said, "former Communists and some of 
those who had studied in the West, and the rest…from the seven Afghan 
parties".

Over the years, bin Laden has infiltrated corporations worldwide, bought 
some incognito, creating a wealth of corporate frontages, including American 
ones, that would be difficult to trace back to him conclusively. 
Intelligence authorities believe that his network worms through more than 60 
countries, most of them unsuspecting, and that he has safehouses in 20 more, 
including India (proven), the European Union (proven) and the US (much 
suspected but, frustratingly, unproven).

The American authorities say that they can pin him down to the 1993 blast at 
the World Trade Centre that killed six and injured more than 100; to an 
explosion at the Egyptian embassy in Pakistan; plan to bomb US and Israeli 
embassies in Manila and other Asian capitals (late 1994); to plots to hit 
former US president Bill Clinton (the Philippines, early 1995), Pope John 
Paul II (Manila, late 1994), Egyptian president Hosni Mubarak; and a plan to 
blow up six US trans-Pacific Boeing 747s (1995).

Then came the September 1998 Nairobi blast just inside the walls of the US 
embassy there. The explosion killed 213 people, including 12 Americans, and 
4,500 were wounded. Just 10 minutes after the Nairobi blast, a bomb inside a 
refrigerator truck detonated outside the US embassy in suburban Da-es-Salaam 
in Tanzania, killing 11 people, none of them American.

Then the Americans did something that they found difficult to live down, not 
because of a bout of uncharacteristic post-facto penitence but because of an 
inordinate amount of global civil flak. On August 21, the US launched a 
Cruise missile assault on bin Laden's camp in Afghanistan and what it said 
was a chemical weapons facility in Khartoum, Sudan.

Bin Laden's contempt of America is scouring. "Based on the reports we 
received from our brothers who participated in jehad in Somalia," he said, 
"we learned that they saw the weakness, frailty and cowardice of US troops. 
Only 80 US troops were killed. Nevertheless, they fled in the heart of 
darkness, frustrated, after they had caused great commotion about the new 
world order."

His rage against the US is adequately Islamic - it is, for purposes of 
publicity, aimed only at American men. "Our enemy, the target - if God gives 
Muslims the opportunity to do so - is every American male, whether he is 
directly fighting us or paying taxes (sic)," he said. In short, every 
American male going about his daily business is a walking target for 
retribution. It is another matter that the World Trade Centre blasts on 
Black Tuesday were hardly gender-specific.

As matters stand as of time of uploading, bin Laden's whereabouts are a 
matter of conjecture. US President George W Bush yesterday underlined a 
strategy of vengeance - that the US would hit not only the perpetrators of 
the actual violence but also the harbourers of the perpetrators. Kabul was 
hit last night by missiles and jets from the Northern Alliance resistance. 
Despite all protestations to the contrary, it was a symbolic and indicative 
hit ordered by the Bush Administration.

If Bush sticks to his strategy, next in line for a coldly measured dose of 
punition is Pakistan. The Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) has already 
pinpointed in its post-WTC investigations a Pakistani family that runs a 
baggage handling enterprise. Looking back for Pakistan's involvement with 
bin Laden, however cursory it might have been, an incident comes to mind: 
after the second Gulf War, he had travelled to Peshawar in Pakistan on an 
exit-only visa given to him by the Saudi government that had ostracised him. 
Bin Laden made no effort to hide his satisfaction. "We supported the 
Pakistani people and congratulated them when God was gracious enough to 
enable them to acquire the nuclear weapon," he was to say. "We regard this 
as one of our rights, of Muslim rights."

God knows the issue is no longer about human rights.

http://www.tehelka.com/channels/currentaffairs/2001/sept/12/ca091201osa1.htm



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