Blood Brotherhoods

In Colombia it is cocaine that funds both the criminal cartels and the guerilla movement. Sometimes the links between the cartels, guerilla movements and the army are extremely confused. The CIA has long been suspected of using drug money to fund a ‘black’ budget used in counter-insurgency, a secret cabal within a secret organisation. Meanwhile, three IRA members are captured in El Salvador and Libya has been linked with providing arms to several terrorist groups, some seemingly unconnected to the immediate strategic interests of that country. For David Hicks it didn’t matter what he was fighting for, just as long as he was fighting for something. It seemed to be the only place he felt needed and wanted. The psychiatrist Jerrold Post has suggested that, “individuals become terrorists in order to join terrorist groups and commit acts of terrorism”[i]. David Hicks is a perfect example of the type attracted to violent criminal, political or partisan based terrorist gangs. Post goes onto say that, “For many, belonging to the terrorist group may be the first time they truly belonged, the first time they felt truly significant, the first time they felt that what they did counted”. This may very well be the case, but why join groups that engage in tragic cycles of violence? In a letter to home David Hicks reports coming across the stripped and bloated bodies of Kosovar women and children, with obscenities written on their flesh. The Serbs had been through the village a couple of days before to commit the atrocities, but we know now that similar Kosovar militia retaliated in kind. Where was the justice in this war? We should not be surprised. This is the common thread that unites the blood brotherhoods, a life of outrageous violence. But what is the cause of these brotherhoods? Why are groups of men connected in networks of violent political, religious, ethnic and criminal brotherhoods, networks that transcend the original cause to integrate into a worldwide underground of death merchants; death through drugs, arms and terrorism? I do not want to understate the original conditions that give rise to such religious, political, ethnic or criminal terrorism. In many cases such terrorism has a first cause in genuine cases of political, social or economic oppression. This oppression may be at the hands of a state, a rival ethnic group, or as a result of economic inequity. But there is much more at work here. There is a deeper cause, and uncovering that deeper cause is the subject of this chapter.

THE STAGES OF DEVELOPMENT