Hostage case won’t change Australian security situation

By James Brown Source:Global Times Published: 2014-12-21 23:08:01

Illustration: Liu Rui/GT



Many Australians are asking themselves whether last week's incident in Sydney, in which a shotgun-wielding man held multiple hostages captive and killed two, was a terrorist attack or not. To be sure, the perpetrator, Man Haron Monis, was a self-styled Sunni cleric who demanded that he be brought the flag of the Islamic State (IS) during negotiations with police. He had previously called for Australia to cease its military campaign in Afghanistan and written hate-letters to the families of Australian soldiers serving there. But to say this was an act of terrorism is to exaggerate Monis's actions and give IS credit it doesn't deserve.

Thankfully, Australia has been relatively free from the scourge of terror. In 2009, a radical Melbourne-based cleric and six of his followers were convicted of planning terrorist attacks in Sydney and Melbourne that never occurred because police disrupted their efforts early on.

That same year, five men linked to the Somali group Al-Shabaab were arrested for planning an attack on a military base in Sydney.

In the past six months, Australian authorities have become increasingly concerned about the possibility of "lone wolves" becoming radicalized by the rise of IS and carrying out terror attacks on Australian soil. A large part of this concern is founded on the disproportionately large number of Australians who have travelled to Syria and Iraq to fight with IS and the al-Nusra front.

In September, the Australian Federal Police (AFP) raided homes in Sydney and Brisbane to foil networks linked to these foreign fighters. Police also stopped a plot by a small number of IS sympathizers to behead an innocent civilian in Sydney. The site for that attack was to have been Sydney's Martin Place, the pedestrian boulevard in the heart of Sydney's business district where last week's siege unfolded.

Monis's intentions for the siege were unclear. He had no coordinated media plan and no coherent demands beyond wanting to obtain an IS flag and speak with Australian Prime Minister Tony Abbott. It seems his personal need for attention fuelled the decision to take people hostage, not his sympathies with IS. He aligned himself with Sunni Islam only months before, and there is no evidence that Monis ever connected with IS figures. The most likely motivation for Monis's extreme crime was that his final legal appeal to Australia's High Court had been exhausted only days before last Monday's attack.

Australians will remain vigilant to the possibility of terrorism, but it would be wrong to conclude that the attack in Sydney marks a significant worsening of Australia's security situation.

Australia has some of the tightest and most effective gun laws in the world, a legacy of a 1996 crime in which 35 people were shot by a lone madman. Its intelligence agencies are well-funded, and newly improved legislation will help them track the terrorist threat. The AFP have been building their counter-terrorism expertise since the 9/11 attacks, including deep and active cooperation with Indonesian agencies and police to help reduce the terrorist threat in that country.

It is unlikely that this incident will cause a significant boost in Australian terrorism-related legislation or trigger a major change in counter-terror strategies.

But the incident will remind Australians that they are not immune from the problems that plague the rest of the world.

Australia remains deeply engaged in multilateral initiatives to counter terror, including through its active role in the UN and its recent presidency of the UN Security Council. The Australian military and police are committed to the global coalition working to reduce the threat posed by IS and to ensure that returning foreign fighters can't continue their terrorist tactics.

But analyzing terrorism will provide little understanding of why two innocent Australians died on their morning commute.

Instead, understanding how one man could become so isolated in his community and so enraged against the world will help ensure that this kind of crime is unlikely to happen again.

The author is the Military Fellow at the Lowy Institute for International Policy in Sydney. He previously served with the Australian Defence Force in Iraq and Afghanistan. opinion@globaltimes.com.cn



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