Is it right to support terrorism when you’re just trying to protect people?
June 26th, 2007If you're new here, you may want to subscribe to my RSS feed. Thanks for visiting!
Kyle over at immigration orange always has thought provoking articles and one of the most thought provoking that he has had recently was his piece on the support of terrorists in Colombia by Chiquita Brands.
Chiquita didn’t just decide to support terrorists for the sake of killing people, it justified paying $1.7 million by considering it as protection money for its employees. Does that make it right though? Well, no, it doesn’t but it’s only one high profile example of people making decisions that are expedient at the time.
However, that’s the least of the problems that such support causes. Although the public perception of their aims might be different, terrorist organisations often co-operate with one another and some of that money from Chiquita no doubt found its way back to fund killing of people in Northern Ireland. Would Chiquita be quite so happy if some of their money is found to have been used to fund terrorism in America too?
The fundamental problem is that a number of products that everyone buys are produced in countries where peace is something that might come in the future and the reality of the present day is violence from one or more groups within the country. Doing business in a country like that does entail problems and there is no short-term way around that.
Unfortunately the short-term alternatives aren’t great either. Chiquita and others pulling out of Colombia doesn’t make the problem go away as others will take over the plantations and those bananas will still be sold internationally. In fact, if that wasn’t the case the impact on the Colombian economy could be catastrophic which wouldn’t be good for the cause of peace either: as seems very clear with the recent experiences in Northern Ireland, a strong economy makes the incentive for terrorism dry up very quickly.
We can’t know for sure what Chiquita’s money was used for but $1.7 million is an awful lot of money that would have been much better spent in the cause of peace.
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I’m sure that it’s been there for ages but I just noticed that the playground in the ground of the Stormont Estate had been dedicated to the memory of Mo Mowlam.Mo was one of the many politicians who have fallen by the wayside along the path to peace in Northern Ireland. As Secretary of State for Northern Ireland from 1997 to 1999 it was she who presided over the Good Friday Agreement which is essentially the basis that has established peace although, as can only be expected, it did take quite a while after the signing of that agreement way back in 1998 before various pieces of the puzzle fell into place and a few years after that before people in NI and elsewhere finally got around to accepting that peace had apparently arrived.
As befits its status as the largest inland lake in the British Isles, Lough Neagh in Northern Ireland is host to numerous water activities in the tourist season.
