Osama, Obama and Tyrannicide

There was no better way to cope with mass murder: about the opposition against tyrants and the boundaries of international criminal justice.

Hansel and Gretel find hope when a man from Geneva appears in front of the witch’s house. He introduces himself as Doctor Fromage, sent by the Red Cross to “offer his good services.” So begins Ephraim Kishon in one of his best satires: the story of Hansel and Gretel from the view of a modern human rights activist. From inside his cage, Hansel begs the man for protection against the terrorist witch who wants to eat her. Without hesitation, Dr. Fromage sets things straight. “You misunderstand me,” he says. “I don’t plan to involve myself in internal conflicts. My job is to take care of the children and witches, and keep them secure regardless of specific circumstances.”

The witch is delighted: “That’s what I call objectivity!” Hansel and Gretel moan bitterly, but the trained civil servant is not rattled. He insists that no witch in the world would cooperate if he couldn’t stay objective. Even a witch has her ritual meals, her very own lifestyle that have to be objectively accepted. When the witch’s prisoners put up a fight, the man searches the area [for them]. But, in an act of lynch law, the children kill off the cannibal — and are set free.

Kishon wrote the text as a reaction to the public outrage that Israel felt when, in May 1972, the country exercised deadly violence against terrorists who started a bloodbath among passengers at a Tel Aviv airport. By getting into the grotesque through the use of fairytale elements, the satire essentially contains elements of the discussion about how, in the face of the violent deaths of violent criminals, the outrage had not only just become virulent back then and is now, in the case of “Obama and Osama,” once again rekindled.

Out of the ancient world came the concept of tyrannicide as an act of liberation from illegitimate, violent rule. In the early modern era, thoughts of the right to resist developed, after which the revolt against, and eradication of, unjust rule received quasi-natural-right status. Immanuel Kant distrusted the right to resist because the philosopher feared that it could easily become an excuse for individuals to oppose the state. Also, to the German legal positivism of the 19th century, the right to resist was — unlike Friedrich Schiller’s rebel in his “Hostage”— suspicious while it, in view of illegitimate states, considered the United States, France and Great Britain legitimate. Since 1968 the German Basic Law has contained the right to resist in Article 20, Paragraph 4: “All Germans have the right to resist any person seeking to abolish this constitutional order, if no other remedy is available.” Certainly the people of the time had their sights on the legitimization of emergency laws, not the assassination of a tyrant.

As the waves of debate surge over the question whether it is legally, ethically, morally or theologically lawful to liquidate a mass murderer like Osama bin Laden, as an American military task force did during the night on Monday [May 2, 2011] of this past week, one should imagine who the liquidated enemy was: Osama bin Laden was a non-state actor; a mass murderer on the global stage who was called to murder the “unbelievers.” As an asymmetrical enemy, he had declared his war on the United States on all fronts of the globe and by all available means of violence.

Before the mass murder of September 11, 2001, his messages didn’t inspire a lot of confidence. His “fatwa against the Jews and Crusaders” on February 23, 1998 called it the “individual duty of every Muslim to kill the Americans and their Allies — civilian and military” in order to liberate the al-Aqsa Mosque in Jerusalem and Mecca. The native country of the nomadic terrorist was Saudi Arabia; his crime scenes were located on the continents of Africa, America, Asia and Europe. The fact that America’s mortal enemy has now died at the hand of the country of his victims can be interpreted as the right to resist put into practice.

In Germany, there is a greater sense of resentment than relief. Tonight [Sunday, May 9, 2011] the Anne-Will-Runde will deal with the question of whether or not it is acceptable to actually be “glad” about this death. Ironically, this sentiment is working its way through a country where the — unfortunately unsuccessful — would-be assassins of July 20, who wanted to kill Hitler, were treated as national heroes. You often hear the argument that a terrorist has rights. Even a pedocriminal has rights, so bin Laden should have also been put before the courts. You don’t have to be Hansel and Gretel to rub your eyes [in amazement] at this. How the state handles pedocriminals — with therapy, imprisonment and/or punishment — is incomparable to the question of what the appropriate reaction is to terrorist groups that want to destroy democratic systems. [In this situation] it’s as if we lapse back into a pre-political state of nature.

Of course, modern democratic institutions should uphold and cultivate their standards of justice and human rights. The ideal to which democracies are committed is that not only is no one above the law, but also that the law applies to everyone equally; regardless of whether they’re a terrorist, a sexual predator, a war criminal or a mafia boss. No witch is without rights. In a constitutional democracy, the law depends on a fair trial, defense for the defendants, humane prison conditions and transparent court cases. For example, this applies to the U.N. criminal courts for the former Yugoslavia or Rwanda, where the instigators stood trial for genocide among other things.

Where such trials are successful — trials in which the witnesses are not murdered, judges are not threatened and the defendants don’t fire up their followers with provocative speeches or kill themselves — this is where democratic institutions are doubly successful, both legally and morally. In Osama bin Laden’s case, under the present conditions, a smooth trial would have hardly been conceivable — aside from the fact that it’s much harder in cases of non-state actors than in cases of state actors for the courts to issue orders.

With regards to the liquidation of the perpetrator bin Laden, President Obama declared, “Justice has been done.” This declaration is pragmatically and ethically lawful. From a legalistic perspective people can and should be calmly concerned. The fact that no one knew of a better way to stop bin Laden, who was apparently hidden by the Pakistani army, doesn’t change anything. When asked why they are so heavily involved in bin Laden’s case instead of turning their attention to the thousands of murder and torture victims of totalitarian regimes, vehement legalists readily answer with a strange argument. They say that the prevailing conditions were already nasty. Yes, we already know that.

For us as Democrats, other standards must apply. For us, the highest priority should be to prevent terror and mass murder. The most prudent thing to do is to counter poverty with force, a concept that comes from the right to resist.