One extreme to another...

“I am prepared to die. Of course.

“The hate is so real, so great that it raises you [above] consciousness, and you see, for the first time ever, clearly. You see what is there, not what you hope for. You see them for what they are....for them, I can hope for nothing less than death.

“I pray it is agonising.”

Lastri currently languishes in Sukun Women’s Prison on the Indonesian island of Java. She was arrested after a failed attempt to blow herself up inside the island’s largest court in January 2000. She is neither a member of a terrorist cell nor a seasoned fundamentalist in pursuit of legendary martyrdom.

She is a grieving mother, to whom no apology will bring satisfaction or comfort. Only blood and fire will do.

Following the downfall of President Suharto in 1998, tensions between Christian and Muslim communities dramatically rose and in February of that year, 14 people were killed in clashes between youths of the rival faiths. One of them was Lastri’s son.

“No one came to the funeral. They were terrified there would be more killing. So I buried my only child alone, not even my pastor would stay to help push dirt over the coffin...It’s up to me, alone, to find the animals who did this to my son and execute them.”

When asked by prison officials whether she considered the potential innocent lives she would have taken had her bomb detonated, she repeatedly replied,

“No one is innocent.”

Whether it is a car bomb exploding on a bustling city street, a politician shot dead on the steps of a presidential palace or a man erupting into flames before the eyes of his oppressors, our reaction is instinctive: disgust, dismissal as lunacy or perhaps even nonchalance.

Across the spectrum of media, it is deemed simpler to judge the actions of mad men rather their motives. In the Indonesian press, Lastri was characterised as a ‘the disgrace of her family, who would be right to desert her’ and ‘the weeping witch’ and even speculated on links to Al Qaida. Even the BBC, who briefly mentioned the incident on the World Service, described her as ‘ruthless’ and ‘unstable’. Not a single media outlet reported that her son was killed in violence a year previously or that, by its very nature, had an impact on her subsequent actions.

The US government defines extremists, somewhat unsympathetically, as those who operate on the peripheries of society, seeking unobtainable goals with uncompromising determination.

In this definition we find the vaguest reflection of the psychology behind an ‘extremist’. Someone who ‘operates on the peripheries of society’ can also be interpreted as someone who feels they have been actively, or passively, deprived of understanding, either of who they are or what they believe. Whether it’s political fundamentalists, Stonewall rioters, Suffragettes finding martyrdom beneath the hooves of a horse or a grieving mother, those in history who have resorted to violence and self-mutilation, those we often characterise as ‘villains’, are usually born of the injustices an insensitive majority wreaks upon them – especially when that injustice appears unfounded.

“There is never an excuse for violence,” says Michael Billig, a professor of social sciences at Loughborough University who specialises in the psycho-analysis of terrorism, “but for those groups who feel, rightly or wrongly, that they are isolated from mainstream culture...or that their views and cultures are deliberated neglected, their passion for equality, for a shared investment in society, often manifests itself as violence and contempt.

“The issue, then, is that governments and, ergo people, draw a line, creating an ‘us and them’ scenario, which only pushes the injured parties further from central society...and exacerbates the problem because they’re then left with no alternative but to commit to a policy of radicalism.”

If we take away someone’s voice, surely all they have remaining are their fists? Annabelle Sawyer is a senior researcher at the Harvard Institute of Psychology and has spent the last nine years studying the pathology of extremism.

“The term extremism was coined by the political media...for the purposes of alienating people whose interests conflict with those of the established authority...This is demonstrable in the Catholic church who attempt to label homosexuals as perversions of mankind...or Islamic governments, fearful of female empowerment, cultivating women as merely objects of temptation – certainly not equals.

“Unless they are suffering from mental retardation [sic], you can trace the violence of an individual or a group to the policies of the establishment...who wish to maintain their vested interest in crystallising the current order.”

A striking feature of attempting to research the psychology of extremists is just how little material exists. Type in any number of keys words in Google that include psychology, terrorist, human, extremist, define and certainly you’ll find government measures to tackle radical behaviour or profiles of wanted men and women, but almost nothing critiquing their motivations or why they feel it necessary to abandon their humanity – or, indeed, why they feel it has been stolen from them.

“An interesting study was conducted in 1988, which, startlingly, was later disregarded, in a military prison in Miami that housed Cuban terrorists, many of whom had attempted to kill large numbers of people in Florida,” says Billig, “These were men who felt their nation was being crippled unfairly by the United States – something many young Cubans can’t understand the reasons for.

“The study found that by sitting these men down and having a high-ranking figure apologise to them, it numbed much of their frustration...which is incredible. Further psychological tests found that many – but not all – were beginning to actively revise their attitudes to the United States.”

It is almost impossible to justify extremism. Whereas it may be tempting for gay people to violently attack the Muslim and Christian cults (something it would be difficult to argue they didn’t almost entirely deserve), surely they would be no better than those who seek to demonise them? When we allow hatred to become our hosts and collect arms with hope of bloody revenge, we become no better those who inflicted the original injustice.

That is why, if we, as a global society, wish to defuse many of the adverse effects of extremism, we must first combat the cruel realities that bear them. If the universal media were to see the human behind the atrocity, perhaps a bereft mother in downtown Washington could identify with Lastri. If someone from the Indonesian government had apologised to Lastri, had reminded her that it isn’t impossible to maintain humanity in tragedy, then she may not have decided that justice could only be found in death.

Instead, Lastri is facing a life sentence in Sukun, where, instead of being comforted by memories of her lost son, she will hungrily wonder where his faceless killers hide and how she might find them.