PARIS: According to a major documentary to be broadcast tomorrow evening (Tuesday night in Pakistan) on Franco-German cultural network ARTE, the ‘Human Bomb’ is a phenomenon that’s here to stay, indeed after getting his start in Beirut back in 1983, and being at the center of more than 200 attacks since in Sri Lanka, he’s only just begun his existence as a “poor people’s” weapon against Israel.

Especially when you realize — stresses the documentary — that anybody who wants can become a “human bomb” in exchange for a visit to the local hardware store where the requisite materials will cost you around 170 dollars.

Indeed, claims the documentary by Ilan Ziv and Serge Gordey, it’s only with last September 11 attack on the World Trade Center that the “effectiveness” of the suicide-bomber, has really at last been proved, giving the human-bomb what the French refer to his as — lettres de noblesse — (letters of nobility).

Contrary to what one might think, the documentary is hardly an editorial on the phenomenon of the suicide-bomber, rather it’s based on documentary and eyewitness evidence gathered round the world — notably in Lebanon, Sri Lanka, Iran, Israel and the Palestinian territories — and demonstrates without a doubt that the days of the human-bomb are hardly over.

Indeed, his existence will proliferate in coming months and years, and that — as with the September 11 attack on the United States — his work will be done heretofore on an increasingly larger — and largely global — scale.

Terrorism is an ages-old phenomenon, in fact it got its start in Paris during the French Revolution when in the late 18th century a certain Maximilien de Robespierre, an attorney and sometime aristocrat, decided to accelerate France’s revolution against its past by systematically executing the “enemies of the people” of his day, notably by way of a newly-discovered instrument, the guillotine.

Robespierre’s lesson was not lost on history, for the summary and systematic execution of individuals on a quasi-legal basis became a commonplace occurrence during future revolutions and wars.

As for the human-bomb, although nobody is really certain when he got his start, the documentary does note that Japan was able to produce several thousand Kamikazes at the end of World War II who crashed their planes into American naval vessels throughout the Pacific.

The most recent manifestation of terrorism — the human-bomb — coincides with the Israeli occupation of Lebanon in 1983 and the decision taken by Iranian-trained revolutionaries to destroy the US embassy in Beirut, which is what was done quite handily on April 18, 1983.

CIA agent Robert Baer is extensively interviewed on camera for the documentary, and notes that the phenomenon was so unexpected that when he was told to produce a report on what had happened, why it did happen, and who was behind it, he really didn’t know where to look.

To this day, he is unsure as to who was the “human-bomb” in question, although he thinks that today it was a certain Mohammed Hasouna, for whom a tombstone has been erected in Iran, although nobody is really sure whatever happened to his corpse.

The big change between then and 1944, notes Baer, is that terrorism has become so low-cost that just about anybody who wants can today become a human-bomb in his own right.

The documentary goes on to demonstrate that finding the appropriate materials is child’s play, just as is assembling the bomb, which also calls for a stock of plastic sandwich bags, in which the explosive powder is to be placed. Then everything is strapped around one’s waist, where a slight pull on a detonating device will set it all off.

Indeed, and this is another point made so well by the film, if the number of human-bombs has grown so tremendously in recent years, if their accomplishments — notably last September’s attack on the United States — have taken on such proportions and on an increasingly global scale, it seems largely to be in direct proportion to the efforts undertaken by Israel, and by its Western allies, to attempt to control the phenomenon.

The principal point of the Arte documentary seems to be, indeed, that the human-bomb is a phenomenon that is here to stay, for it feeds on itself, and that the number of suicide-bombers will undoubtedly grow exponentially, if nobody does anything to eliminate the underlying problems that give rise to this most recent, gravest, most sordid, but perhaps most fascinating form of terror.