The Economist, March 2, 1996, pp. 23-25.
What is terrorism?
The use of terror is more widespread and effective than
is generally recognised
June 1914: a young man in Sarajevo steps up to a carriage
and fires his pistol. The Archduke Eerdinand dies. Within
weeks, the first world war has begun. The 1940s: the French
resistance kill occupying troops when and how they can.
June 1944: at Oradour-sur-Glane, in central France, German
SS troops take revenge, massacring 642 villagers. August
1945: the United States Air Eorce drops the world's first
nuclear weapons. Some 190,000 Japanese die, nearly all of
them civilians. Within days the second world war has ended.
Which of these four events was an act of terrorism? Which
achieved anything? Which, if any, will history judge as
justified? And whose history? Terrorism is not the simple,
sharp-edged, bad-guy phenomenon we all love to condemn. No
clear line marks off politics from the threat of force,
threat from use, use from covert or open war. Who is or is
not a terrorist? The suicide bomber, the rebel guerrilla,
the liberation front, the armed forces of the state?
In practice, what act or person earns the label depends on
who wants to apply it. To Ulster loyalists all IRA violence
is terrorism; to Sinn Fein it is part of a legitimate
war.To many Israelis, everyone from the suicidebombers in
Jerusalem or Ashkelon to the Hizbollah grenade-thrower in
South Lebanon is a terrorist; to many Arabs during the 1982
Lebanon war, the worst terrorists in the Middle East were
the -- entirely legitimate, uniformed -- Israel Defence
Force.
If the concept is not to vanish into all-embracing fudge,
two distinctions can be drawn, though habitually they are
not. Terrorism is indeed about terror; not just violence,
but its use to spread terror. And the violence is aimed
specifically at civilians.
Classical terrorism, ideological rather than territorial,
reveals the niceties. Recent decades saw West Germany's
Baader-Meinhof gang and Red Army Faction murder prominent
businessmen such as Alfred Herrhausen and Jurgen Ponto
(bosses of Germany's two largest banks, Deutsche and
Dresdner respectively. Italy's Red Brigades murdered Aldo
Moro, a former prime minister. Its far right in 1980 blew
up a train in Bologna station, killing 84 people. Which of
these was truly terrorism? Arguably, only the last. It was
an act of indiscriminate violence to terrorise citizens at
large; the others were discriminate assassinations to win
publicity and display power.
Likewise, lobbing mortar-bombs into a British army base in
South Armagh may have deadly results, but it is guerrilla
warfare. Planting a bomb that kills a dozen diners in a
restaurant is terrorism. The suicide bomber in Jerusalem
was a terrorist; the Hizbollah fighter in South Lebanon
attacking Israeli army patrols is not.
Even in the distinction between guerrilla warfare and
terrorism, there are grey areas. The soldier in a tank is
a military target. What about one in a jeep escorting
civilian vehicles? Or returning on a bus from leave? A bus
that may -- and was, when a suicide bomber attacked it in
Gaza last April -- be carrying civilians too?
There are, in contrast, distinctions often made that ought
not to be. What is or is not "terrorism" does not depend on
the badness or goodness of the cause, nor on whether those
espousing it have the chance to express their demands
democratically. When President James Garfield was
assassinated in America in the same year, 1881, that a
Russian terrorist group blew up Tsar Alexander II, the
Russians wrote an open letter condemning Garfield's killers
and arguing that:
In a land where the citizens are free to express their
ideas, and where the will of the people does not merely
make the law but appoints the person who is to carry the
law into effect, political assassination is the
manifestation of despotism ... Despotism is always
blameworthy and force can only be justified when
employed to resist force.
Yet despotism does not justify throwing bombs into crowds
(as the group sometimes did).
The fact is that a good cause may use terrorism just as a
bad one may. South Africa has provided a clear example. The
ending of white dominance was a plainly good cause. For the
most part, the African National Congress used mass
demonstrations and industrial sabotage to advance its
cause. But the men who shot up a white church congregation
or planted a bomb outside a cinema were terrorists in the
purest sense of the word.
Nor does the terrorists' ultimate success or failure alter
the truth. Menachem Begin got to lead a country; Yasser
Arafat may do; Velupillai Prabhakaran, who leads the Tamil
Tigers, probably will not. None of that changes the fact
that Deir Yassin (a massacre of Palestinian villagers by
Israelis fighting to establish their state), the killing of
11 Israeli athletes at the Munich Olympics in 1972 and this
year's Tamil Tiger bomb in Colombo were all acts of terror.
The terror of the state
So much for the underdogs. Can there be terrorist
governments too? The Americans certainly think so when they
accuse Libya or Iran of supporting international terrorism.
In the cold war, international terrorists were used to wage
war by proxy: the East German regime provided safe houses
for Baaders and Meinhofs; the modern era's most notorious
terrorist, the gun-for-hire Carlos the Jackal, made his
career in this world of state-sponsored terrorism.
All that was diplomacy by terror. Can a recognised
government also be guilty of terrorism against its own
people?
Yes. Stalin used terror systematically to consolidate his
power -- random murders of Communist-Party members and army
officers in the 1930s, massacres and exiles of smaller
ethnic groups throughout his rule. Much of Latin America
practised state terrorism in recent decades. The brasshat
regimes of the day faced left-wing, sometimes terrorist
movements. Many fought back with terror. And not just
through paramilitaries or unacknowledged death squads. The
infamous massacre at El Mozote in El Salvador in 1981 was
the work of that country's regular army. The unit that did
it had a cheerful song of its own,
"Somos Guerreros":
We are warriors,
Warriors all!
We are setting out to kill
A mountain of terrorists.
What in fact they killed was over 500 peasants; probably
the worst "official" massacre in Latin America's recent
history.
Can regular armies, in regular war, be guilty of terrorism?
The answer, surely, is yes. Look at the Japanese rape of
Nanking in 1937, when not hundreds or thousands but ten of
thousands of civilians were murdered, to terrorise the rest
of China. Then go a step further. Can the armies of proud
democracies be guilty too? A century ago, the rich world,
with the rules of war that it claimed to use, would have
called attacking civilians impermissable. The modern world
has other ideas. The Allied bombing of Germany was aimed at
civilians in the hope of shattering morale: in short,
terror. The fire bombing of Tokyo and the atomic weapons
that vaporised Hiroshima and Nagasaki were arguably aimed
at government morale, not that of Japan's population. Their
victims did not notice the difference.
Who kills and how?
What use, one can ask, is a definition so wide that it can
go from Stalin to the American air force? There are two
answers.
First, it is a reminder that terrorism, historically, has
been the tool of the strong, not the weak. Medieval armies,
having taken a besieged town, would slaughter some or all
of the citizens to encourage other towns to surrender
faster. During India's struggle for independence, by far
the worst terror was the Amritsar massacre in 1919, when
British-officered troops shot up a political gathering, and
carried on shooting until the bullets ran out; 379
civilians died (and it worked: the rebellious province of
Punjab returned to order). In contrast, discriminate
assassination was the typical weapon of the 19th-century
anarchist and nihilist.
By and large, true random terrorism has come in the past 30
years, as in the Bologna train bomb, the recent nerve-
gassing of the Tokyo metro by a religious cult, or the
Oklahoma City bomb; all three crimes were aimed at no
matter whom for a purpose so vague or Utopian as to seem
irrelevant, except to the deranged. Even in this period
most -- not all -- IRA killing was aimed at defined
targets: soldiers, policemen, individual Protestant farmers
in border areas. The Basque violence of ETA has often
followed this pattern. Peru's Shining Path guerrillas are
truer terrorists, but even they (mostly) prefer the
tactics, honed by the Vietcong, of killing officials, not
just (as in some infamous massacres) everyone in sight.
Algeria's and Sri Lanka's terrorists today probably have
the strongest claim to be called spreaders of true random
terror.
The second thing one can learn from the wide definition of
terrorism is that the phenomenon is neither uniquely
wicked, nor -- still less -- uniquely deadly. People fight
with the weapons they have: knives, Semtex, rifles,
fighter-bombers. All their users are alike convinced of
their own righteousness, all kill and all their victims are
equally dead. What they are not is equal in number. The
Munich terrorists killed 11 Israelis; Israel's retaliation
against the Lebanese town of Nabatiyeh, however justified,
killed about 100 Arabs. The State Department has totted up
the deaths due to international terrorism from 1968 through
1995. Its total, and it defines terrorism broadly, is
8,700. Twenty-four hours of air raids killed six times as
many civilians at Dresden in 1945. One is a crime, says
international law, the other a legitimate act of war.
The response
Is all this mere word-play? It is not. It crucially affects
responses to terrorism.
One true difference between a terrorist group and a
government is that the group is almost impossible to smash.
You can destroy or seize a government's ability to make
conventional war; you will never get every terrorist's last
stick of dynamite or timing mechanism, and it requires
wonderfully few terrorists to keep a civilised society on
edge.
But many other imagined differences are less great than
they might appear. It is a common error to suppose that
because terrorism is not war, and because its weapons are
not the full panoply of war, then the psychology of
terrorists must be different too. Of course, there are
plenty of curious specimens among terrorism's ranks: Carlos
the Jackal, now in French hands, was not just any old
gunman; or consider Abimael Guzman, an academic who until
his capture in 1992 led Peru's Shining Path movement. Every
terrorist must have personal devotion to the cause -- he
is, after all, risking his liberty, and often his life; not
many reluctant army conscripts, drafted by a legitimate
government, are likely feel the same way. And plainly, say
those who know them, the IRA and other groups include
people who enjoy violence for its own sake.
But so do most armies. And most governments, once at war,
can produce remarkable devotion to the national cause. In
its own terms, a warring terrorist group, like a warring
government, is "pursuing diplomacy by other means", even if
its means of war are different. It too is subject to highs
and lows, to war fatigue and collapses of morale, to
premature celebration of a battle won as if it had been the
war. It too can be threatened with a heavy hand; some of
its members may be wooed with a lighter one.
Terrorists, like governments, may be rational: they are
pursuing a policy they hope will succeed. And the more it
works, the more vigorously they will pursue it.
It is always hard, when terrorism is just one element in a
complex pattern of events, to identify its impact. But the
world is manifestly a different place because of acts of
terror. In 1948, the Israelis blew up the King David hotel,
the administrative centre of the British rulers of
Palestine. The atrocity helped persuade the British to
leave.
Often, terrorists help advance a general cause, but not
their own particular aims. That may be the case with the
IRA. Irish Republican terrorism helped dramatise the
nationalist cause throughout periods of discriminatory
Protestant rule. And Britain has made concessions to the
nationalists. In the Anglo-Irish agreement of 1985, the
British accepted the right of the Irish Republic to a say
in a province of the United Kingdom; in the two
governments' Downing Street declaration of 1993 Britain
said it had "no selfish strategic or economic interest in
Northern Ireland". It is hard to imagine any other
government saying such things of its own accord. Yet
whether it was the IRA that brought this about, or
persistent pressure from the Irish government and peaceful
nationalists in the north, is debatable. The leader of the
biggest nationalist party in Northern Ireland, John Hume,
argues that IRA terrorism has been the main obstacle to a
peaceful settlement in Ulster. If so, the IRA may also have
harmed the nationalist cause.
And sometimes, terrorists can advance both a general cause
and themselves. The PLO'S campaigns in the 1970s made the
organisation the dominant representative of the
Palestinians. They also helped solidify the Palestinians'
own sense of their distinct identity, which until then had
been relatively weak.
Just as terrorists make a difference to the world, so
changes in the world make a difference to terrorists. It
was not just their own weakness that led the British to
quit India, or later Cyprus (whose EOKA gunmen, though
damned as terrorists, were more like guerrilla fighters),
or later still Kenya (where they faced a genuinely
terrorist liberation movement). Weakness played its part,
but so did a world view that said colonial empires had had
their day. Much the same was true in South Africa. F.W. de
Klerk, probably the last white president there, may not
have been a more virtuous man than the architects of
apartheid who preceded him. But he was and is a realist,
who lived in different days and under different pressures.
In that case, a just cause plainly helped the terrorists.
For Muslim countries the Palestinian cause was no less
just. Western countries, guiltily aware of the horrors of
Jewish history, disagreed, and it took 20 years of Israeli
occupation and the intifada, the Palestinian uprising of
1987-90, to persuade them that the PLO too had a case. It
is still not one that much impresses Americans; and though
other westerners may have sympathy with Palestinian dreams
of statehood, any movement that still seeks a quite
different thing, the destruction of Israel, on top will --
very rightly -- find that its bombers face a western world
united behind the Jewish state.
Like the rest of us -- mostly
In all this, what is different about dealing with
terrorism? The answer, perhaps unsurprisingly, is not very
much.
Any government has its own interests, its own pressures,
its concessions it can make and those it cannot. It fights
its conventional wars with tanks and aircraft, its
small-scale wars -- partly terrorist, mostly not -- with
intelligence men and small arms. It cannot, usually, zap
the terrorists' territory as it could that of a hostile
state. But its psychology will be much the same in the two
cases -- and so will that of its enemies. The terrorist or
suicide bomber or gunman or fighter or liberation hero is
not different from other men (men, sic; rarely have women
played any notable part, any more than they have in
old-fashioned war).
With one notable exception: the nutters, whether with a
cause or no evident cause at all. The American way-out
redneck who thinks he has to plant a bomb, when he could
vote for Pat Buchanan, is beyond any but a psychiatrist's
reach. So too elitist solipsists like the Baader-Meinhof
mob, convinced that murder was justified because they knew
all the answers and it was society that was out of step.
Among the almost causeless, Italy's far right may have
sought instability, but for what? That was never clear. And
no known concession could have led Japan's Aum Shinrikyo
cult to put aside its chemistry set.
Is it coincidence that three of these four groups seem to
specialise in the true terrorism, the random murder of
civilians for terror's sake? Perhaps it is not.
[End]
This special essay is from an issue of The Economist that
also writes on "in the mind of the terrorist," "a new plan
for Ulster" and "Israel, Palestine and Hamas."
