TER_ror

[John Young]

   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."