Terrorism

Understanding the Global Threat

David Whittaker

• Editorial: Routledge
• Año: 2013
• ISBN:
  9781317864943
• Edición: 2
• Categoría: Storia
• Categoría: Storia mondiale

What is terrorism and where does it come from? Who are the people who perpetrate terror? What are their motives? Terrorism is now everybody's major and constant fear. This easy-to-read, concise account of terrorism provides the essential global guide to understanding what the threat is and exactly where it comes from. Without this knowledge, argues David Whittaker, there can be no way forward in prevention and control. The book looks in particular at how terrorism has shaped and been shaped by the past half century, the driving forces behind it, the methods, the psychology and the money.

Originally written in the aftermath of September 11, the book has now been updated to reflect how our understanding of and reaction to terrorism has moved on in the past few years. The Where to Find Out More section at the end will also be thoroughly updated to include recent websites and publications on the subject.

chapter one
The Meaning of Terrorism

In the autumn of 2001 the word ‘terrorism’ was on all lips. It was a term prominent in the press and on television. Everybody used it and nobody explained it. The terrible events in New York and Washington on 11 September were constantly recounted in an atmosphere of incredulity and horror. It was not long before all the resources of detection mounted by Washington’s administration shone a spotlight upon a distant and impoverished Afghanistan, now pointed out as the refuge of a terrorist group, the al-Qaida. An attack of a warlike nature would be mounted against those held responsible for such a tremendous outrage at America’s heart.

Disclaiming any move for retribution, President George Bush urged all nations to work together to rid the world of something that looked like a disease of pandemic proportions. This appeal in a time of trauma was understandable yet it failed to provide a meaning for the term ‘terrorism’ that the common man could acknowledge. Even more than politicians, media commentators have been slow to give the term full attention. They have neglected an opportunity to throw light on an aspect of human behaviour that is complex and diverse, something that is so specific in its extent and in its context that it cannot be described as a global phenomenon. In the most straightforward of words, what does the term ‘terrorism’ really mean?

Meaning and Contrasts in Perception

Almost certainly, terrorism has a different meaning for those in authority who are responsible for peace, order and security, for those onlookers who are television viewers, radio listeners and readers, for those who are victims or their relatives, and for the terrorists themselves. There are clear contrasts in perception.

In the eyes of a responsible authority, nationally or locally, a workable definition of what they must cope with might run like this: ‘terrorism is the premeditated threat or use of violence by subnational groups or clandestine individuals intended to intimidate and coerce governments, to promote political, religious or ideological outcomes, and to inculcate fear among the public at large’. Thus, terrorism is unlawful action, going beyond what are regarded as the bounds of legitimate protest, going further than confrontation, on to exceeding the limits of conventional social behaviour. Terrorism is rated as a criminal offence, wholly disproportionate to any expression of grievance or any attempt to work for change. No civilized community can tolerate licence to kill and the spreading of uncertainty and fear. Strong and stern counter-terrorism is needed

to cope with the targeting of prominent individuals who are murdered or taken hostage. The state will marshal its police and its army and stamp on a threat to peace and a threat to power. Strong-arm tactics of this nature employed in Argentina, Indonesia and Israel are then seen by liberals everywhere as an unacceptable means of dealing with popular protest, however inflamed and violent some of that becomes. In this context, however, it is worth remarking that the relationship between state power and terrorist power can work another way when it may suit the interests of a state such as Libya, Syria or Iraq to give sanctuary to those who would carry out terrorist initiatives beyond its borders. This is state-sponsored terrorism and in many respects it gives terrorism a new meaning.

If terrorism, in the eyes of institutional authority, poses a threat to order, power and peace, then for the onlooker it is a threat to daily life. It is less political and much more direct in its possibilities and consequences. Definition may depend upon circumstances and attitudes and these alter with time. Terrorism as a label may be used to deplore anti-social behaviour which is considered vicious and lethal, for instance, the hijacking of an aircraft, the detonation of explosives, the harassing and shooting of a crowd. There is a ready convergence of condemnation whenever, all too frequently, the press has presented yet another bloody terrorist incident glimpsed in Northern Ireland or in Israel. Sympathy is immediately widespread together with a call for remedial counter-action. For many observers the term ‘terrorism’ has a wider meaning. The evidence for this is in conversation and in correspondence with newspapers. From time to time, activities branded as malevolent are castigated as ‘terrorism’. These may be as various as the burning down of a school, the sabotaging of a farmer’s GM crops, the urban rampage of ‘football hooligans’, or simply bricks heaved through the windows of a corporation identified with that popular enemy, Globalization. This vagueness in definition almost certainly encourages prejudice and intolerance. All too often a leader of protest

is demonized and examples of this have been Jomo Kenyatta in Kenya, Archbishop Makarios in Cyprus, Yassir Arafat of the PLO, Fidel Castro in Cuba, and Osama bin Laden in Afghanistan. This then puts them in a state of iniquity until, later, compromise is reached, their status is reassessed, and some of them may even be promoted to head of state.

For the victim, innocent or picked out on account of their status or position, the definition of terrorism bears a grotesque finality. It leads to denial of life, of liberty, of privacy, of human rights. Far more than for any onlooker or security authority, it represents such a degree of transgression that any who survive must feel a sense of irreversible vulnerability. American commentators in 2001, following the horrific bombing of New York and Washington, have speculated that the notion of personal attack spreads far across fifty states, and beyond the bereaved relatives of the lost. In that sense, all contemporary United States citizens are victims.

For the terrorist, the word ‘terrorism’ may be a misnomer. The actions of those dedicated to a cause may be seen by others as destructive and perverse but for those who believe in what they are trying to achieve the end justifies the means. Here, once more, we meet with a generalization that fogs a clear meaning. The sheer variety of terrorist campaigning down the centuries throws light sometimes on idealists desperate to overthrow a tyrant or struggling to bring about at least some degree of respect and tolerance, a better deal, for the dispossessed and disenfranchised. Exasperation leads to turbulence and violence. Elsewhere, the idealist is balked at every turn and resorts eventually to destructive and inhumane action. Most terrorists claim to be delivering a political message. All too often their methods go further than the question and answer of political dia

logue and they come to depend, however reluctantly, upon thrusting only an answer at opponents. For most political activists, among Palestinians, in Latin America, and in apartheid South Africa, there has always been the vision of a more secure and beneficial future. Such is the consuming faith of liberators who are fighting for freedom from dictators, or imperial rule. In other cases, it is the past which transmits a myth, of invincibility, or of their right to live as they prefer. Northern Ireland’s paramilitarists appear prisoners of myths and of memories of battles lost and won. Terrorism is not a term that terrorists own to; for the main part their intentions and actions define a duty they feel they must discharge. Generally, they are anxious to claim responsibility for what they do.

Historical Shifts in Meaning

The term ‘terrorism’ has shifted in meaning through the centuries. Words still used today by way of condemnation – zealot, thug, assassin – illustrate the changing stress terrorists have placed upon their objectives. In the first century AD the Roman province of Judaea was plagued by the hit-and-run terrorism of the Zealots. There were nationalistic and religious elements in their activities, as there are in numerous terrorist initiatives today. They were zealous in their harrying of Roman officialdom and of Jews whose orthodoxy was tainted with heresy. What in modern language is described as ‘religious fundamentalism’ played a part in the 1,200 years of terror that the Thugs brought to central and northern India. The ‘thuggery’ of roving bands was partly religious in carrying out thousands of sacrificial strangulations to the goddess Kali and also criminal in its basis of outright banditry. A faint parallel to modern intolerance among some Muslims was the cult of the Shi’ite Order of the Assassins whose followers considered it a sacred duty to hunt down Christians in Persia, Syria and Palestine at the time of the eleventh- and twelfth-century crusades. Success in their murderous missions would ensure them a place in Paradise, an uncanny resemblance

to the reward imagined by modern suicide bombers among the Hizbullah in the Lebanon and the Tamil Tigers of Sri Lanka. It could be said that this was the universal and timeless consequence of violence breeding violence as the defences of Islam were being violated by the cruelties of the Christian West. Indeed, the word ‘terror’ (derived from Latin and meaning ‘a great fear’) was taken further by leaders of the French Revolution in 1793–94. They believed that a carefully organized ‘reign of terror’ (‘la régime de la terreur’) would enable a fragile revolutionary council to order its new-found unity by terrorizing opponents. Robespierre, the high priest of the 1789 Revolution, declared that a democratic France would be a terrorized France. A state-directed system for containing dissension by the most rigorous of means would ensure that France in future was in the hands of a disciplined people.

Increasingly, within the modern era, terrorism is given a secular meaning. Nineteenth-century Russia, more than most other European states, was a hotbed of political debate and intrigue. Terrorism there was, in most respects, an intellectual drive to unseat an inflexible autocracy and to replace it with a democratic society. Serfs would be freed. Vast, unwieldy Russia, rich in resources (and resourcefulness), would be liberated and given back to its deserving people. A challenge to the Tsar and his bureaucrats and court was to be headed by a group calling itself the Narodnaya Volya, the ‘People’s Will’, who would choose time and weaponry for terror tactics, as beneficial instruments of delivery. Bomb and firearm must be used without too much shedding of blood. The secretive zones of officialdom were to be infiltrated by spies. The murder of Tsar Alexander II in 1881 was proclaimed by his assassins as an example of their belief that such an act was an example of what they called ‘propaganda by deed’. Terrorism, enshrined in this way, as it were, recruited earnest disciples in St Petersburg, Paris, London and Berlin. Michael Bakunin (1814–76), exiled from his estates in Tsarist Russia, set up in Paris a revolutionary cell whose members called themselves Anarchists, declaring that the evils of capitalism and political oligarchy must be confronted, if necessary, by force of arms. Bakunin, in

the 1860s, wrote to inspire fellow-conspirators with his Principles of Revolution and his Revolutionary Catechism. There a definition of terrorism was made plain: the political activist, so frequently alienated from society, was to remain anonymous, a ruthless destroyer of institutions, structures and, where necessary, of those complacent individuals who gave in to exploitation and dominance. The term ‘nihilism’ was soon coined by others to describe terroristic methods which appeared to have nothing but destruction and disaster as their objectives. Bakunin went to Paris to join Pierre Proudhon (1809–65), the French writer, who might be described as an early philosophical terrorist. For Proudhon, the ownership of property was regarded as theft from the common people. It murdered individual freedom in his view. Anarchy, total destruction, would rid the world of privilege and power, in the army, in the Church, in royal courts and among businessmen.

Twentieth-Century Terrorism

It was during the 1920s and 1930s that terrorism began to acquire a new and ominous meaning. In the hands of a determined clique of power seekers, terror methods could replace the rulers of a democratically elected state with the representatives of an alternative political or ideological creed. The Treaty of Versailles in 1918, ending the First World War, gave a final blow to the old Habsburg and Ottoman empires and brought into being an array of new democracies in central Europe. A consequence of the newness and uncertainty surrounding the creation and growth of new centres of power was a time of uncertainty when expediency and power-mongering led to public unrest and violence in the streets. Countries as dis

similar as Poland, Greece, Turkey, Romania, Bulgaria, Czechoslovakia, saw turbulent contests between adherents of the old regimes and the popular fronts that championed the liberation of the masses. Pistols, explosives and incendiarism ousted the ballot box and revolutionary terrorists were borne shoulder high as folk heroes. Terrorism was something fought out between the Black gangs of the political right with their secret police and snatch-squads and the Red units of the political left, manning the barricades and resorting to sabotage. Terrorism was now something that used newspapers, loudspeaker vans and radio to spread fear, certainly, and also to recruit legions of followers in a way that had never been possible before the development of these technologies of terror.

A further, expanded meaning of terrorism came about in the mid-1930s as the hopes of the time of Versailles that Europe would now settle down into peace crumbled into cynicism and futility. Now terrorism meant war. Fascist-led states such as Germany and Italy, seeking resentfully and aggressively for a new order, spilled over into neighbouring parts of Europe like Austria and Czechoslovakia, and into Abyssinia and Libya in Africa. Their consolidation of power and the spreading of it depended upon terrorizing opponents at home with summary arrest and possible execution and, abroad, with inhumane military tactics. Hitler’s Nazi warplanes blasted civilians in Spain’s Guernica and in Abyssinia the forces sent by Mussolini poured mustard gas onto hapless villagers. Terrorism now included genocidal strikes against Jews ...