A Brief History Of Terrorism
By Martin Walker
The word terrorism was first used in 1795, a grim spawn of the heady period that brought the American War of Independence and the French Revolution. The word was born with the Reign of Terror, the use of the guillotine by the French revolutionaries to consolidate their regime by killing their enemies and intimidating the potential opposition.
Until well into the twentieth century, terror usually meant state terror. The tactics of the French revolutionaries were copied by the Cheka secret police founded by Vladimir Lenin in 1918 to ensure the Bolshevik grip on power and later by Nazi Germany's Gestapo in the 1930s and 40s. Incidentally, it was the Nazi occupiers of Europe during the Second World War who characterized the work of the French, Czech, Polish, and other resistance movements, supplied and fomented by Britain's Special Operations Executive, as "terrorism."
For the resistance movements, and for their British backers in SOE who had been ordered by Prime Minister Winston Churchill to "set Europe ablaze," they were not terrorists but freedom fighters. Their clandestine work of sabotage and ambush-destroying bridges and railroads and assassinating German officials and their local collaborators-was a wholly justifiable tactic of a war of national liberation.
That was precisely the justification used after the war by a series of anticolonial movements. Some, like the Viet Minh against French rule in Vietnam, had been supplied by British and American forces to fight the Japanese. After 1945, they used the wartime tactics of resistance to attack the returning French with the classic weapons of terrorism, raiding remote plantations to kill French overseers, random shootings and bombs in crowded cafes, all designed to destroy the morale of the French civilians.
Similar tactics were used against the British in Palestine by Israeli freedom fighters (or 'terrorists') like the future prime ministers Menachem Begin and Yitzhak Shamir. The Irgun and Stern Gang blew up civilians in hotels, assassinated British troops, and ambushed British patrols, all in the name of the national liberation of Israel.
Learning from these examples, the National Liberation Front of Algeria fought French rule with a ruthless terror campaign, using Arab women dressed as fashionable young Frenchwomen, to place bombs in cafes, dancehalls, and cinemas. The French fought back ferociously, and in the battle of Algiers, General Jacques Massu's battalion of paratroopers broke the FLN terrorist networks in the casbah, or Arab quarter, with ruthless interrogations and the widespread use of torture.
The Battle of Algiers was a military victory, but a political defeat, horrifying public opinion in France and elsewhere, toppling French governments, and eroding the French national will to maintain the struggle against the FLN. France suffered a political collapse that returned to power wartime hero Charles de Gaulle, who eventually launched negotiations that led to Algerian independence in 1962.
These were the lessons that inspired modern terrorism, a phenomenon that emerged from the twin roots of the Arab-Israeli Six Day War of 1967 and the worldwide student movements of 1968. The devastating Arab defeat and the Israeli occupation of the West Bank and Gaza Strip inspired the Palestine Liberation Organization-too weak to fight an orthodox struggle-to adopt terrorist tactics. Other pro-Palestine groups imposed their demands on a global audience by hijacking airliners and kidnapping Israeli athletes at the 1972 Olympic Games in Munich.
Young militants in Europe, Japan, and the United States turned to similar tactics for different reasons. In Northern Ireland, a Protestant backlash against the campaigns of the Roman Catholic civil rights movement revived the moribund Irish Republican Army. Ham-fisted attempts by the British Army to detain militants without trial triggered a thirty-year terrorist campaign.
West Germany's Red Army Faction, Japan's Red Army, and Italy's Red Brigades made common cause with the PLO. They used their training camps and cooperated on operations like the seizure of an OPEC summit meeting in Vienna in 1975, while also conducting their own kidnapping and killing operations against "the fascist capitalism" of their homelands.
This was largely a European phenomenon, despite the pinprick attacks of the Weathermen, a small group that broke away from the less extreme US antiwar movement to plant bombs in the Pentagon and elsewhere. One reason why Europe suffered far more terrorist attacks than the US was its proximity to cold war sponsors of terror, like the Czechoslovaks supplying Semtex plastic explosives to the IRA or the East German secret police, the Stasi, giving logistical support, including false passports and sanctuary, to German and Italian terror groups.
Through police and intelligence work and the ending of Soviet Bloc support with the end of the cold war, most of these post-1968 terrorist groups have been defeated or marginalized. The two that survived, the PLO and the IRA, were sustained by a degree of popular legitimacy that stemmed from their origins as national liberation movements. The two campaigns waged against them illustrate the two extremes of counter-terrorist strategy.
The British, despite ruthless bombings of civilians in London and elsewhere and repeated assassination attempts on British prime ministers, strove to maintain their civil liberties and the rule of law. Police and troops who had gone too far, or killed without cause, were put on trial. Miscarriages of justice were sometimes corrected, and outrages like the Bloody Sunday shootings by British soldiers in Londonderry in 1972 became belatedly the subject of public inquiries. By these means, and by working closely with the US and Irish government in Dublin, the British have been able to develop a peace process that brought much of the IRA back into the democratic and political arena.
The Israelis, by contrast, have assassinated PLO leaders, using bombs, missiles, and helicopter gunships despite the likelihood of civilian casualties. The Israelis, it must be stressed, believe they are fighting for their very existence, which the British are not.
However, the British and Israeli strategies represent the parameters of the counter-terror policies that the US along with its European allies and most of the civilized world, must now consider. One lesson that the Europeans all absorbed in the antiterrorism campaigns of the 1970s and 1980s is that it is both possible and important to retain civil liberties and the rule of law while fighting terrorism. One key goal of terrorism is to polarize society by provoking it into the kind of repression that undermines public support for government.
"You don't protect civilization by dismantling its civilizing achievements," comments Tom Arnold, a veteran British member of Parliament who was an adviser to former Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher. Arnold recalls that even after the IRA almost killed Thatcher and several cabinet colleagues by bombing her Brighton hotel during a Conservative Party conference, she rejected any new repressive measures and continued seeking a political solution with Dublin through the Anglo-Irish agreement.
Americans may question the wisdom of following the British technique when there seems to be little prospect of political negotiation with the suicidal nihilists who destroyed the World Trade Center and attacked the Pentagon. However, the ruthless Israeli tactics would not fit easily into the US political tradition and its rule of law. Possibly, the United States might adapt both strategies, echoing the British to protect civil liberties at home while being as ruthless as the Israelis abroad.
The Bush administration, however, may have few options because it will not be dealing with a 'rational' terrorist, with a clearly defined and negotiable aim like a united Ireland or a Palestinian state or an independent Algeria. There is a new cleavage between the terrorists who sought to bomb their way to the peace table, or at least to a negotiated political solution, like Arafat or Begin before him, and the implacable new fanatics like the suicide bombers of New York and Washington who simply want to blow up the peace table along with everything else. Furthermore, it is not possible to negotiate with a suicide bomber who never said what his goal was before crashing a civilian airliner into a civilian target.
Martin Walker, based in Washington, DC, is the chief international correspondent for United Press International and a contributing editor to EUROPE.
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