Terrorism: Continuity and Change in the New Century

John K. Cooley is a correspondent for ABC News and has written widely on the Middle East and North Africa. The second edition of Unholy Wars: Afghanistan, America and International Terrorism is forthcoming from Pluto Press, London.

Just as the twentieth century opened with surges of revolutionary terrorism around the world, the twenty-first begins with new spasms of violence, much of it based on religion or using religion as a pretext. This globalised “religious” terrorism of the new millennium, from Afghanistan and Indonesia to Tokyo and New York, is being reported and analysed by some of us as a new phenomenon. It is not. The essentially secular and, later, Marxist terrorism in Tsarist Russia, arising from the ideas of nineteenth-century, mainly German theoreticians such as Karl Heinzen, was also viewed around 1900 as new: an effort to effect revolutionary social change, or to change history by assassinating despotic rulers or political adversaries, or both at once.

In many ways, the terrorist violence of the years around 1900 and that of those around 2000 were historic cases of déjà vu. Examples of both types, the secular and the religious, often mixtures of both, abound throughout recorded history since the times of the Hittites, Babylonians and Sumerians.

Americans who complain about the “new” phenomenon of hate and racial killings in recent years in their streets and schools ought to read about the first American use of state terrorism, followed by many others, against the native inhabitants of their pre-independence colonial territory. In 1620, Captain Miles Standish, leader of the Puritan immigrant colonists in Plymouth, Massachusetts, invited the local Indian chief, his eighteen-year-old brother and two other Native American braves to one of the first Thanksgiving Day holiday dinners. Once they were inside, Standish (a hero in American elementary school textbooks) locked the door. He then hacked one brave to pieces with his knife. Other Pilgrims, as the schoolbooks call the Puritan settlers, finished off the remaining native guests. One of these was taken outside and publicly hanged as an admonition to other Indians to “keep their place”, a phrase often used to address black slaves, ex-slaves, and blacks in the not-so-Old American South. The Plymouth massacre was a blend of today’s hate and race killings, and state terrorism, carried out in this case by the Massachusetts Bay Colony authority.

Equally, the sectarian violence in today’s world between, and in some cases among, Muslims, Christians and other believers such as Buddhists and Sikhs (who killed two of India’s Hindu rulers bearing the illustrious Gandhi family name) has innumerable analogues in ancient and medieval times. The wholesale slaughter of the medieval sect of the Cathars in western Europe, on the orders of popes and kings, is a prime example. By the sixteenth century, both Roman Catholics and Calvinist Protestants had decided that any ruler who was not of their religion was automatically a tyrant. The Spanish Inquisition held similar views, and expanded them to the effect that all those suspected of dissent—intellectuals, scientists, scholars, artists even, as well as rulers—were heretics and deserved to be persecuted and executed by being burned alive. This led to systematic terrorism by the prevailing religious authority. In Scotland, the theologian John Knox considered that defence of his Calvinist faith justified the assassination of his adversaries. He was both puzzled and angry when Queen Elizabeth I failed to take his advice and immediately execute the imprisoned Catholic Mary, Queen of Scots. Today, the use of religion as a pretext for disposing of one’s political adversaries is seen in “modern” states, from the Philippines and Indonesia to Pakistan and Uganda.

An Effective Tool?

Practising terrorists, such as Mustapha Ashu, the twenty-one-year-old Palestinian tailor who assassinated King Abdallah I of Jordan in 1951 while the latter was visiting the tomb of his father in East Jerusalem, would argue that assassination could, or should, change the course of history. In the case of Abdallah, father of the late King Hussein and grandfather of Jordan’s present ruler, Abdallah II, the purpose was ostensibly to halt “treacherous” negotiations with the Israeli Jews who had recently seized control of much of Palestine, and to frustrate any compromise between the new state of Israel and the Arab world as a whole. Similar ideas are held by the suicide bombers and assassins of today’s Islamist groups in Palestine, such as Hamas, which oppose the 1993 Oslo peace accords and their sequels.

But can terrorism in general, and assassination in particular, really change the course of events? According to the nineteenth-century British statesman, Benjamin Disraeli, they “never changed the history of the world”. He was commenting on the murder by a Confederate terrorist, John Wilkes Booth, of President Abraham Lincoln at the end of the American Civil War in 1865. It is arguable that Lincoln’s assassination hardened the resolve of the victorious Union states in the north to deal firmly, if not harshly, with the southerners in implementing Lincoln’s emancipation of the slaves. Conversely, it might be and has been argued that the assassination had the adverse effect of removing Lincoln’s watchful eye from the corruption and abuses of the northern military occupation of the defeated southern states, and that it seriously slowed the healthy reconstruction of the south.

Certainly, Serb terrorist Gavrilo Princip’s murder of Austria’s Archduke Francis Ferdinand in August 1914 triggered a huge chain reaction precipitating the First World War. However, it is also true that this was only a spark leaping into the highly inflammable nexus of Europe at the time. A different spark might equally have provoked the flames and explosion. Tsar Alexander II’s assassination in Russia before the turn of the last century by Russian radical terrorists contributed little to the cataclysmic events leading to the Bolshevik revolution of 1917. The Russian people learned then, and have had to re-learn since, that you can’t “kill the Tsar” (a motto of the revolutionaries of the time) without replacing him with another, whether his name be Nicholas, Lenin, Stalin or Brezhnev.

America’s Violent Past

Assassinations and conspiracy theories are not peculiar to the terrorism-obsessed America of today: they are long-standing themes of American history. Well before Lincoln’s time, President Andrew Jackson died certain that his assassin, Richard Lawrence, was part of a plot by the opposing Whig party to eliminate him. After Lincoln, assassinations proliferated. During the term of President Andrew Johnson, no fewer than thirteen office-holders were shot, twelve of whom were killed. During the presidential terms of the alcoholic Civil War hero, General Ulysses S. Grant (1869–77), there were no fewer than twenty such attacks, including eleven fatalities. In 1881, Charles J. Guiteau continued the long trend of violence in American politics. Guiteau, the disappointed seeker of an ambassadorship who ghost-wrote speeches that no one wanted to deliver, shot and killed President James A. Garfield at the Washington, D.C., railroad station. Barely a generation later, in 1901, a man whom the police considered a dangerous immigrant, and who had been excited by the murder in Italy of King Umberto I by an Italian-American anarchist, shot one of the most popular of US presidents, William McKinley, who died a painful death after unsuccessful surgery to remove the bullet.

Although President John F. Kennedy’s much-chronicled assassination in Dallas, Texas, in November 1961, apparently by Lee Harvey Oswald, has provoked hundreds if not thousands of conspiracy theories in films, journalism and books, the weight of evidence still points to the work of a loner. Such was definitely the unsuccessful attempt to assassinate President Ronald Reagan in Washington, D.C., in 1981. On the other hand, all published evidence (and probably much that has not been published) indicates that the murder of black civil rights leader Martin Luther King in April 1968 was the result of an intricate plot. This touched off the most extensive and bloodiest racial disorders in the United States of any single act of terrorism in its history.

In the cases of Lincoln, as we saw, and of Kennedy, and certainly of Martin Luther King, assassinations did affect American history, which arguably still bears the marks of these terrorist political murders. This writer has not been personally exposed to terrorism in the United States, apart from accidental close proximity at the age of six in Orlando, Florida, to the open automobile of President Franklin D. Roosevelt in February 1933 when an assassin missed the president but fatally wounded Mayor Anton Cermak of Chicago.

North Africa

The opposite has been true of his experience as a foreign correspondent abroad. This experience began in North Africa in 1954 during the kinds of conflict which have given rise to the cliché about secular nationalist violence: “One man’s terrorist is another man’s freedom fighter.” This certainly applied to the two French protectorates, Tunisia and Morocco, where I lived at the time. Soon to follow was the Algerian revolution, which I and many contemporaries covered as newsmen, and which traced a path of recurring violence across the years 1954–62, finally bringing independence to the thirty million or so Algerians who had been told officially until then that Algeria was not a colony but part of metropolitan France and that they were “Musulmans francais d’Algerie” (French Muslims of Algeria).

One of the prologues to the Algerian drama, which saw urban terrorism and its mostly savage repression by the French military and security services through torture and drastic penal measures, was the fierce nationalist uprising in Morocco. It lasted from August 1953 until 1956, when Morocco won full independence from France and from Spain (which had also colonised a narrow northern, mostly mountainous zone along the Mediterranean coast). I lived in Casablanca then. My first experience of terrorism was the blowing up of my neighbourhood café, in which French customers and Moroccan staff were wounded or killed. Partisans of the Istiqlal (independence) movement soon perpetrated bigger bombings and select assassinations of French police officials, not unlike what was to follow in Algeria, Kenya, Angola, Mozambique and other former colonial areas, and much later in Israel and Palestine.

The trigger for the violence in Morocco was the folly of the French government in yielding to pressure from the French colons and some of the military and forcibly exiling to Madagascar in August 1953 the popular, independent-minded king, Muhammad V. The king evidently believed that President Roosevelt had offered assurances at the Casablanca Conference of 1943 that the United States would support the ending of French colonial rule after the Second World War had been won. The violence that erupted in Morocco, a portent of things to come in Algeria and elsewhere, was in protest at the king’s dethronement in favour of his tractable old uncle, Moulay ben Arafa, and in support of Muhammad’s return and Morocco’s full independence. Both occurred in 1955–6. Similar events took place, though with less violence, in France’s other North African protectorate, Tunisia, under the able leadership of the late Habib Bourguiba.

The outcome in 1962 of the long Algerian war for independence, launched by an initially small group of armed conspirators which grew and then became the National Liberation Front (FLN), was not a “terrorist” victory (as the diehard ex-colonial Europeans of Algeria claimed, similarly to the claims made by Israeli settlers in the West Bank and Gaza who feel threatened by Israel–Palestinian agreements). Neither was it a military defeat for the French army. It was, however, a political victory for the FLN. The FLN’s weapons had included urban terrorism and rural guerrilla warfare. More tellingly, they also included superior diplomacy in the outside world, the sympathy and support of statesmen such as US President John F. Kennedy, and the political cunning of President Charles de Gaulle of France, whom the Algerian war returned to power. De Gaulle made the inevitable separation of France’s African possessions as painless as possible. (He, for his own pains, was unsuccessfully targeted by French terrorists, would-be assassins.) The FLN’s modus operandi became an early pattern for the Palestine Liberation Organisation. The PLO later eschewed Algerian-type terrorism and, like the FLN, embraced diplomacy. The Palestinians also had early Israeli terrorist models to follow, as well as that of EOKA in the struggle to rid Cyprus of British colonial rule in the 1950s.

For roughly the first two-thirds of the twentieth century, the violence called terrorism was mostly of this type: essentially secular and nationalistic. There was some greater or lesser component of Islamism, or Islamist zealotry, in the anti-French and anti-Spanish violence in North Africa, in the anti-Italian struggle in Libya, and in the anti-British independence campaigns in Egypt and Palestine. But these twentieth-century “freedom fighters” were essentially struggling for freedom from the secular rule of colonial powers. Not so Muslim fighters who, especially from the fifteenth to the nineteenth centuries, fought against the imposition of Christianity on the African continent by Spain, Portugal and, to a lesser extent, France and Italy—an imposition they compared to the medieval Crusades.

Palestine/Israel

Also essentially secular in their goals were the Jewish terrorists who in 1946 blew up the King David Hotel in Jerusalem and executed British military hostages. They aimed to overthrow the British mandate in Palestine and turn Lord Balfour’s 1917 promise of a “Jewish homeland” into the reality of a Jewish state. One of the main terrorist instruments of this conversion was Lohamei Herut Yisrael (Fighters for the Freedom of Israel), known as Lehi or the Stern Gang. It split from another underground organisation, the Irgun, led by Menachem Begin, who in 1978–9 would negotiate the Camp David and Washington peace accords on behalf of Israel with President Anwar Sadat of Egypt (further proof that one epoch’s terrorist can become another epoch’s peacemaker). The Stern Gang derived its name from its first leader, Avraham Stern, shot to death while in British custody. On Stern’s death, Yitzhak Shamir, another Israeli prime minister to be, became one of the group’s three commanders.

The Stern Gang committed one of the acts of terrorism which may have changed history—in this case negatively from the point of view of promoting Arab–Israeli peace. Count Folke Bernadotte of Sweden, a nephew of King Gustav V, headed the Swedish Red Cross during the Second World War. He arranged many prisoner of war exchanges and personally saved about twenty thousand inmates, Jewish and otherwise, of Nazi concentration camps. In May 1948 the United Nations Security Council sent Bernadotte to Palestine to arrange a truce. Both Israel and the Arabs grudgingly accepted a cease-fire. However, when Bernadotte suggested that Palestinian Arab refugees be allowed to return to homes they had lost to Israelis, he began to receive death threats. On 17 September 1948, Bernadotte and a French aide were shot to death in their car in Jerusalem.

The Stern Gang was widely blamed for the murders. In September 1988, forty years after the officially unsolved killings, two former members of the gang confessed to their roles on Israeli radio and television. One of them, Yehoshua Zeitler, said he had decided to tell the story because he feared that once again, as in 1948, the United Nations wanted to force concessions from Israel that would threaten its survival. The other, Meshulam Markover, said he had led a four-man assassination team in a jeep that cut off Bernadotte. He said the fatal shot was fired by one Yehoshua Cohen. Yitzhak Shamir, Israeli prime minister at the time of these confessions, declared he had played no role in Bernadotte’s slaying since the Stern Gang had officially disbanded six months prior to the shootings. The Bernadotte assassination to this day casts a dark shadow over Israel’s often tense, never cordial, relations with the United Nations and has therefore definitely influenced history.

How the Palestinians built upon the early fedayeen guerrilla organisations—trained in part by Egyptian intelligence under President Gamal Abdul Nasser to harass the Israelis during Egypt’s occupation of the Gaza Strip (1949–67)—is a story sometimes forgotten. The Israelis called the Arab operations “state terrorism”, as they did the acts of Yasser Arafat’s own Fatah group within the PLO, created by the Arab governments in 1964. Fatah, more politically minded than other, smaller Palestinian guerrilla organisations such as George Habash’s Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine, veered away from violent attacks and gradually became the PLO’s middle-of-the road mainstay for peace talks.¹

Arafat, realising after the loss by the Arabs of three more (post-1948) conventional wars with Israel in 1967, 1973 and 1982, decided that neither terrorism nor guerrilla war would prevail against the Jewish state. He and his core of what are now elder Palestinian statesmen, such as Abu Mazen, Hani al-Hassan and Ahmed Korei, allied with a new generation of Palestinian intellectuals such as Hanan Ashrawi and Saeb Erekat, became peacemakers and peace negotiators from the time of the Oslo peace accords onward. This group, many of them ex-terrorists, acknowledge, with Leila Khaled, the female hijacker of Israeli and Western aircraft during the 1960s and 1970s, that the usefulness of terrorism in drawing attention to the Palestinian cause is now over, though it was doubtless important in earlier decades.

Not so, say the Islamist groups, primarily Hamas, spawned with Israeli encouragement in the Gaza Strip a few years prior to the Palestinian intifada or general uprising in the West Bank and Gaza Strip, which erupted in 1987. Deadly suicide bombings, perpetrated by the Iranian-backed Hizbollah (Party of God) in Lebanon, together with advanced guerrilla warfare techniques, eventually led to Israel’s withdrawal in May 2000 from the border zone its troops had occupied continuously in Lebanon since 1978. Similarly, Hamas and the smaller Islamic Jihad, loosely controlled from Syria, threatened to renew violence against the US-sponsored “peace process” arising from the 1993 Israeli–PLO Oslo accords, whether or not Arafat and his mainstream Palestinian Authority, the direct heirs of Fatah, made good their repeated vows to declare and maintain an independent Palestinian state. One of the lessons of twentieth-century political violence is clearly that for some causes, such as those of the Algerian and Palestinian liberation movements, terrorism sometimes works, however odious its actions and grim the casualties it inflicts.

Moreover, counter-terrorism often fails—witness the murder by Israeli agents of a Moroccan waiter in Norway in mistake for Abu Hassan (Ali Hassan Salameh), one of the planners of the Black September massacre of Israeli athletes at the Munich Olympics in 1972. But Israel did eventually get its man. Abu Hassan had established good relations with American diplomats in Beirut and helped facilitate early peace feelers between the PLO and the United States before Israel was ready for these. Israel’s Mossad intelligence agency hired and trained for nearly three years a British Jewish girl, Erika Mary Chambers. After preparing and helping to execute the fatal remote-controlled bombing of Abu Hassan’s car in Beirut, Chambers was whisked safely away by Mossad and given a new identity in an unknown land. Chambers, who had adopted as cover for the operation the role of a charitable worker for a Palestinian children’s relief agency, was only one of a host of terrorist agents employed by both the Israeli and Palestinian sides in their secret war.

Afghanistan

The most significant episode in twentieth-century terrorism, the repercussions of which bid fair to continue well into the twenty-first, was generated by the 1979–89 war in Afghanistan.² President Jimmy Carter of the United States issued a command decision to counter the invasion. Consequently, the Central Intelligence Agency decided to turn what had long been a none-too-secret flirtation between the United States and radical Islamists—considered good potential allies because of their anti-communism—into a marriage of convenience. In 1980, Washington made a basic deal with President Zia ul-Haq of Pakistan to fight the Soviets. Saudi Arabia and other Gulf oil states also helped. The coalition recruited and trained cadres, and helped finance at a cost of close to $10 billion over the decade of the 1980s the jihad, or holy war, launched by the native Afghan guerrilla fighters against the Soviet invaders and their puppet Afghan communist government.

China, Egypt, Israel, Britain, France and Germany also helped in various overt and covert ways. The main contribution in manpower was the global recruitment by the CIA and its partners of thousands of young Muslims from nearly all Arab and Islamic countries and communities, ranging from North Africa to Indonesia, and the Philippines to the United States. Many received Islamic religious indoctrination, and most underwent military training in camps in Pakistan. The trainers themselves, under the watchful eye of Pakistan’s powerful Inter-Services Intelligence Directorate (ISI), were schooled by US Green Berets (army special forces), Navy Seals and other agencies in the United States. The young recruits, whether from Algeria or Aden, New York or Manila, swelled into a full-time mercenary force which fought on the side of the Afghan resistance until attrition, diplomacy and US Stinger anti-aircraft missiles led to Soviet defeat and withdrawal in 1989.

The consequences of arming, training and financing this global band of Muslim partisans, many of whom hated their American, Saudi and other paymasters as much as or more than they did the Soviet occupiers, were evident even before the war was over. In October 1981, President Anwar al-Sadat of Egypt was assassinated by Muslim zealots whom he had been encouraging and arming to fight in Afghanistan. In Pakistan, Zia ul-Haq died, together with the US ambassador to Pakistan, Arnold Raphael, and senior US and Pakistani military officers, in a suspicious plane crash, whose causes remain a mystery. Shortly before this, Afghan fighters under ISI control crossed the northern Afghan border into what was then Soviet Tajikistan, where they blew up oil, industrial and infrastructure installations using the terrorist and guerrilla techniques they had been taught by the CIA. This almost caused a full conventional war between the Soviet Union and Pakistan. Zia and the Pakistani warlords had to call off their sabotage operations after Soviet planes invaded Pakistani airspace and agents of the Soviet KGB and the Afghan communist KHAD secret police began terrorist attacks in Pakistani cities. War between the Islamists and the post-Soviet independent Tajikistan government, backed by Russian Federation troops, persists to this day. Russian troops have also remained in, or since returned to, other border areas in Uzbekistan and Turkmenistan for defence against the Islamist Taliban fighters—heirs of the wartime mujahidin—who won control of over 90 per cent of Afghanistan during the internecine wars of the 1990s, and who have imposed the harshest of Islamist regimes, depriving women of the rights which, ironically, the communists had protected to some degree.

When the war ended, Afghanistan lay in ruins, with the various freedom fighter factions who had battled against the Soviets now battling among themselves. Three million Afghanis were refugees in Iran, India and other neighbouring states. Drug trafficking had been encouraged by the CIA and its Pakistani military allies to help finance the war and to weaken their Soviet enemies by planting easily available narcotics among them, just as the communist Indo-Chinese had done to American troops during the Vietnam War. Heroin addiction, scarcely an issue in Pakistan before the Afghan war, became a critical problem for the nation’s fragmented society, torn by sectarian terrorism. By the year 2000, UN and NGO statistics showed that Afghanistan had become the world’s largest producer of opium, the raw material of heroin. The flow of hard drugs and of hashish westward towards Europe and the Americas, as well as eastward into India and the Far East, reached record proportions as a result of the CIA-sanctioned wartime drug trafficking.

Apostles of Terror

Equally serious for the progressive globalisation of terrorism in the late twentieth century was the homecoming and worldwide dispersal of the well-trained and battle-hardened Afghan veterans. During the 1990s, after the collapse of the Soviet Union, they spread not only into the Muslim former Soviet republics near Afghanistan, but also around the world. Egyptian, Algerian, Sudanese, Saudi, Filipino, Indonesian, Iraqi and, yes, American Islamists returned to their home countries or moved to others to disrupt and destabilise them. Some received additional training in camps financed and run by Pakistan’s ISI or the Saudi multi-millionaire construction tycoon, Osama bin Laden, the former ally of the United States in Afghanistan, blamed by Washington for the August 1998 bombings of the American embassies in Nairobi and Dar es Salaam, which killed and wounded thousands. These terrorists were then sent on specific missions into countries and homelands not their own. In February 1993, for example, veterans of the Afghan war and those trained or associated with them exploded a bomb in New York City’s World Trade Center, nearly causing it to collapse. Eleven people died and hundreds were injured in the blast. In June 1993, New York and federal authorities foiled a much more extensive plot by Islamist immigrants and visitors to bomb such targets in New York as the United Nations’ headquarters, the Lincoln and Holland tunnels, the George Washington Bridge and the FBI headquarters. Motives of revenge and a desire to change history seemed to dictate other intended targets of the group: several US congressmen deemed to be pro-Israel.

Early in 1994, Ramzi Ahmed Yousef, the Afghan- and Pakistan-trained alleged mastermind of the World Trade Center bombing, tried to engineer the simultaneous bombing, on a single day, of twelve US airliners over the Pacific Ocean. Only one was actually damaged, with one loss of life. Yousef and the other New York conspirators were convicted and are serving life or long prison terms. Abu Sayyaf, a minority Islamist terrorist group operating in the Philippines, after effectively being transplanted there from Afghanistan, demanded freedom for some of the Islamist conspirators convicted in America in return for freeing groups of Filipino and foreign hostages. In December 1999, an Algerian, Ahmed Ressam, was arrested by US customs authorities as he tried to smuggle a carload of arms and explosives from Vancouver, Canada, to Port Angeles in the US state of Washington. He turned out to have links to other Algerians in the United States, Canada and France. All or most belonged or had belonged to the so-called Armed Islamic Group (GIA). This was the most radical of the Afghan veteran groups involved in a long and bloody war against Algeria’s military-backed governments that erupted when Islamists, looking likely to win a legal and fair election in Algeria, were prevented from doing so by the army in 1991–2.

The West

Few Western countries have escaped the scourge of terrorism in recent decades. Britain, living with the Northern Irish peace process and fitful cycles of terrorist warfare between the mainly Catholic Irish Republican Army and Protestant paramilitaries, has been only too conscious that terrorism can continue for generations; centuries even. Germany, Italy, France and Greece experienced through the 1960s, 70s and 80s the terrorism of small indigenous groups combining ideological extremism with murderous instincts: France’s far-right Action Direct; Italy’s Marxist Red Brigades, which in the 1970s kidnapped and murdered prominent moderate politicians; Germany’s Red Army Faction, which did the same to prominent bankers and businessmen, sometimes with the acquiescence, if not supervision, of communist East Germany’s Stasi or state security service. In Greece, the November 17 group periodically carried out assassinations of prominent Greek businessmen, US military and diplomatic personnel, and Turkish diplomats, with seeming impunity and freedom from arrest. In May 2000, November 17 murdered the British military attaché in Athens.

Thus, in the European West, terrorist violence had become daily fare on television, radio and other popular media. For Americans, however, whose historical memories are short and who had long forgotten the anarchist bombings and labour riots of the early twentieth century, terrorism seemed like something that happened in other countries, not in the United States. Then in 1993 came the attack on the World Trade Center, the thwarted bomb plots of June that year and an armed assault outside CIA headquarters in Langley, Virginia—apparently by a revenge-seeking former Afghan fighter who felt the CIA had betrayed him or other former mercenaries. There followed the catastrophic bombing in 1995 of the federal office building in Oklahoma City, for which two white American extremists were convicted and sentenced to death. (The US media, for no apparent reason except prejudice, at first tried to pin the crime on unknown “Middle Eastern terrorists”.) In 1996 there followed two fatal bombings of American military servicemen and their families in Saudi Arabia, possibly perpetrated by Osama bin Laden’s followers (or so the Saudi royal regime hinted; other clues seemed to point to an Iranian-backed Hizbollah-type organisation). In 1998 the US embassies in Kenya and Tanzania were devastated by bombs, with horrendous loss of life.

Domestic American terrorists began to strike more often. Anti-abortionists, ironically proclaiming themselves to be “pro-life” because they oppose abortions under any circumstances, even to terminate pregnancies resulting from rape, attacked and killed doctors and other medical personnel. They bombed abortion clinics in Georgia and Alabama in 1999. Hate killings, certainly eligible to be considered terrorism, occurred in Texas and other southern states—nothing new there. In 1999, racist shootings at a Jewish day-care centre in California, and shootings by teenagers or children, some against their own classmates, in California, Illinois and elsewhere in the United States, spurred a new lobbying drive for gun control. However, few commentators called these recent violent deeds by the name they deserve: terrorism.

Who Merits the Label?

Just what, after all, is terrorism? We have all heard and repeated, ad nauseam, the cliché about terrorists being also freedom fighters, depending on your outlook. It remains true for many situations in the world of the twenty-first century. However, with the resurgence of religious-based violence, which we have noted in passing in this article, the old cliché could now be rephrased to say, “One man’s terrorist is another’s holy warrior.” That was true of the medieval wars of religion in Europe, and is true today in places like the Sudan, Indonesia or the Philippines. Or why not, “One man’s heretic or unbeliever is another man’s fighter for the true faith”? This has been evident lately from North Africa to South Asia and the Far East and Pacific islands.

Before closing this survey, it might be useful to recall some of the old formulations about terrorism and terrorists, because there is always danger, especially in popular journalism, of abusing them. If you label an adversary a “terrorist” and make this label stick, he or she becomes a rogue player (the extraordinarily inept phrase “rogue state” used recently by the United States to designate countries beyond the pale of its approval, such as Cuba, Iraq and North Korea, comes to mind here). The “rogue player” is then deemed to be outside the rules of the normal political game.

Scholars broadly agree that the etymological root of the word “terrorism” is the Latin verb terrere, “to cause to tremble or quiver”. It began to be used during the French Revolution, especially after the fall of Robespierre in 1794. The “reign of terror” or simply “The Terror” became a kind of generic definition of a policy, a state of mind. It denoted a regime which specialised in bloody deeds of torture, imprisonment and beheading by the guillotine. Raymond Aron, the renowned French historian, defined terrorism as “a violent action … called terrorist when its psychological effects are out of proportion to its purely physical results”.³ Examples would include the bombings in the Paris metro in recent years by Islamist groups and the bombing of my neighbourhood café in Casablanca in 1954. Aron compared events like the bomb-slaughter of civilians in the Milk-Bar, an Algiers café frequented by French people in the early years of the Algerian revolution, with Allied (and he might have added, German) “terror” bombing during the Second World War: “Attacks by revolutionaries which we term indiscriminate were [no more so] than Anglo-American bombardments” of targeted regions of Axis-controlled Europe. In other words, the massive incendiary bombings of Dresden and Hamburg, or the Nazi missile attacks on London, were meant to spread fear and terror among civilians, just as terrorist bombs in Algeria (or Israel, or Egypt, or New York, or Manila, we might add) were also meant to spread fear and terror among ordinary people.

Terrorist violence commonly provokes more repression from the official or occupying security forces. Counter-terrorism, as seen in Ireland, Algeria, Israel, General Pinochet’s Chile, Afghanistan under communist rule or Chechnya under Russian occupation, is often indistinguishable from outright terrorism. The death squads of Latin America were a classic example. This kind of counter-terrorism is something we can expect to see more of in the new century.

Future Trends

However, the “globalisation” of terrorism—the spread of politically motivated violence over much of the world by the year 2000—has had the paradoxical effect of narrowing the possibilities and parameters of terrorist action. This has meant the decline of one form of state terrorism: fewer and fewer national governments have come to support attacks on the citizens or infrastructures of other states. Whereas formerly several countries used to support foreign guerrilla movements and leaders—for example, mainland China, which once helped to arm African and Arab movements, or Iran, which once supported religious-related causes (Hizbollah in Lebanon, Shi’ite groups in Afghanistan)—few do now. The number of states where terrorists can find shelter or protection (as they did in communist East Germany) is shrinking, a fact noted by US government reports in early 2000. It is doubtful whether Osama bin Laden could long survive outside the protection of his Taliban hosts in Afghanistan.

The US State Department’s blacklist of seven states which Washington says officially support terrorism—Cuba, Iraq, Iran, Libya, North Korea, Sudan and Syria—has remained unchanged since 1993. But Western intelligence analysts concede that in the cases of Syria, Cuba and North Korea, at least, governments have taken a step backward from direct support for terrorist violence or liberation movements.

The case of Colonel Muammar Gaddafi’s long rule (since 1969) in Libya is another case in point. Gaddafi used to bankroll some of the older Palestinian groups, and the IRA, to which he even sent several shiploads of arms. His eventual agreement to send two Libyan intelligence officers, accused of engineering the December 1988 bombing of Pan Am flight 103 over Lockerbie, Scotland, to face trial by Scottish judges in the Netherlands, has had much to do with his partial rehabilitation in the West.

Many of these changes are, again, a consequence of the Afghanistan war, and also of the end of the Cold War. Much, if not all, of the old bipolar Russian–American adversary relationship is gone. A dramatic, and ironic, illustration of this was the Moscow–Washington consultations on “terrorism” in the early summer of 2000. These concerned how to meet the threat of Afghanistan’s Taliban regime, castigated by the United States for hosting Osama bin Laden and charged by Russia with helping to train and arm Chechen fighters. In May 2000, Russia even seriously threatened to hit training bases in Afghanistan—probably some of the very same hit by US cruise missiles in reprisal for the African embassy explosions in August 1998.

But if former enemies are now co-operating in the fight against terrorism, and if other states are turning away from supporting political violence, the future also holds worrying portents. The disintegration of the Soviet Union and the revolution in digital communications have added new tools and techniques to the terrorist’s arsenal. Alarming scenarios are painted of so-called catastrophic terrorism using chemical, biological and nuclear weapons. Governments are making serious contingency plans to meet this threat, and that of cyberterrorism—the disabling or disruption of intelligence networks and military C3 systems (command, control and communications) by terrorist computer experts who often understand cyberspace and its manipulation better than those who are frantically training to thwart them. Costly research is being conducted, not only in the West, but also in Russia and China, on how to combat these dragons lurking in the shadows.

In any case, the time has come to study these new threats to the human race as seriously, as scientifically and as dispassionately as possible. At the same time, we can continue to learn about how to deal with the future by a diligent study of the past.

Endnotes

1. Among many books covering this area is John K. Cooley, Green March, Black September: The Story of the Palestinian Arabs (London: Frank Cass, 1973), one of the earliest accounts, emphasising the difference between Arafat and other guerrilla leaders.

2. See the second, updated and revised edition of my Unholy Wars: Afghanistan, America and International Terrorism (London: Pluto Press, forthcoming) for an attempt to describe the consequences of the 1979 Soviet invasion of Afghanistan.

3. Cited by Jean-Paul Chagnollaud, Confluences, no. 20 (winter 1996–7), p. 8.