Conflict Resolution: The Missing Element in Counter-Terrorism

Sanjib Baruah is professor of political studies at Bard College, Annandale-on-Hudson, New York, and the author of India against Itself: Assam and the Politics of Nationality (University of Pennsylvania Press, 1999).

 

I

n July 2000, thousands of Canadians of Sri Lankan Tamil descent gathered in Toronto to celebrate a recent “victory” of the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE), the organisation embroiled in a bloody civil war in Sri Lanka since 1983. This war has cost more than sixty-two thousand lives, and the LTTE is known to have been involved in numerous acts of political violence, including major assassinations such as that of the former Indian prime minister Rajiv Gandhi. A report of the Toronto celebrations in the New York Times included a picture of children dancing on a stage adorned by a colossal effigy of the LTTE leader Vellupillai Prabhakaran, whom many might regard as the terrorist par excellence of our times. The event raised funds for the Tamil Rehabilitation Organisation, an arm of the LTTE. Estimates of funds collected in Canada to support the Sri Lankan Tamil cause range from $7 million to $22 million a year.¹

 

Such an event would have been illegal in the United States. The LTTE is among the twenty-eight organisations on the US State Department’s list of foreign terrorist organisations. Under the Anti-terrorism and Effective Death Penalty Act of 1996, contributing to any of these organisations—regardless of intention—is illegal. Canadian law and practice, too, may change in coming months. Canada is signatory to a new international instrument for fighting terrorism, the International Convention for the Suppression of the Financing of Terrorism (ICSFT), which was adopted by the UN General Assembly in December 1999. This convention calls upon states to enact domestic legislation that will criminalise fund-raising which supports terrorism and that will allow the seizure and forfeiture of funds intended to support terrorist activity. Canada is at present considering revisions to its criminal code to bring it into line with the convention.

 

The international regime on counter-terrorism is based on a law-enforcement notion of terrorism as crime that disregards the conflicts in which most terrorism is typically embedded. Whereas previous international conventions and treaties sought to criminalise particular acts such as the hijacking of airplanes and ships, bombings or the taking of hostages, the ICSFT now seeks to expand police capacity across national borders by targeting fund-raising that might support such acts.

 

During the Cold War, efforts to reach comprehensive international agreements on terrorism failed because of differing attitudes within the international community towards conflicts associated with terrorist incidents, especially wars of national liberation or self-determination such as the struggle against apartheid in South Africa and the Palestinian conflict. Considering those difficulties, it is not surprising that international instruments on terrorism have chosen to take the narrower tack of developing co-ordination between national law-enforcement and legal systems to punish terrorist crimes. But as a result, the agenda of counter-terrorism has been de-linked from any engagement with those protracted conflicts whose cycles of terror and counter-terror have animated terrorism. The counter-terrorism agenda has ignored the role that international organisations or other third parties could play in mediating such conflicts. When such mediation does take place it is because the resolution of certain conflicts becomes a priority for other reasons—usually for a major power—and not because the international community sees conflict resolution as an intrinsic part of counter-terrorism.

The Law-Enforcement Agenda

Writing towards the end of the Cold War, Paul Wilkinson, a long-established name in the study of terrorism, declared: “We are a long way from achieving a global international law consensus on methods of dealing with terrorism, but this does not mean that all paths to improved international cooperation are blocked.” Achievements in the area of international co-operation against terrorism, he wrote, have been “piecemeal and pragmatic”, focused on “specific limited aspects such as aircraft hijacking or border cooperation in policing”.² What Wilkinson describes as “piecemeal and pragmatic” comes down to what I have called a law-enforcement approach to counter-terrorism. The list of international conventions on terrorism in Table 1 is illustrative.

 

  

 

 

As is apparent from their titles, these conventions reflect the priorities of law enforcement in so far as they seek to establish and expand a common legal framework for investigating and prosecuting terrorist crimes. The stipulations of the various conventions require all states to criminalise and impose stiff penalties for particular acts of terrorism, such as the murder and kidnapping of senior government officials and diplomats, hijackings, hostage taking and the sabotage of aircraft, ships and fixed offshore platforms. Convention three in Table 1 requires states to ensure that plastic explosives have chemical markings in order to facilitate identification in bombing investigations. Convention eight seeks to criminalise the unlawful taking and use of nuclear material.

 

The United States has played a key role in shaping and promoting the international counter-terrorism regime. As a superpower with a global presence, the United States has been more vulnerable than any other country to terrorism rooted in far-away conflicts. The view of terrorism as primarily a criminal act reflects the thinking prevalent in US law-enforcement agencies. From their perspective, the test of a good counter-terrorism regime is whether it enables the aggressive pursuit of crimes of terrorism against US citizens. This law-enforcement approach is severely limiting from the perspective of the larger interests of the United States. For instance, it has been persuasively argued that there is a strong correlation between terrorist attacks on US targets and US interventions abroad, and that a restrained foreign policy is more likely than anything else to reduce terrorism against Americans.³ Yet the law-enforcement view of terrorism as crime has pushed such potentially important debates off the agenda of US policy debates.

Post–Cold War Changes

The global political context in which international terrorism is discussed has changed significantly since the end of the Cold War. This year’s report by the US National Commission on Terrorism records some of the changes in the United States’ perception of the threat from international terrorism:

 

There are dramatically fewer international terrorist incidents than in the mid-eighties. Many of the groups that targeted America’s interests, friends, and allies have disappeared. The Soviet bloc, which once provided support to terrorist groups, no longer exists. Countries that once excused terrorism now condemn it.⁴

 

While the report speaks of “growing, practical, international cooperation” in the fight against terrorism, it also points to countries which allegedly continue to support terrorism and to a few other countries which, according to the United States, are unwilling to shoulder the responsibilities of counter-terrorism, even while publicly supporting its goals.

 

The United States claims there has been a geographical shift of the “locus of terror” from the Middle East to South Asia. It identifies India, Russia, China and the countries of Central Asia as the “frontline states” where most international terrorism now occurs.⁵ Whether or not these claims are true, there is little doubt that incidents of terrorism in these regions have profoundly affected the attitudes of a number of the governments concerned. They have led to some significant realignments, notably the close relations that Russia and India are developing with Israel, based primarily on Israeli technical and material assistance on counter‑terrorism.

 

Reuven Paz of the International Policy Institute for Counter-Terrorism, an Israeli think-tank, believes that the increasing “Islamist terrorism” in the Xinjiang region of China will see Chinese–Israeli co-operation emerge in the near future as well. Israeli experience in counter-terrorism, writes Paz, “has become a bridge to Asia”.⁶

 

The conversion of Russia, India and possibly China to the law-enforcement view of terrorism is striking. Although substantial differences between countries do emerge during debates on terrorism in world forums, it seems unlikely that international co-operation on counter-terrorism in the post–Cold War era will deviate from the well-trodden path of law enforcement. The most recent convention, the ICSFT, is illustrative of this continuity in the way it seeks to criminalise the financing of terrorist activity. The convention defines such activity in two ways. First, a person commits an offence within the meaning of the ICSFT if he or she provides or collects money with the knowledge that it will be used to carry out an offence according to any of the criteria the ICSFT lists in an annex. Second, the ICSFT forbids fund-raising meant for killing or hurting non-combatants in an armed conflict when such acts are intended to cause fear in a population or to force governments or international organisations to take particular decisions.

A Flawed Approach

Canada’s representative Phillippe Kirsch, who presided over the working group that finalised the ICSFT, defended the convention by arguing that it underscores the emergence of universally accepted norms as to what constitutes an act of terrorism. To support his position he cites Article 14 of the convention.⁷ This forbids governments from claiming that any offence, as defined in the convention, is a political offence when a request for extradition or legal co-operation is made. If understanding terrorism as a certain specified crime unconnected to politics has indeed become the universal norm, it might facilitate the prosecution of a few people implicated in acts of terrorism; but is this the best way for the international community to deal with the threat of terrorism?

 

The primacy of the law-enforcement approach in framing the dialogue has also had a number of important unintended consequences. When the US Congress in the wake of the World Trade Center and Oklahoma City bombings debated new counter-terrorism laws in the 1990s, David Kopel of the Cato Institute aroused controversy by telling a seminar that the provisions of the laws were disproportionate to the actual threat from terrorism. The total number of people killed annually in terrorist incidents in the United States, he said, was fewer than two hundred. That was fewer than deaths from falls from ladders and scaffolding, or in bathtub accidents, and was infinitesimal compared to the deaths per year in car accidents. His comparison outraged some conservative terrorism experts. The Terrorism Research Center called Kopel’s statistical comparison “ludicrous, crass, and irrelevant”. It accused him and the overall tone of the Cato Institute seminar of failing to appreciate “the fundamental nature” of terrorism, namely, that it is a crime, an act of political violence intended to create an atmosphere of fear. The Terrorism Research Center said governments have a responsibility to secure society from this threat, but not from the sort of accidents cited by Kopel.⁸

 

What this criticism of Kopel misses, however, is the substantive point he made about the dangers of passing laws in response to a skewed perception of risks. News coverage of terrorist incidents is typically sensational, magnifying the threat posed by terrorism. While it may be understandable that in such circumstances politicians rush to act against the threat, it is reasonable to ask whether the particular actions their laws mandate are the best way of securing society against terrorism. Kopel and many other critics of the hastily enacted US counter-terrorism laws were concerned at the effects of those laws on constitutional freedoms. Kopel’s caution also has broader implications. Given the fear that terrorism generates, counter-terrorism is liable to produce bad public policy in many ways, both domestically and internationally. Arguably, the interpretative framework that the law-enforcement approach imposes on conflicts with complex histories—that they have nothing more than terrorism as their root cause—has led to policies that have only exacerbated the threat from terrorism.

The Terrorist as ‘Other’

In an analysis of the terrorism literature in Western liberal democracies, Ileana M. Porras finds that the terrorist is “rhetorically transformed from an ordinary deviant into a frightening/foreign/barbaric/beast”, while “extra-normal means” are simultaneously urged to fight terrorism. In this discourse, it is implied that the terrorist has by his or her own choice become the “other”. The state therefore has no choice but to treat the terrorist as other. The blame lies squarely with the terrorist: counter-terrorism is the consequence of the terrorist’s own actions. The state is blameless. Indeed, at the very moment of applying repressive anti-terrorism measures, the state can portray itself as the innocent victim of terrorism. This literature, writes Porras, virtually recommends “repressive measures short of military dictatorship”. The law-enforcement view of terrorism similarly risks legitimising military solutions to complex conflicts and pushing conflict resolution off the policy agenda.⁹

 

When anthropologist Joseba Zulaika researched Basque terrorism in his native village of Itziar, the most cathartic moment—one that had the most possibilities for ending the cycle of violence—came during a town meeting which turned into a community debate where present and former terrorists, along with the rest of the village, “explored questions and responsibilities” over events that had taken place in the village. The lesson Zulaika learnt from the villagers of Itziar was the premise that, whatever terrorists are, “they should be perceived as part of one’s own community and not as always the evil, disembodied Other.” Yet that is precisely the opposite of what Zulaika found was urged in the discourse on terrorism.

 

Zulaika concluded that accusations of terrorism, like those of witchcraft and demonic possession in former times, “allow us to deface the accused person” and thereby deprive him or her of their “most intimate humanity”. But in Itziar, the villagers were “distressed with something prior to criminality, that is with the ethics that provide a foundation to justice, with contemplation of the face in order not to become dehumanized”.¹⁰

 

In many of the conflicts that breed terrorism today there is often a cycle of terror and counter-terror. Reports from Amnesty International or Human Rights Watch are replete with examples of the torture and execution of suspected terrorists by government security forces in many parts of the world. Sometimes state actions in the name of counter-terrorism have included what Human Rights Watch calls the “death squad dodge”. In order “to avoid the opprobrium and potential criminal liability that comes with openly committing executions and torture, abusive militaries began to subcontract atrocities to irregular forces which the military could then claim were beyond its control”.¹¹ If terrorists are outlaws, it follows from the rhetoric that a response to terrorism could well be outside the realm of law. In such situations it is hard to say who instigated the cycle of terror—the armed militants or the repressive forces of the state.

 

A comprehensive approach to terrorism has to find a mode of intervention that can break the cycle. That is unlikely to be provided by the law-enforcement view of terrorism, which does little beyond strengthening the notion of the terrorist as outlaw.

Getting Tough on Asylum-Seekers

The dangers of such a narrow view are illustrated by recent demands for more stringency in screening asylum applications to bar those implicated in terrorist acts from entering other countries as refugees. UN Security Council Resolution 1269 calls for measures to ensure that asylum-seekers have not participated in terrorist acts. In recent years, European countries as well as the United States have tightened their refugee admission procedures to close the door to persons implicated in acts of terrorism abroad. Indeed, US counter-terrorism laws have tried to close not only what is seen as the asylum loophole, but also all other perceived loopholes in US immigration laws that might let in a terrorist. Resolution 1269, to be sure, explicitly asks that the terrorist-screening measures should conform to accepted human rights standards, but in reality it may be very difficult to balance these conflicting goals.

 

Anthropologist Cynthia Mahmood Keppley has described the inequities of the refugee determination process for Sikh militants claiming asylum in the United States and Canada:

 

Taking up arms against persecution is the great moral blind spot of international law. We all sympathize with victims, with bloated-bellied Rwandans huddled in tent camps. These inspire donations, prayer, and legal protection … [P]eople who don’t flee but stay and fight are much more problematic for lawyers, scholars, and all the human beings worried about both justice and peace.¹²

 

Keppley’s experience predates the recent tightening of US asylum procedures. She notes that while well-founded fears of persecution had allowed some Sikh militants fleeing Punjab to succeed in claiming refugee status in North America, the law excluded those who had committed an “ordinary” crime. This barred many Sikh asylum-seekers, since acts of insurgency are seen by the states of origin as criminal acts. “When states of origin are allies or ‘democracies’,” Keppley says, “the situation becomes even more problematical.”¹³

 

The contradictions of this policy were underscored in Britain recently when a special immigration appeals commission overturned a government deportation order against two Sikh militants. According to the government the two men had knowingly financed, planned and incited terrorist acts. But the immigration appeals commission ruled that they could not be deported because they faced a real risk of torture if they were returned to India (human rights reports amply document the use of torture and extra-judicial killings by India in its approach to the Sikh insurgency). Even though the two men might pose a danger to Britain’s national security—since the terrorist charge was not in dispute—the judge concluded that the deportation order still contravened the European Convention on Human Rights. At the same time, the judge observed that “law-abiding citizens of the UK might reasonably feel disquiet about a state of affairs which permits international terrorists proved to be a danger to national security to remain here”.¹⁴

 

Surely the “disquiet” is partly attributable to the law-enforcement thrust of an international counter-terrorism regime that seeks to deny asylum to suspected terrorists but makes no reference to the circumstances of the conflicts in which the crimes were committed or to how governments deal with those conflicts. Such an approach can only be blind to the fate that awaits suspected terrorists once they are returned to their war-ravaged places of origin. In those places, the law-enforcement approach has another effect: it encourages the notion that terrorism is the root cause of the conflicts. For many governments it is not too much of a leap to conclude that military measures and extra-judicial methods are the only way to end these protracted conflicts, and to hope that the international community will accept such policies, or at least look the other way.

Chechnya: State Terrorism?

One of the most dramatic aspects of the changed tenor of the post–Cold War discourse on terrorism has been Russia’s demands for a strengthening of the global counter-terrorism regime. In September 1999, Russia sponsored UN Security Council Resolution 1269 calling for effective international action on terrorism. The ICSFT adopted by the UN General Assembly in December 1999 was sponsored by the G-8, of which Russia is a member. This is a far cry from the 1980s, when the Reagan administration blamed the Soviet Union for supporting international terrorism.

 

In autumn 1999, however, the Russian government was preparing for its second military offensive in Chechnya. A spate of bomb blasts in Moscow and other parts of Russia had killed hundreds of civilians. Before any culprits were found, the authorities blamed Chechen terrorists (a Chechen connection to the explosions remains unproven). Russian politicians made use of the bombings to call for a war against international terrorism. Russian military officers publicly proclaimed their resolve not to be deterred by civilian casualties in their Chechnya offensive. An unprecedented anti-Chechen campaign was launched on Russian television in preparation for the offensive.

 

The brutality of the war that followed is widely known. A UN Human Rights Commission resolution has criticised Russia’s disproportionate and indiscriminate use of military force. The ultimatum to citizens to get out of Grozny or be destroyed surely has few parallels even in the annals of government wars against civilians. UN Human Rights Commissioner Mary Robinson has called on Russia to set up an independent inquiry into allegations of mass killings, torture and rape by its troops. The Russian offensive against the backdrop of Moscow’s official conversion to the cause of counter-terrorism raises serious questions about the rhetoric of counter-terrorism.

 

Even if cross-border terrorism in the region, linked to the Islamic struggle in Afghanistan, is a dimension of the Chechen conflict, terrorism is hardly the primary explanation of that conflict. Many Chechen militants see their war as rooted in the resistance which sprang up when Russia began its colonial expansion into the northern Caucasus in earlier centuries.

 

Even though Chechnya came firmly under the control of the Tsarist empire in 1859—with the Soviet Union inheriting that legacy—the situation always remained tense. In 1944, Stalin ordered the resettling of large numbers of Chechens in central Asia and Siberia. A third of the Chechen population may have died in the process of deportation. The movement for secession began after the collapse of the Soviet Union, Chechnya declaring independence in 1991. In 1992, a constitution was adopted that defined the Chechen Republic as an independent state. In 1994, Russia sent troops to crush the independence movement. More than one hundred thousand people died in the ensuing war before a truce was signed in 1996.

Cycle of Violence

Russia’s use of counter-terrorist rhetoric to mobilise both domestic and international support for its second offensive in Chechnya in 1999 illustrates the dangers of decoupling counter-terrorism from the question of conflict resolution. International governmental organisations and human rights NGOs have criticised Russia for its serious human rights violations in Chechnya. But the possible role of this ruthlessness in causing a resurgence of Chechen terrorism has not really been considered. There has been a wave of suicide car and truck bombings since the official end of the war in early 2000. As Stephen Mulvey of the BBC put it, “Suicide has been part of the rhetoric of the Chechen war from its inception—in 1994—but it is only now that is becoming a reality.”¹⁵

 

The separation of counter-terrorism from conflict resolution has led Western governments to respond in contradictory ways to Russian policy in Chechnya. While they have criticised Russia’s human rights violations, they have also provided material and political support for those same violations in the name of fighting terrorism. Indeed, Eric Margolis has accused the United States of “largely financing Russia’s genocide in Chechnya” by supplying Russian attack helicopters with advanced US night-vision devices, “‘to combat terrorism,’ says the White House”.¹⁶

 

Chechnya dramatises the contradictions inherent in the law-enforcement view of counter-terrorism, but it is by no means a unique case. While a full-scale war on civilians in the name of counter-terrorism may be rare, brutality by states against those whom they accuse of being terrorists is not. Although insurgent factions in many of these situations are no less brutal, the law-enforcement view of terrorism merely fuels the cycle of terror and counter-terror.

Conflict Resolution

According to the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute, of the twenty-seven major armed conflicts in the world in 1999, all but two were internal to countries. Unlike inter-state conflicts, when it comes to internal armed conflicts, the international community has little capacity to intervene. In recent years international intervention has become a synonym for military intervention, yet the latter is only rarely the kind of intervention that most conflicts require. Arguably, third parties can contribute to conflict resolution at much earlier stages of a conflict when the political space for compromise is larger. Scholars and policy makers in recent years have emphasised the importance of preventive diplomacy: early warning systems and the presence of credible third parties are among the factors recommended for effective conflict prevention.

 

Given the taboo against intervention in the domestic affairs of a state, it is not surprising, however, that international mediation in internal conflicts happens only rarely. Indeed, the international community may have access to such conflicts only when violence reaches a very high level. Strong states such as Russia and India may resist giving access indefinitely.

 

The issue that the international community must address is how to design new institutions and procedures, and how to reform old ones, in order to resolve and manage the conflicts inherent in the nature of some nation states. While intra-state conflicts are not the only conflicts that give rise to terrorism, the gap between the rhetoric of counter-terrorism and the international community’s lack of will to invest resources in conflict resolution becomes especially noticeable in these cases.

 

In recent years there has been significant progress towards resolving one of the world’s longest-standing disputes: the conflict in Northern Ireland. The lessons of this case speak loudly against the decoupling of counter-terrorism from conflict resolution. The prospects of an end to terrorism have come not from sticking to the law-enforcement approach, but from linking the goal of ending terrorism with that of conflict resolution.

 

It is not accidental that the Good Friday peace process in Northern Ireland has involved the release of terrorists from prison. Convicted terrorists have not only been released, they have sometimes played key roles in peace negotiations. To be sure, the release of prisoners—often former terrorists—has occasioned some of the most difficult moments in the political process of trying to end the Ulster conflict. Yet the releases have been an indispensable part of the process. Governments which insist that such prisoners are no more than ordinary criminals have not produced the breakthroughs that today promise, in Northern Ireland, an end to terrorism. Progress towards resolving the Ulster conflict and ending terrorism there has come only when terrorists were seen as political prisoners firmly located in the dynamics of the conflict.

 

Compared to the progress made in Northern Ireland—a result of conflict-resolution processes prompted by the initiatives and major resource commitments of important third parties—the global counter-terrorism regime has very little to show in the way of success in combating terrorism. If that failure is to be reversed, conflict resolution will have to be placed firmly on the counter-terrorism agenda.

 

Endnotes

1. “Canada’s Tamils Work for a Homeland from Afar”, New York Times, 16 July 2000.

 

2. Paul Wilkinson, “The Laws of War and Terrorism”, in The Morality of Terrorism: Religious and Secular Justifications, ed. David C. Rapaport and Yonah Alexander (New York: Columbia University Press, 1989), p. 321.

 

3. Ivan Eland, “Does US Intervention Overseas Breed Terrorism? The Historical Record”, Cato Institute Foreign Policy Briefing no. 50, 17 December 1998.

 

4. Countering the Changing Threat of International Terrorism, report of the National Commission on Terrorism, Washington, D.C., 2000 [www.fas.org/irp/threat/commission.html].

 

5. Ambassador Michael Shennan, testimony before the House International Relations Committee, 12 July 2000.

 

6. Reuven Paz, “Israeli–Indian Cooperation for Counter-Terrorism”, the International Policy Institute for Counter-Terrorism, Herzliya, Israel, 30 June 2000 [www.ict.org.il/articles/articledet.cfm?articleid=114].

 

7. Cited in “New UN Treaty to Outlaw Funding of Terrorism”, the International Policy Institute for Counter-Terrorism, Herzliya, Israel, 14 December 1999 [www.ict.org.il/spotlight/det.cfm?id=365].

 

8. “Terrorism: Can You Trust Your Bathtub?”, the Terrorism Research Center, 12 September 1996 [www.terrorism.com/terrorism/bathtub.html].

 

9. Ileana M. Porras, “On Terrorism: Reflections on Violence and the Outlaw”, in After Identity: A Reader in Law and Culture, ed. Dan Danielson and Karen Engle (New York: Routledge, 1995), pp. 296–7, 307–8.

 

10. Joseba Zulaika, “The Anthropologist as Terrorist”, in Fieldwork under Fire: Contemporary Studies of Violence and Survival, ed. Carolyn Nordstrom and Antonius C. G. M. Robben (Berkeley, Calif.: University of California Press, 1995), pp. 210, 220.

 

11. Human Rights Watch, World Report 2000 [www.hrw.org/hrw/wr2k/Front.htm].

 

12. Cynthia Keppley Mahmood, Fighting for Faith and Nation: Dialogues with Sikh Militants (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1996), pp. 263–6.

 

13. Ibid.

 

14. “Two Sikh Militants Win Deportation Battle in UK”, Times of India, 1 August 2000.

 

15. Stephen Mulvey, “Analysis: Chechnya’s Deadly Martyrs”, BBC News Online, 4 July 2000 [news6.thdo.bbc.co.uk/hi/english/world/europe/newsid_818000/818697.stm].

 

16. Eric Margolis, “Forgotten Chechens Face Extermination”, Foreign Correspondent.com, 23 January 2000 [www.foreigncorrespondent.com/archive/chechens.html].