Preamble
No professional builder of worth will ever commence the roofing of a house without first taking a cursory look at the structural design of such a house including its foundation. In the same token no good columnist will want to proffer a solution to a mammoth problem like terrorism without first examining the circumstances that brought it about in the first instance.
Some few weeks back or thereabout, ‘THE MESSAGE’ has engaged in analysing terrorism from every conceivable angle revealing its genesis, exposing the role of some nations and individuals in it as well as unmasking the identity of a related kingpin called Osama Bin Laden.
Terrorism is not a new phenomenon peculiar to modern time. It has long become a part of human lifestyle especially since man’s wants began to outweigh his needs and thereby creating greed in him.
Since about 2000 years ago when the first act of terrorism was perpetrated, no single year has passed by without an incident of terrorism in one part of the world or another. That first act was perpetrated by a radical offshoot of the Zealots (a Jewish politico-religious sect during the 1st century AC) active in resisting the rule of the Roman Empire over Judea.
Zealots emerged in 6 AC when Judea was put under direct Roman rule and the authorities ordered a census for the purpose of taxation. The Zealots’ argument was that acknowledging the authority of the pagan Roman Empire would mean repudiating the authority of God and submitting to slavery.
Led by Judas of Galilee, a Zealots’ faction called Sicarii (‘dagger men’) adopted a terrorist tactics assassinating Romans and even Jews who were in favour of Roman authority or sympathetic to it.
Although that rebellion was eventually put down, and many members of Sicarii probably including Judas, were killed, others continued to advocate uncompromising resistance to the Romans. One of Jesus’ disciples, Simon, was a Zealot (see Luke 6:15).
According to a renowned Jewish historian, Flavius Josephus, the Zealots played a major role in inciting and sustaining the general Jewish uprising that began in 66 AC against the Romans. Although they continued to attack other Jewish groups, they fought bravely in defence of Jerusalem until its fall in 70 AC. Thereafter, another group of Zealots held the fortress of Masada against besieging Roman troops until 73 AC, when they all committed suicide rather than surrender.
From that experience, the aggrieved peoples of the world began to borrow the idea of terrorism as a method of demanding for their rights. And thus, through the annals of history since then, terrorism has become like a triggered gun which can be fired deliberately or accidentally at anytime and anywhere.
Based on the same experience, an Islamic movement known as the Assassins used similar tactics in their struggle against the Christian Crusaders who had invaded what is today part of Syria. That was between 1090 and 1272 AC. The Assassins embraced the same notion of self-sacrifice and suicidal martyrdom evident in some Islamic terrorist groups today. They regarded violence as a sacramental or divine act that ensured its perpetrators would ascend to a glorious heaven should they perish during the task.
In modern time, the word terrorism was first used in France to describe a new system of government adopted during the French Revolution in 1789-1799. Called regime de la terreur (Reign of Terror), the then new regime was intended to promote democracy and popular rule by ridding the revolution of its enemies and thereby purifying it. However, the oppression and violent excesses of the terreur transformed it into a feared instrument of the state. From thence, terrorism has had a decidedly negative connotation. The word, however, did not gain wider popularity until the late 19th century when it was adopted by a group of Russian revolutionaries to describe their violent struggle against tsarist regime. Terrorism then assumed the more familiar antigovernment slogan it has today.
According to Encyclopedia Encarta, terrorism is by nature political because it involves the acquisition and use of power for the purpose of forcing others to submit, or agree, to terrorist demands. By unleashing terror, terrorists intend to generate publicity and draw attention to themselves in their bid to generate power. And in the process, they foster an environment of fear and intimidation that they can exploit to their advantage. As a result, the success of terrorism is best measured in terms of the attention it draws to the terrorists as well as the psychological impact it exerts over a nation and its citizenry. Terrorists typically attempt to justify their use of violence by arguing that they have been excluded from, or frustrated by, the accepted processes of bringing about political change. They maintain that though their method is reluctantly chosen and even regrettable, terrorism is the only option available to them. Agreeing or disagreeing with this logic depends on the side of the divide to which the sympathizers belong. This is what brought about the aphorism “One man’s terrorist is another man’s freedom fighter” which underscores how the use of the word terrorism can be highly subjective depending upon one’s interest.
Although terrorism is generally believed to be a primordial development, its intensity in modern time is strengthened by technology which engenders corporate or state sponsored terror. Prior to the invention of bomb, terrorism was limited to individuals and groups of aggrieved persons. It was only the climax of reactions by aggrieved people to negative policies of authorities or their misrule.
All terrorists share one and the same characteristic: They never take actions randomly or senselessly. Every terrorist wants an attack to generate maximum publicity because media attention helps to achieve the intimidation needed for the success of terrorism. Accordingly, terrorist acts are carefully planned. Testimony by a terrorist convicted in the 1998 bombing of the U.S. embassy in Kenya revealed that al-Qaeda spent nearly five years to plan that attack.
Several essential elements go into planning a major terrorist attack. Planning begins with gathering of detailed reconnaissance and intelligence about a target: its defenses, vulnerabilities, and patterns of daily activities. Meanwhile, logistics specialists ensure that all the supporting tasks are accomplished. These tasks include assembling the weapons and other supplies and communications equipment needed for the operation, arranging for safe houses and transportation for the terrorist attack team, and mapping escape routes. A bomb maker or other weapons expert often joins the final planning phases. And after all the preparations have been completed, the operation is handed over to the team that carries out the attack.
For security reasons separate teams that do not know one another execute each step, from planning to logistics, attack, and escape.
All terrorist groups share another basic characteristic such as secrecy about their operations. Terrorists operate underground, concealed from the eyes of the authorities and from potential informants among the populace. To maintain secrecy, terrorist groups are often organised into cells, with each cell separate from other cells in the organisation but working in harmony with them. A terrorist cell can be as small as two or three people, with only one person knowing someone in another cell. Should the authorities apprehend a member of one cell, they can obtain information only about the activities of that cell—or at most about an adjacent cell—and not about the entire organisation. For this reason terrorists prefer this organizational structure of interconnected cells. The structure narrows up in pyramid fashion, as it rises toward the group’s senior command structure and leadership at the top, to whom very few have access.
Terrorism often targets innocent civilians in order to create an atmosphere of fear, intimidation, and insecurity. Some terrorists deliberately direct attacks against large numbers of ordinary citizens who simply happen to be at a particular place at the wrong time. More selective terrorist attacks target diplomats and diplomatic facilities such as embassies and consulates; military personnel and military bases; business executives and corporate offices as well as transportation vehicles and facilities, such as airlines and airports, railways and railway stations, buses and bus terminals as well as subways. Terrorist attacks on buildings or other inanimate targets often serve a symbolic purpose: They are intended more to draw attention to the terrorists and their cause than to destroy property or kill and injure persons, although death and destruction nonetheless often result.
Despite variations in the number of attacks from year to year in the past few decades, one feature of international terrorism has remained constant: The United States has been its most popular target. Since 1968 the United States has annually led the list of countries which citizens and property were most frequently attacked by terrorists. Several factors can account for this phenomenon, in addition to America’s position as the sole remaining superpower and leader of the free world. These include her geographical scope and ambitious imperialist tendency as exemplified by her many military bases around the world.
Although most terrorist groups have failed to achieve their long-term, strategic aims through terrorism, their adoption of violence has on some occasions brought about significant political changes that might otherwise never be possible. Moreover, despite the claims of governments to the contrary, terrorism has sometimes also proven successful on a short-term, tactical level like winning the release of prisoners, wresting political concessions from otherwise resistant governments, or ensuring that causes and grievances that might otherwise have been ignored or neglected were addressed.
Terrorism was used by some nationalist movements in the anti-colonial era just after World War II, when British and French empires in Africa, Asia, and the Middle East were dissolved. Countries as diverse as, Cyprus, Kenya, and Algeria owe their independence to these movements.
Evidence of terrorist success has come more recently in the examples of Gerry Adams and Martin McGuinness in Northern Ireland and Yasir Arafat in the Middle East. Adams, the president of the political wing of the Irish Republican Army (IRA) in Northern Ireland, and his deputy McGuinness both won election to the British Parliament in 1997. Arafat, as leader of the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO), won international recognition for the PLO. Through tactical victories and political achievements, each of their organizations has demonstrated how a series of terrorist acts can propel to world attention long-standing causes and grievances.
The most spectacular terrorist incident of the anti-colonial period was the 1946 bombing of Jerusalem’s King David Hotel, by a Jewish underground group known as the Irgun Zvai Le’umi (National Military Organization). The hotel was attacked because it served at that time as the military headquarters and offices of the British administration in Palestine. Ninety-one people were killed and 45 others injured: men, women, Arabs, Jews, and Britons alike. The Irgun’s commander at the time was Menachem Begin, a future prime minister of Israel and 1978 Nobel Peace Prize co-winner.
Begin is not alone among those once called terrorists who later attained the highest levels of power in their newly independent countries. Others include Kenya’s president Jomo Kenyatta, Cyprus’s Archbishop Makarios, and Algeria’s president Ahmed Ben Bella.
During the late 1960s and 1970s terrorism assumed more clearly ideological motivations. Various disenfranchised or exiled nationalist minorities—as exemplified by the PLO—also embraced terrorism as a means to draw attention to their plight and generate international support for their cause. The PLO sought to create a state in what was historically known as Palestine: the land that became Israel in 1948 and the West Bank and Gaza Strip—territories occupied by Israel since the Six-Day War of 1967.
A Palestinian group, in fact, was responsible for the incident that is considered to mark the beginning of the current era of international terrorism. On July 22, 1968, three armed Palestinians belonging to the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP) hijacked an Israeli El Al commercial flight from Rome, Italy, en rout Tel Aviv, Israel. Although commercial planes had often been hijacked before, this was the first clearly political hijacking. The act was designed to create an international crisis and thereby generate publicity.
But perhaps the most conspicuous terrorist act that formed a catalyst in the Palestinian cause was that of 1972 Olympic Games in Munich, Germany at which some Palestinians stormed the Israeli camp and murdered 11 of the Jewish athletes in cold blood. That dastardly act though held the world nonplused and sent jitters to most governments it nevertheless paved way for the global recognition of Palestine as a waiting independent State.
Two years after that tragic event, (1974) the United Nations invited the Palestinian Liberation Organization (PLO) leader, Yasir Arafat to address its General Assembly and consequently granted observer status to the PLO. Thus, within one decade, the PLO as a political entity without a state had established formal diplomatic relations with more than 86 countries as against Israel’s 72. The PLO would likely never have attained such recognition without the attention that its international terrorist campaign drew to the plight of thePalestinians in refugee camps.
It must be remembered that the World War I was precipitated by terrorism through the assassination of Archduke Francis Ferdinand, the heir to the throne of Austria-Hungary, by a Serbian nationalist. And it was as a result of that war that the Bolshevik Group seized the power in Russia which culminated in what came to be called Union of Soviet Socialist Republic (USSR). The ripples effect of that development later polarized the world into the Capitalist and Communist camps with emergence of countries like Cuba and China and their entailed armament race.
Because religion was used to justify, legitimize, and even encourage, violence in the assassinations of Egypt’s president Anwar Sadat in 1981 by a group of Islamic fundamentalists and that of Israel’s Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin in 1994 by a group of Jewish extremists, the world tends to attribute terrorism to religion more than anything else. This is a wrong focus considering the various examples cited above. And besides, terrorism is now basically of two major types-internal and external both of which are inter-related. When these two are compared, one will discover that external terrorism can be more easily tackled than the internal one. But generally, what is the solution to terrorism? Read on next Friday In sha’a Llah.
3 Responses to “Solution to terrorism “
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said this on 05 Feb 2010 1:40:38 AM CDT
thanks for the lesson, but i doubt with such illustrious history and rate of success, there could be a solution to terrorism…
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Lumumba Rating:
said this on 06 Feb 2010 6:32:56 AM CDT
You created a confusion between military tactics and strategies of national liberation movements and acts of terrorism as a weapon of war. That they both share violence in their methodologies does not make them the same. Linking Ben Bella or Mau Mau with terrorism is flying in the face of history and turning it upside down. Even going by your history, you stated terrorism started 2000 years ago. Before then nko? Or was that the beginning of history as we know it?
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said this on 07 Feb 2010 3:43:03 AM CDT
lumumba…first acknowledge his premise..one man’s terrorist is another’s freedom fighter…that dismisses your confusion…as for the 2000 years, he had to start from somewhere, or at least where there is a semblance of recorded or dated history…it is called historiography…
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