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Track II : Security and Terrorism in the 21st Century,January 13The Changing International Terrorist Threat

Paul Wilkinson,

St. Andrews University, Centre for the Study of Terrorism & Political Violence

Terrorism is not a synonym for political violence in general. It is a special kind of violencedesigned to create a climate of fear among a wider target group than the immediate victims,usually for political ends.1There is an impressive weight of historical evidence showing thatterrorism alone has rarely sufficed to achieve long-term political goals.2. It has proved highlyeffective as an auxiliary weapon in political conflict in achieving more limited tactical aims,and this helps to explain its continuing popularity as a method of struggle in a host of causes.3.The characteristic objectives of terrorists include: massive and immediate publicity as a resultof an outrage or a series of atrocities; to inspire followers and sympathizers to further acts of terrorism or insurrection; to provoke the authorities into a repressiveover-reaction which the terrorists can then exploit to their political advantage.4; as a means of extortion to force the authorities into making concessions, such as the release of imprisonedterrorists or the payment of ransoms; to sow inter-communal hatred andconflict; to destroy public confidence in government and security agencies; and to coercecommunities and activists into obeying the terrorist leadership. In short, terrorism has provena low-cost, low-risk, potentially high-yield method of struggle for all kindsof groups and regimes. There is no sign that the ending of the Cold War has eradicated theunderlying ethnic, religio-political, ideological and strategic causes of conflict which spawnterrorism.5.On the other hand, twentieth century history also shows `terrorism is a faulty weapon thatoften misfires.6. Wanton murder and destruction may have the effects of uniting andhardening a community against the terrorists, of triggering a violent backlash byrival groups or of stinging the authorities into more effective security measures in the ensuing period of public revulsion. It is also clear that liberal democracies have been extraordinarilyresilient in withstanding terrorist attempts to coerce them into major changes of policy or surrender in the face of the terrorists' demands.7In contrast todictatorships and colonialist regimes, liberal democracies have the key advantage that theyenjoy legitimacy in the eyes of the overwhelming majority of the population and candepend on their support against the terrorists.8.The underlying resilience of liberal democracies should not, however, blind us to the fact thatit is relatively easy for terrorists to exploit liberal democratic freedoms to organize andimplement attacks and more sustained campaigns of violence which may well involvemassive bombing attacks deliberately aimed at causing hundreds of deaths and injuries amongthe civilian population. The terrorist bombing of Pan Am flight 103 over Lockerbie inScotland in December 1988, killing all 259 passengers and crew and 11 people on the ground,accounted for over 40 per cent of all deaths caused by international terrorism in that singleyear.9. Thirty people were killed and 252 injured in the Hizbullah bomb attack on the Israeli

embassy in Buenos Aires in March 1992. Six Americans were killed and over 1,000 injured inthe bombing of the World Trade Centre in February 1993, and 96 were killed and 200 injuredin the bombing of the Jewish community's building in Buenos Aires in July 1994. The attackson the Jewish community in Buenos Aires and London in July 1994 show not only thatterrorist crimes endanger life and limb and are often aimed at intimidating particular religiousor ethnic minorities; they also graphically demonstrate how terrorist groups and their statesponsors use terrorism as an international weapon, in this case to derail or at least severelydisrupt the peace process in the Middle East.It is clear, then, that the international and national problems of response to terrorists threatsare interwoven. To be effective, action against terrorists must be synchronised to both levels.By tolerating the terrorists' capacity to provoke and incite further conflictthe international community is playing with fire. And we have seen that terrorists confrontliberal democracies internally with a ruthless challenge against the safety of their citizens, thesecurity of the state, and the rule of law. Liberal democratic governments have to decide howto react to terrorist violence, and they have to carry a majority of their citizens with them behind their policies.Counter-terrorism is not an insignificant or purely marginal responsibility which can safely beleft entirely to secret intelligence and police agencies. By its very nature it raises importantissues of democratic accountability, legal powers, and civil liberties.Clumsy and heavy-handed responses can endanger human rights and weaken democracy andthe rule of law. Weakness and under-reaction can invite worse violence by signalling toterrorists that they can commit their crimes with relative all deaths caused by international terrimpunity and can gravely damage public confidence in the authorities andtheir ability and will to uphold the law. It would be foolish to pretend that it is easy for liberaldemocratic states to get this balance right. It is also important to bear in mind that, in the post-Cold War world, the national policies of major democratic states, especially the United Statesand the key European Union (EU) member states, have the predominant influence on theshaping of the international order. If they get things badly wrong, this has major repercussionson the global strategic environment.

The Current Threat in Britain and Western Europe

The United Kingdom has experienced the most protracted and lethal terrorist campaign inWestern Europe: the bombing campaign by the Irish Republican Army (IRA) in the twenty-seven years since 1970. This campaign, mainly centred in Northern Ireland but frequentlyspilling over into attacks on the British mainland, and occasionally against British targets onthe continent of Europe, has been more than three times as lethal as the terrorist campaignconducted against Spain by ETA-M-Euskadi ta Askatasuna (military faction), the armed wingof the Basque separatist movement, and has resulted in hundreds of deaths, thousands of injuries and hundreds of millions of pounds of damage to property.10. It has also provoked aretaliatory terror campaign by Loyalist extremist groups, the UVF and UFF, though thesegroups declared a cease-fire in October 1994, and although extremely tenuous this has not yet been formally renounced.The IRA declared a cease-fire in September 1994, but resumed violence in February 1996. Itis now clear that the hardline IRA leadership is determined to keep to the bomb and the gun,the mortar and the land mine, their habitual weapons, and that the talk by Sinn Fein, the IRA's political wing, of their 'peace strategy' was intended as a political ploy. It should be clearly

understood that even if the IRA did declare a new cease-fire and thus gain Sinn Fein entry tointer-party talks, the gulf between the IRA's demands and the views of the Unionist partiesrepresenting the majority of the population in Northern Ireland is vast. Hence it would be premature, indeed reckless, for the British government and the intelligence and policeagencies to scale down their counter-terrorism efforts when a lasting peace still appears soelusive. However, so far as civil aviation is concerned, the IRA and ETA have not viewed thisas a major target. The IRA did mount a mortar attack on Heathrow Airport in 1994, and ETA bombed a tourist airport in Spain in 1996, but these attacks were a departure from their normal practice.The other major indigenous terrorist threats in Western Europe are also separatist/ nationalistin political motivation: ETA-M, which is still capable of committing outrages in the Basqueregion and against Spanish targets in Madrid despite the success of the Spanish securityauthorities, in close co-operation with the French, in capturing and convicting ETA leadersand cell members; and the FLNC and other Corsican terrorist groups waging a violentcampaign against the French authorities. However, although the ETA campaign hasoccasionally spilled over the border into France, and both the Basque and Corsican terroristshave sometimes used foreign countries for safe havens and arms procurement, their violencehas been primarily concentrated in their own regions, and they have not chosen to wageinternational campaigns.There has been a sharp decline in the activities of extreme left-wing indigenous terroristgroups since the 1980s.11. Action Directe(AD) in France and the Fighting Communist Cells(CCC) in Belgium were effectively eradicated by successful police action. The Red Brigades(BR) in Italy were defeated in the early 1980s by a combination of effective police and judicial measures, such as the Pentiti legislation, and their own internal splits anddemoralization.12. The Red Army Faction (RAF) in Germany is a mere shadow of the groupthat plagued the federal republic in the 1970s. Greece is the only EU country in which left-wing terrorist activity is still a problem for the authorities.13.On the other hand, there has been a very worrying escalation of terrorism and politicalviolence by ultra-right groups in Germany and elsewhere. In Europe during the past fewyears, the problem of the resurgence of extreme-right violence has become a far more seriousthreat than ideologically motivated violence from the extreme left. For example, in Germany,the widespread disillusion with mainstream political parties, the economic strains of re-unification, high levels of unemployment and the arrival of hundreds of thousands of newcomers has created a climate in which violent right-wing extremism thrives. In 1992,there were over 2,000 attacks by extreme right groups, causing 17 deaths and over 2,000injuries. The German interior ministry estimates that there are some 75 extreme-right groupsactive in Germany with 65,000 activists, roughly 10 per cent of whom have a record of violence. Between 1991 and 1993, the extreme-right groups killed thirty people. In September 1993, Chancellor Kohl rather belatedly condemned the rise of these groups and their violentactions, and said they were as much of a threat to democraticsociety as extreme left-wing terror had been in the 1970s and early 1980s. The neo-Nazigroups easily circumvented the ban on groups which threaten the constitutional order, under Article 9 of the German constitution. However, a number of extreme groupshave now been proscribed and the authorities are making greater efforts to prevent them frommounting violent attacks. Nevertheless, more arson attacks causing the deaths of immigrantfamilies cannot be ruled out.

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