Issue No.588
Opinion
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30 May - 5 June 2002 Issue No.588 Opinion |
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| Published in Cairo by AL-AHRAM established in 1875 | Recommend this page | ||
Terrorism: uses and abuses
As America defines and redefines 'terrorism' at will, and Israel seeks to violently impose its 'pax' on the Palestinians, it is still too early to drop the gun for the olive branch, argues Ayman El-Amir*
After seven weeks of brutal war against the Palestinians, Israel believes it has softened up the so-called "infrastructure of terrorism" enough to pave the way for a pax Israeliana. To set the stage, Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon has come up with an open-ended list of preconditions that must be fulfilled before agreeing to negotiations. Foremost among these is the demand to end "violence" or the Palestinian Intifada. For 20 months, Palestinian human bombs have been the centre-piece of the Intifada. They have presented the only weapon that Israel's entire arsenal of lethal American armament couldn't match. Control and elimination of this phenomenon will, therefore, be the main focus of the next US endeavour to rekindle the faltering Middle East peace process.
As a first step, Washington is planning to send George Tenet, the director of the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) to the region, with the primary mission of helping the Palestinian Authority (PA) restructure, reform and unify its security services. In this way, the PA will have more effective control of, and responsibility for, any act or form of resistance against the Israeli occupation, no matter how long the occupation lasts. Palestinian resistance factions: Hamas, the Popular Front, Al-Aqsa Brigades and Hizbullah in Lebanon, have unanimously vowed to continue the armed struggle against Israeli occupation "by all means available" to them. This, obviously, includes human bombs, or "suicide bombers", as the Western media would have it.
A paradoxical situation has developed. Arab governments have succeeded in persuading the Bush administration to be more involved in the Middle East. After weeks of incarceration and humiliation, President Yasser Arafat has emerged with firm instructions to end attacks against the Israeli civilian population and a promise to reform the PA. Ariel Sharon continues, what Egyptian Foreign Minister Ahmed Maher has aptly described as, "the revolving door warfare". Furthermore, European criticism has not been backed up with action. While the Intifada remains the only effective reality on the ground, it seems inexorably set for a collision course with a "reformed" PA, which is under tremendous pressure to end "terrorism". Mr Sharon would like nothing better than that.
Terrorism, as a modern political phenomenon, has been the bane of civilised society for more than 200 years. Whether it is merely wanton violence or a fight for national liberation, the qualitative definition of terrorism is in the eye of the beholder. One man's terrorist is another man's freedom fighter. The perspective keeps shifting, depending on the interests involved and the political priorities at the time. In fact, terrorism originally referred to acts of extra judicial violence the state committed against the defenceless individual. Thus, the Constitution of the United States was laboriously framed by the Founding Fathers to protect individuals against the tyranny of government.
After the French Revolution of 1789, M de Robespierre's radical Committee of Public Safety (1793-1794) arrested more than 300,000 suspected "enemies of the Revolution" and, in less than one year, sent about 17,000 of them to the guillotine. Many more were left to perish in prison, during the infamous "Reign of Terror" era. Less than 200 years later, between 1975 and 1979, the brutal Khmer Rouge regime in Cambodia conducted similar massacres, albeit on a far wider scale. The death toll is reported to have been over one million. Individual terrorism, on the other hand, usually targets political leaders as symbols of a system they seek to overthrow. A famous example was the assassination of Archduke Frantz Ferdinand, the crown prince of Austria, and his wife, Sophie, in Sarajevo on 28 June 1914. Gavril Princip, the 19-year-old Serbian student who shot and killed them, had no idea that his actions would be the spark to ignite World War I -- by far the bloodiest war in modern history. Some latter-day historians, however, have redeemed young Gavril. They acknowledged that colonialist Europe, blinded by the lust for a more equitable division of conquered territories, was ready for the fuse to ignite the powder-keg.
In the decades following World War I, terrorism thrived on a lack of shared understanding of the phenomenon, combined with the rise of nationalism and universal acknowledgement of the right to self-determination of colonial peoples and territories. After the end of World War II, and the creation of the United Nations, the mixed agenda of terrorism and the struggle for national liberation became even more complex. The phenomenon spread from Europe to regions under colonial rule in Africa, Asia and the Middle East and took various forms. It included the hijacking of aircraft, bombings, hostage-taking and urban guerrilla warfare. A call for collective international action was sounded and there was no better place for that than the United Nations (UN). For almost three decades, from the 1960s to the 1980s, the UN Legal Committee struggled in vain for an all-embracing definition of terrorism. Some states wanted to outlaw terrorism in all its forms. Others, particularly those committed to supporting the struggle for national liberation, wanted also to address "the causes of terrorism". Developing countries insisted on a distinction between terrorism and national liberation struggles. Little progress was made.
It was not until 1987, curiously enough, the year of the first Intifada of the "stone-throwers", that a serious international attempt at condemning terrorism was made. The Reagan administration, having bombed Libya a year earlier, made fighting terrorism a key component of its foreign policy. In December of that year, the General Assembly unanimously adopted a landmark resolution against terrorism, condemning the phenomenon in the strongest possible terms. Only two countries voted against the resolution: the United States and Israel. Why did these two champions of anti-terrorism vote against a resolution condemning it? Perhaps it was the provision stating that the rights of people struggling against racist and colonialist regimes, or foreign military occupation, should not be infringed upon. For the US and Israel, this touched on two raw nerves: the struggle of the African National Congress (ANC) against the openly racist government of South Africa, officially an ally of the United States; and the Palestinian resistance movement in the Israeli-occupied territories. Moreover, Hizbullah was effectively fighting Israel's occupation of southern Lebanon.
Another example of double-standards was the decades long dispute between the US and the UK about Noraid-- the organisation which raised funds in the US for the Irish Republican Army (IRA) in Northern Ireland. The UK viewed it as an effort to support terrorism, the US, clearly influenced by its Irish lobby, did not. It was not until 11 September that the US banned Noraid, as part of a new drive to stop funding the sources of terrorism. As Professor Noam Chomsky of MIT has put it "The world looks very different, depending on whether you are holding the lash or whether you are being whipped by it for hundreds of years."
The destruction of 11 September has led to a paradigm shift. One no longer needs a definition of terrorism to recognise an act of terrorism. It has also unleashed an indiscriminate global action agenda that has put the Palestinian resistance at a disadvantage. The bottom line is painfully evident. Nobody wants to travel on aircraft, dine at restaurants, or go shopping in malls with the constant fear that the person next to you might be a human bomb. What is less well understood, is that these would-be human bombs never wanted to be placed in such a predicament. This was probably the case until they were displaced as children, lived in an environment of fear, had their movement curbed, saw their houses demolished, their orange groves ploughed under, their brothers and sisters going hungry and their proud father kicked, insulted and spat on by Israeli soldiers in front of family and friends. Many people have survived a bomb attack, albeit with physical and psychological scars, to tell the story. No human bomb will ever come back to tell us why or what it was like to be torn to pieces by explosives for a cause. The function of the armed struggle for national liberation has consistently been to raise the cost of military occupation beyond the limits of tolerance for the occupying power. This is precisely what Palestinian human bombs are doing. In time, the resistance will get even more sophisticated.
In his historic appearance before the United Nations General Assembly in November 1974, Yasser Arafat concluded his address with the rhetorical statement that he had come to the world body with a gun in one hand and an olive branch in the other. He pleaded with delegates not to let the olive branch drop from his hand. Twenty-seven years later, it is still premature to drop the gun.
* The writer is a former correspondent for Al-Ahram in Washington, DC. He also served as director of United Nations Radio and Television in New York.
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