The Genesis of Terrorism

Columnist Col (Retd) EAS BOKHARI analyses the reasons that spawn terrorism.

“... The chances are that of 100 attempts at terrorist superviolence, 99 would fail. But the single successful one could claim many more victims, do more material damage, and unleash far greater panic than anything the world has yet experienced....”

  Walter Laquerer

The above quotation depicts what exactly happened on II September in the USA. This short presentation deals with the nature of terrorism with special reference to post-modern terrorism, and how it works and some of the malaises of this multi-faceted and nefarious activity.

There is no doubt that terrorism has currently become the leading occupation of politicians, police chiefs, journalists, and writers from Dostoevsky to Henry James. President Clinton had given terrorism top priority at the Group of Seven meeting after the June Bombing of the US military compound in Dhahran, Saudi Arabia. President Bush has just outlined his massive attack against terrorism which is perhaps the most comprehensive crusade that can be planned. His plan which is still to be unfolded in its entirety is highly sophisticated and equally multi-faceted involving a variety of actions which are being planned over a long period of time to attack worldwide terrorism.

It is perhaps not very appropriate to count the number of worldwide incidents as the statistics may not convey much and may be totally infructuous. And even the definition of terrorism fails to capture the magnitude of the problem worldwide.

“Terrorism has been defined as the substate application of violence or threatened violence intended to sow panic in a society to weaken or even overthrow the incumbents, and to bring about political change.” To elaborate it a bit more, “... Terrorism consists of a series of acts intended to spread intimidation, panic, and destruction in a population. These acts can be carried out by individuals and groups opposing a state, or acting on its behalf. The amount of violence is often disproportionate, apparently random, deliberately symbolic: to hit a target which would convey a message to the rest of the population... Violence perpetrated by the state or by right wing terrorist groups is anonymous....”

Terrorism shades on occasion into guerrilla warfare, although unlike guerrillas, terrorists are unable or even unwilling to hold territory after taking it, and is even a substitute for war between states. By and large in its very long tarnished history terrorism has appeared in many guises and today the society faces not one terrorism, but many terrorisms.

Since 1900, terrorists’ motivation, strategy and weapons have changed to some extent. The anarchists and the left wing terrorist groups that succeeded them, down through the Red Armies that operated in Germany, Italy and Japan in the 1970s have almost vanished; if anything the initiative has passed to extreme right. “Most international and domestic terrorism these days, however, is neither left nor right, but ethnic, separatist in inspiration... Ethnic terrorists have more staying power than ideologically motivated ones, since they draw on larger reservoir of public support...”

The discernible change in the recent decades is that terrorism is by no means militant’s only strategy. The many branched Muslim Brotherhood, the Palestinian Hamas, the IRA, the Kurdish extremists, Tamil Tigers of Sri Lanka, The Basque Homeland and Liberty (ETA) movement in Spain, and the myriads of other groups that have sprung in this century have had political as well as terrorist wing from the beginning.

It appears that the classical hijacking of airplanes has become a little rare as such planes cannot stay in the air forever. The terrorists also see the diminishing returns on hijacking. The emphasis appears to be on indiscriminate killing and the dividing line between urban terrorism and other tactics has become less distinct.

Misapprehensions, not only semantic, surround the various forms of political violence. “A terrorist is not a guerrilla, strictly speaking. There is no longer any guerrilla, engaging in Maoist style liberation of territories that become the base of a counter-society and a regular army fighting the central government except perhaps a remote place like Afghanistan, the Philippines and Sri Lanka... The term ‘guerrilla’ has had a long life partly because terrorists prefer the label for its positive connotations... It also persists because governments and media in other countries do not wish to offend terrorist by calling them terrorist.. The French and the British press would not dream of referring to their country’s native terrorist by any other name but call terrorists in other nations militants, activists, national liberation fighters or even ‘gun persons’.”

And, as been amply demonstrated in the recent happening in the New York Trade Centre and the Pentagon in Washington DC, the belief has gained ground that terrorist missions by volunteers bent on committing suicide constitute a radical new departure. This is an extremely dangerous departure as it is very difficult almost impossible to prevent. The case in point is the terrible happenings of 11 September 2001.

The phenomenon of volunteers willing to lose their life is not something new, and has occurred in all eras and cultural traditions and there are those terrorists who are eager to blow themselves up, thus espousing politics ranging from the leftism of a Baader-Meinholf Gang in 1970s in Germany to rightist extremism. When the Japanese military wanted Kamikaze pilots in the end of the World War II, thousands of volunteers rushed to offer their services. The young Arab bombers on Jerusalem buses looking to be rewarded “by the virgins in Paradise are a link in an old chain.”

A study of some of the acts of terrorism shows that terrorism more often than not has little political impact, and when it does have one, it is often the opposite of the desired one. Terrorism in 1980s and 1990s is no exception. The 1991 assassination of Rajiv Gandhi as he campaigned to retake the prime ministership neither hastened nor inhibited the decline of India’s Congress Party.

“Terrorists caused disruption and destabilization in other parts of the world, such as Sri Lanka, where economic decline has accompanied the war between the government and Tamil Tigers. But in Israel and in Spain where Basque extremists have been staging attacks for decades, terrorism has had no effect on the economy... Even in Algeria where terrorism has extracted the highest toll in human lives, Muslim extremists have made little headway since 1992-93 when many predicted the demise of the unpopular military regime....”

As it has been pointed out terrorism is a multi-faceted phenomenon and the common wisdom holds that terrorism can even spark a war (as is the case in the present terrorists attack on the US) or at least, surely it can prevent peace, especially where there is much inflammable material as in Sarajevo in 1914. Some such conditions prevail in the Middle East too these days.

There is no doubt that the terrorists prospects are improving day by day as their destructive potential increases. This has to do both with the rise of groups and individuals that practice or might take up terrorism with the weapons available to them. “The past few decades have witnessed the birth of dozens of aggressive movements espousing varieties of nationalism, religious fundamentalism, fascism, and apocalyptic millenarianism, from Hindu nationalists in India to neofascists in Europe and the developing world to the Branch Davidian cult of Waco, Texas....”

The terrorists may have a very broad choice of weapons ranging from unconventional to conventional weapons of mass destruction. The catalogue of Weapons of Mass Destruction (WMD) includes, besides nuclear weapons, such artifacts as the biological agents and man-made chemical compounds that attack the nervous system, skin and blood. It should be noted that the science fiction writers had produced chemical weapons much earlier in the history as is clear in Jules Verne’s ‘The Begumi Fortune’, a German scientist aims to wipe out the 250,000 inhabitants of the (French) Franceville with one grenade of what he calls carbon acid gas, shot from a supergun. With improvements in missile technology, the ballistic missiles, cruise missiles and aerosols have become much more effective. These weapons have played a role recently in Afghanistan, and Yemen and their use by terrorist groups will be but one step further.

Until the 1970s most observers thought that the stolen nuclear material constituted the greatest threat in the escalation of terrorists weapons but now it is thought that the danger lies somewhere else. In April 1996, a US Defence Department report said “... Most terrorist groups do not have the financial and technical resources to acquire nuclear weapons but could gather materials to make radiological dispersion devices and some biological and chemical agents...” It is to be noted that the terrorist groups have themselves investigated the use of poisons since the nineteenth century. The Aum Shinrikyo cult staged a poison gas attack (sarin) in March 1995 in Tokyo subway killing ten people and injuring 5,000.

There have been amateurish cases of production of gases and the toxins that cause botulism, the poisonous rycin, sarin, bubonic plague bacteria, typhoid bacteria, hydrogen cyanide, VX (another nerve gas), and possible the Ebola virus.

On the choice of weapons it is generally conceded that given the technical difficulties terrorists are probably less likely to use nuclear devices than chemical weapons, and least likely to attempt to use biological weapons. But difficulties could be overcome, and the choice of unconventional weapons will in the end come down to the specialties of the terrorists and their access to deadly substances. In fact the traditional terrorist will never engage in an overkill if he can do the job with his conventional arsenal. But then terrorism has no rationale and a terrorist can resort to anything especially in desperation, even to suicide as was the case on 11 September 2001. And despair could lead to last desperate attempt to defeat the hated enemy by arms / tactics not tried before. As one of Racine’s heroes said of himself, their “only hope lies in their despair.”

As the humankind approached the end of the second millennium of the Christian era, apocalyptic movements showed a marked rise. And of course the belief in the impending end of the world is probably as old as history, but for reasons not quite well understood, sects and movements preaching the end of the world gain greater influence towards the end of a century, and all the more at the end of a millennium.

“Terrorist groups traditionally contain strong quasi-religious fanatical elements, for only total certainty of belief (or total moral relativitism) provides justification for taking lives. That element was strong among the pre-revolutionary Russian terrorists and the Romanian fascists of the Iron Guard in the 1930s, as it is among today’s Tamil Tigers. Fanatical Muslims consider the killing of the enemies of God a religious commandment, and believe that the secularists at home as well as the State of Israel will be annihilated because it is Allah’s will. Aum Shinrikyo doctrine held that murder could help both victim and murderer to salvation...”

Extremist millenarians like to give history a push by creating a world ending havoc replete with universal war, famine, pestilence and other scourges. According to Nostradamus, a “great King of terror” will come from heaven in July 1999. There is, however, a problem in fixing the date as the Christian calendar was inexact and, therefore, no one knew the day and hour of this catastrophe, not even the angels. (See Walter Laqueur ‘Fin De Siecle, Once more with Feeling’ Journal of Contemporary History - January 1996 PP5-47).

Apocalyptic elements have cropped up in intellectual fashions and extremist politics as well. For instance extreme environmentalists especially the so-called restoration ecologists, believe that environmental disasters will destroy civilization as we know it, no less, in their view, and regard the vast majority of human beings as expendable.

“The motto of ‘Chaos International’ one of the many journals in this field is a quotation from Hassan I Sabbah, the master of the Assassins, a medieval sect whose members killed Crusaders and others in a ‘religious’ ecstasy; everything is permitted, the master says.

The pre-modern world and the post-modernism meet at this point.”

It appears that a new breed of terrorists is fast coming on the forefront. They can be distinguished from the classical nationalists and anarchists. The new breed, it is visualized, will consist of individuals or likeminded persons working in very small groups on the pattern of technology hating Unabomber who apparently worked alone sending out parcel bombs over two decades, or the perpetrators of the 1995 bombing of the Federal Building in Oklahoma City. The ideologies of such small groups may be even more aberrant than those of larger groups and surely such solitary workers are very difficult to deter unless he makes a gross mistake.

Finally, society has also become vulnerable to new kind of terrorism in which the destructive power of both the individual terrorist and terrorism as a tactic are infinitely greater. The advanced societies of today are more dependent everyday on the electronic storage, retrieval, analysis, and transmission of information. Defence, the police, banking, trade, transportation, scientific work, and a large percentage of government’s and private sector’s transactions are online. That exposes enormous vital areas of national life to mischief and sabotage by any computer hacker which could render a country unable to function. Hence the growing speculation about info terrorism and cyber warfare.

“An unnamed US intelligence official has boasted that with $ 1 billion and 20 capable hackers (the number is about the same as in the recent US catastrophe in New York and Washington DC), he could shut down America. What he could do, a terrorist could too.

Terrorism is surely a complex phenomenon but all the same terrorism by the state or against it must be considered rational behaviour within the context of alternative options. It is suggestive of the lack of vast support both for the state and for terrorist organizations, otherwise, both would utilize different political means. It is indeed a short cut to the problem of creation of the necessary support.

Socio-political terrorism may arise both in democratic and non-democratic states. It is more frequent in the former because of relative ease with which terrorists organizations can be created in the atmosphere of freedom, when their appearance is unexpected. In non-democratic states, of course, it may be state apparatus itself which resorts to terrorist activities. “In any event, the lack of peaceful alternatives to change is likely to radicalize the situation and to push opponents towards violent, clandestine activities....”

There cannot be a single cause of terrorism: several conditions and determinants must be present. For state terrorism the most important conditions are the willingness and determination of the dominant groups to retain power against mounting opposition, even by violent means.... For socio-political terrorism, it is inability to acquire sufficient support for radical changes in the light of mass passivity and elite unresponsiveness. However, terrorism is never simply the response to socio-economic conditions of marginality. It is always the product of a political project.

According to their goals, one can define and identify several types of terrorism, repressive, revolutionary, secessionist et al. It is also possible to speak of international terrorism, though somewhat inappropriately, for those groups who stage their activities on the international scene. They want to dramatize their plight and obtain international visibility, recognition and support. But by and large most of the terrorist groups have ‘national’ roots even though they might enjoy some (reciprocal) ‘international’ support.

There is no doubt that terrorism can never win, all the same it can achieve significant results. “Terrorism even if it is defeated, is not without consequences”. The dynamics of political competition in fact encourages terrorism and this will endure as a weapon in the hands of the groups that have neither the capability, the possibility nor the patience to utilize their instruments to pursue their goals and implement their strategies.