Abstract
Governments and academics alike have struggled to define terrorism. A 1988 academic study identified 109 variations. As the following definitions of terrorism show, decades of debate have not brought us any closer to consensus.
Innocent bystanders: A 1905 illustration of a bomb attack in Paris that was carried out by anarchists and Russian nihilists.
In early October 2005, three men on motorcycles approached the town of Mong in eastern Pakistan, 150 miles from the capital of Islamabad. They pulled up next to a mosque and, wearing masks, barged in and opened fire. Within minutes, at least eight people were dead and dozens wounded. The attack spread fear through the community of 18,000 people, which includes many members of the Ahmadiyya sect–a variant of Islam that has attracted the wrath of Islamic fundamentalists. “I don't know who attacked our mosque,” one observer told a reporter, “but it seems to be an act of religious terrorism.”
All criminal acts directed against a State and intended or calculated to create a state of
–LEAGUE OF NATIONS CONVENTION (1937)
But under international law, the attack might not have been “terrorism” at all, since there were no bombs, no hostages, no jetliners, and no diplomats involved. Over the past 50 years, a multitude of treaties and a dizzying array of U.N. resolutions have attempted piecemeal to address the issue of terrorism. This web of treaties and resolutions does not cover many attacks that seem obviously and intuitively to be terrorism. Attempts to craft a broad definition have foundered again and again, most recently this year at the organization's sixtieth anniversary summit.
Instead, the world body has agreed to dozens of less ambitious agreements that chip away at the concept, outlawing and condemning one particular method (hijacking or bombing, for example), offering protection to certain classes of people (diplomats), and, more recently, prohibiting “incitement to terrorism” without even defining the underlying offense.
The U.N. Security Council perhaps came closest to a comprehensive definition in the wake of the 2004 Beslan schoolhouse massacre. A Russian draft resolution defined terrorism as “any act intended to cause death or serious injury to civilians or taking of hostages with the purpose to provoke a state of terror, intimidate a population or compel a government or an international organization to do or to abstain from doing any act.” But furious lobbying from several countries that deemed this definition an affront to the principle of “national liberation” ensured that it did not appear in the final resolution. As a result, some simple acts of terror against ordinary civilians–like the October attack in Pakistan–fall through the net.
The global community has united to condemn terrorism–too bad nobody can agree on what exactly a terrorist is.
For some observers, this definitional paralysis is a sign of the world body's dysfunction and of international law's impotence. “U.N. Unable Even to Define Terrorism as 160 Slaughtered,” read a recent headline as the world body wrapped up its summit, juxtaposing diplomatic dithering in New York City with bloodshed in Iraq. 1 The high-level panel convened in 2004 by Secretary-General Kofi Annan that examined U.N. reform concluded that the absence of a definition “stained the U.N.'s image.” For others, the definitional debate is an absurd and all but meaningless sideshow. “Perhaps the only honest and globally workable definition of terrorism is an explicitly subjective one–violence I don't support,” wrote international lawyer John Whitbeck in the International Herald Tribune. 2
Act of
–SHORT LEGAL DEFINITION PROPOSED TO THE U.N. CRIME BRANCH BYTERRORISM EXPERT A. P. SCHMID (1992)
Premeditated, politically motivated
–U.S. NATIONAL SECURITY STRATEGY (2002)
There is some truth to the charges. The U.N. debates on terrorism are often little more than an exchange of tired truisms and canned rhetoric. And the term is ripe for abuse as mere political invective. But beneath the rhetoric and posturing lies an increasingly active debate–particularly in the Islamic world–about the ethics of terror and the all-too-familiar struggle between means and ends. Nor is the question merely one of symbolic importance. Extradition agreements, sanctions regimes, and measures to cut off terrorist funding would all benefit from a broad and clear definition. Far from a side-show, the effort to define terrorism is central to the struggle against it.
THE OLDEST PROFESSION
Terrorism as an activity may be nearly as old as human society. Historians have often identified the Sicarii and the Zealots, Jewish groups opposed to the Roman occupation, as early practitioners. Later, the Assassins–a splinter Islamic group based in Persia–waged a campaign of killing and sabotage during the eighth to fourteenth centuries. The term “terrorist” is newer and seems to have emerged during the French Revolution; the eighteenth century British philosopher Edmund Burke condemned “those hellhounds called terrorists.” French revolutionary Maximilien Robespierre, at least, did not see it as a term of opprobrium. “Terror,” he said, “is nothing other than justice, prompt, severe, inflexible; it is therefore the emanation of virtue.”
Russian anarchists in the late nineteenth century also often received the label “terrorist” willingly, though many of them were morally fastidious by comparison with more recent practitioners. The assassination of Russian leaders was their favored methodology, and innocents were rarely targeted. Albert Camus' play The Just Assassins features a group of Russian terrorists earnestly debating the acceptability of throwing a bomb at the Russian grand duke's carriage when his niece and nephew are present. “Even in destruction,” says one terrorist, “there's a right way and a wrong way–there are limits.” The scene was not implausible; the intellectuals behind the campaign of assassinations in Russia made clear their preference for discriminate violence. “The movement punishes only those who are really responsible for the evil deed,” wrote anarchist theoretician Nicholas Morozov. “Because of this the terroristic revolution is the only just form of revolution.” 3
For many years, it was this type of terrorism–and not today's often indiscriminate bloodletting–that consumed political leaders. The first effort to comprehensively define and outlaw terrorism, for example, came in response to the assassination of Yugoslavia's King Alexander by a Macedonian extremist in 1934. The ill-starred League of Nations patched together a treaty three years later that banned all “acts of terror,” which it defined as “criminal acts directed against a State and intended or calculated to create a state of terror in the minds of particular persons, or a group of persons or the general public.” Like so many of the league's efforts, the treaty went for naught; only a handful of states signed on, and it never came into force.
As Russian-style anarchism faded, the world became acquainted with terrorism that had fewer scruples and more coherent ideologies. In the 1940s and 1950s, terror often accompanied the struggle against colonialism. The Jewish extremist group Irgun blew up the King David Hotel in Jerusalem to protest the British occupation, killing almost a hundred people. (Debate continues to this day about whether Irgun warned the hotel to evacuate.) In Algeria, militants waged a bloody campaign against French authorities that featured frequent assassinations, torture, and brutalization of civilians.
The Cold War, and its attendant ideological struggle, produced its own breed of terrorists. Left-wing groups in Europe such as Action Directe and the Baader-Meinhof faction targeted diplomats and public officials. They also struck military facilities, airports, and businesses (though they rarely inflicted significant casualties). Right-wing governments in Latin America sponsored a series of assassinations, including the 1976 killing of former Chilean diplomat Orlando Letelier in the heart of Washington, D.C.
The Palestinian struggle spans several generations of terror, and the cause has appealed to violent extremists of many stripes–from secular radicals fighting colonialism, to Marxists combating imperialism, and now to Islamists fighting Western “crusaders.” The Palestinian struggle also induced several Arab states to get into the business of sponsoring terrorism. During the 1970s, Libya sponsored terrorists with particular gusto, funding a succession of attacks against Jewish and Israeli targets, as well as other Arab groups that got in its way. More recently, Iran has taken up the baton.
It is now easy to regard terrorism as a post-9/11 issue, but it has been a constant companion for the last 40 years and an identified phenomenon for more than two centuries. And world leaders and international lawyers have gone hoarse pleading for a comprehensive definition and convention. Secretary-General Annan escalated the rhetoric again as the United Nations prepared for its sixtieth anniversary summit. “For too long, efforts at the United Nations to confront this vicious phenomenon have been weakened by the lack of a comprehensive convention on terrorism, based on a clear and agreed definition,” he told a meeting of the League of Arab states in March 2005. 4 And yet he has had no more success than his predecessors. The UN. summit adjourned without a comprehensive treaty and dispatched the matter to a special legal committee.
The term
–U.S. CODE, TITLE 22, SECTION 2656F(D) (1983)
–ACADEMIC CONSENSUS DEFINITION BY A. P. SCHMID AND A. J. JONGMAN (1988)
What makes a definition so elusive? The answer, in one word, is Israel. Deep and emotional support in the Muslim world for the Palestinian struggle has repeatedly sunk efforts to reach a broad definition. Most Arab and Muslim governments have insisted that a definition of terrorism exempt what they term struggles for national liberation. “We ought not, in our desire to confront terrorism, erode the principle of the legitimacy of national resistance that we have upheld for 50 years,” said Pakistan's U.N. ambassador after a Security Council debate in 2004. 5 Other delegations have used similar language for decades to deflect what they see as an unacceptably broad definition.
For their part, Western delegations insist that an exemption for national liberation groups would create a gaping legal hole through which dozens of terrorist organizations could pass. “How is it,” asked Australian foreign minister Alexander Downer as the U.N. summit wound down, “after atrocities in Sharm el Sheikh, Istanbul, Jakarta, Riyadh, and on a daily basis in Iraq–that some continue to employ double standards, deceiving themselves that such terrorists could ever be considered to be ‘freedom fighters?’” 6
In theory at least, the frequent, and by now clichéd, juxtaposition of terrorists and freedom fighters should not prevent a definition. Terms like “national liberation struggle” and “freedom fighter” refer to the justice of the cause for which a person fights. Terrorism, by contrast, is a method of fighting. Ethicists and lawyers have long distinguished between the jus ad helium–the right to use force–and the jus in hello–the law of how to use force. The Geneva Conventions, for example, say nothing about when a state may go to war; they regulate only how a state conducts war. It is perfectly possible to have a just war (or at least a war with some justice) that is fought unjustly.
Debates on terrorism therefore often resemble a conversation in different languages: one camp speaks the language of methods, while the other side talks about causes. All too often, the debate remains at that stagnant and unproductive level of abstraction. But escalating and expanding terrorist violence, from Baghdad to Bali, has forced more concrete questions into the open.
None is more difficult than the question of who can be killed without engaging in terrorism. The “innocent civilian” has become the paradigmatic victim, and any eventual comprehensive definition will likely focus on keeping these people out of the line of fire. A definition of terrorism “must include the deliberate victimization of civilians for political purposes as a principal feature–anything else would be a logical absurdity,” says military historian Caleb Carr. 7
The intense current focus on protecting innocent civilians may say as much about shifting terrorist methodologies as the preferences of states. In 1973, the United Nations passed a convention protecting heads of state and diplomats from attack. The United States regards the 1983 attack on its Marine barracks in Lebanon as terrorism, and few Americans would be willing to concede that even the Pentagon was a legitimate target on 9/11. Many governments, including the Bush administration, would still like to see all attacks by non-state groups against their facilities and personnel included in a definition of terrorism. Yet, safeguarding innocent civilians has become a critical common denominator and would likely form the core of a comprehensive definition.
Even that premise goes too far for those who reject the very concept of “innocent civilians.” After the London bombings, for example, the editor of an Al Qaeda-affiliated publication defended the attacks. “I do not consider those killed in the London attacks as innocent. Because those people paid taxes to the English government and elected [Prime Minister Tony] Blair, who is responsible for the killing of thousands of Muslims.” 8 Any citizen of a democratic state, according to this view, bears some responsibility for its government's policies. Today's terrorists and their sympathizers appear to take the concept of popular sovereignty quite seriously. Many sympathetic to the Palestinian cause reject such a sweeping formulation but still have trouble explicitly granting immunity to Israeli civilians–particularly settlers in the occupied territories.
There is evidence, however, that the wave of attacks by Islamic militants in the last five years has pushed the Islamic world toward a recognition that targeting unaffiliated civilians is out of bounds and a key element in terrorism. When the Egyptian cleric Yusuf Al-Qaradawi stated that attacking American civilians in Iraq was justifiable, he sparked a lively debate on the immunity of civilians. Abd Al-Mu'ti Bayyoumi, a prominent Egyptian scholar, concluded, “Islamic law states that it is forbidden to kill civilians who are distant from the area of fighting, who are not participating in military operations, and who have nothing to do with the occupation of foreign lands.” 9
That definition, of course, leaves some Israeli civilians exposed (those who have something to do with the “occupation of foreign lands”). Other Muslim commentators have gone further and rejected entirely the idea of targeting civilians. “The resistance to the [Israeli] occupation should continue in all forms and means but not through martyrdom operations against civilians,” wrote Bassam Abu Sharif, a former adviser to Yasir Arafat. “It is time to take a Palestinian stand to stop such operations in order to serve the supreme Palestinian interests.” 10
Last summer's London bombings appear to have generated a particularly strong wave of Muslim revulsion. Al-Qaradawi, who had so recently condoned attacks on U.S. civilians in Iraq, called the bombings “cruel and barbaric.” He went on, “[Even] in an official war, when state armies battle face-to-face, Islam does not permit the killing of women, children, elders, priests, farmers, and merchants, and those like them, who are noncombatants, and whom nowadays we call civilians.” 11 A columnist for the London Arabic daily Al Hayat wrote: “There is no point accusing the American administration of responsibility for the spread of terror. What is important is that this terrorism exists, and is killing innocents, and everyone must cooperate to defeat it.” 12 The November 2005 hotel bombings in Amman appeared to deepen that sentiment, as thousands of Jordanians poured onto the streets to protest against Abu Musab Al Zarqawi, who claimed credit for the attacks. Ironically, Osama bin Laden and Zarqawi may have expanded the circle of victims dramatically enough to permit a basic, if still incomplete, consensus on the immunity of civilians.
The calculated use of unlawful
–U.S. DEFENSE DEPARTMENT (2005)
Even if consensus on legitimate targets is attained, another major fault line remains: the question of whether states themselves can commit terrorism. Here, it is evident that the effort to stigmatize terror is a victim of its own success. Very few extremist groups today willingly accept the label “terrorist,” and the word carries such condemnatory power that many Islamic countries are unwilling to see it applied only to extremist groups and not to governments whose policies they abhor. Any definition, said a Pakistani diplomat at the recent U.N. summit, “should unequivocally outlaw state terrorism.” 13
Indeed, it is a constant refrain of debates about terrorism that Israel and the United States, in particular, conduct their own brand of terrorism. “The Palestinians are required to relinquish their resistance while Israeli terrorism is repeatedly justified as legitimate self-defense,” opined a Pakistani newspaper. 14 In the wake of the 9/11 attacks, Mideast scholar Edward Said wrote that “bombing defenseless civilians with F-16s and helicopter gunships has the same structure and effect as more conventional nationalist terror.” 15 In the face of this insistence that governments too may commit terrorism, many international documents have bridged the divide by referring to “terrorism in all its forms and manifestations”–a formulation vague enough to satisfy most parties.
Nowhere to hide: Hostages crammed into a gymnasium during the Beslan school siege in September 2004.
There is no denying that the most effective use of fear has been by governments and not by freelance groups like AI Qaeda. From the guillotine to the Red Terror to the Holocaust to the Khmer Rouge, governments have struck more terror in the hearts of people than terrorist groups likely ever will. Yet Western governments and many international lawyers contend that applying the term “terrorism” to government policies is redundant and confusing. Official terror, Annan said recently, “is already taken care of under international law.” The burgeoning field of international criminal law now regulates the responsibility of government leaders for genocide, crimes against humanity, and war crimes. An international tribunal is trying former Yugoslav president Slobodan Milosevic for crimes against Bosnian Muslims and Kosovars, and the new International Criminal Court may have Sudanese leaders in its sights. These proceedings will be little solace to those convinced that American and Israeli politicians should be in the dock, but they do suggest that international law is responding, however imperfectly, to the phenomenon of state terror.
SIEGE MENTALITY
A comprehensive definition faces other, less daunting roadblocks. How do you distinguish terrorism from organized crime? Are terrorists required to have a political agenda? Must terrorist attacks be international? Do assaults against infrastructure or military targets count as terrorism? How about attacks against web sites or databases?
These fine points have bedeviled experts as well as laymen. The U.S. government has tracked international terrorist attacks since 1983, but the effort has been fraught with inconsistencies and methodological shifts. For example, the U.S. National Counter-terrorism Center dramatically revised its report on terrorism in 2004 after deciding that “domestic terrorism” should be included. John Brennan, the center's acting director, explained to Congress that the murder of Dutch filmmaker Theo Van Gogh “was clearly a terrorist attack, but because [the victim and perpetrator] were both Dutch citizens this attack did not meet the statutory definition of ‘international terrorism.’” 16 The center revised its methodology, resulting in an almost five-fold jump in recorded attacks, from 651 to 3,192.
Much more is at stake than the integrity of the statistical record. Once states agree on a common definition of terrorism, bilateral and regional extradition treaties could enable more effective prosecution of perpetrators. Efforts like the Proliferation Security Initiative, which aims to halt proliferation at sea, could expand to cover the transport of terrorists. Existing U.N. resolutions designed to prevent incitement to terrorism and to dry up terrorist funds could acquire some teeth. “There are many elements of international cooperation that depend on agreement about what the prohibited activity is. The broader the agreement, the better for purposes of cooperation,” says Jack Goldsmith, a professor at Harvard Law School and a former official at the Justice and Defense departments. “Cooperation is thinner than it should be [on terrorism] because they can't agree on what is prohibited.”
The boundaries that an eventual comprehensive definition will use matter greatly, and skilled draftsmanship will be required to render the fragile consensus that is emerging into clear and effective prose. But it is apparent that the most fundamental requirement is a cooling of the rhetoric of crisis that is so pervasive in many parts of the Arab and Islamic world.
The perceived magnitude of that crisis permits methods that would be unthinkable in a less dire moment. And here, Islamic extremists and those sympathetic to them are engaging in a form of ethical and legal reasoning that should be uncomfortably familiar. On the eve of World War II, the mass bombing of cities was beyond the pale. Three years into the war, the prohibition had all but dissolved: Dresden, Tokyo, Hiroshima, and Nagasaki followed. In such settings, when leaders are asked to confront their actions, they pass responsibility to their opponents or simply assert that circumstances left no moral choice. It's a tactic that has stood the test of time; it's a frequent refrain among Islamists that suicide bombers have no other option. “What can we expect from the Palestinians when the Israeli premier repeats with every new dawn that Jerusalem is the eternal capital of Israel, which is something that no reason or religion or law can accept?” asked Mohamed Sayyed Tantawi, the influential grand imam of Al-Azhar. “Honorable people prefer to die than to live in humiliation.” He continued, “I tell Israelis: You are the cause of all that is happening. When land is usurped and injustice intensified, fury spreads and explosions happen in self-defense.” 17
The rhetoric of crisis comes from many sides of the Islamic world and extends beyond the dispute over Palestine. Islam, said Iranian spiritual leader Ali al Khamenei to a meeting of Islamic leaders in 1997, “is in a calamitous condition due to hostile invasions, coupled with the inner factors affecting the past generations.” Newly elected Iranian president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad continued the theme in his recent speech to a student conference against Zionism. “During the period of the last 100 years, the [walls of the] world of Islam were destroyed and the world of arrogance turned the regime occupying Jerusalem into a bridge for its dominance over the Islamic world.” 18 AI Qaeda and other extreme Islamist groups revert to the same rhetoric of brutal occupation and a fight for survival. “The Islamic nation has been groaning in pain for more than 80 years under the yoke of the joint Jewish-crusader aggression,” read an AI Qaeda statement shortly after the 9/11 attacks.
Yet more moderate Islamic voices also subscribe to the notion that Islam is a civilization in crisis. Pakistani president Pervez Musharraf, in a plea for moderation, acknowledged that the Islamic world is in “despair and despondency.” Former Malaysian prime minister Mahathir Mohammed, often seen as a reformer, was no less alarmist in a 2003 speech to the Organization of the Islamic Conference. “Today we, the whole Muslim ummah, are treated with contempt and dishonor. Our religion is denigrated. Our holy places desecrated. Our countries are occupied. Our people starved and killed.”
If and when the atmosphere of crisis passes, genuine scrutiny and wholehearted condemnation of terrorism may come within reach. It is not because of heightened moral sensibilities, after all, that the U.S. media and certain politicians have scrutinized the conduct of the Iraq War when their predecessors left far bloodier practices during World War II largely unexamined. That global conflict was perceived as a war for survival; the Iraq War has been labeled a war of choice. A comprehensive definition of terror may have to await a determination by the Islamic world's leadership that they are not in a war of survival. Then, it may be safe to call terrorism by its real name.
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Footnotes
1.
James Kirkup, “U.N. Unable Even to Define Terrorism as 160 Slaughtered,” Scotsman, September 15,2005, p. 2.
2.
John Whitbeck, “A World Ensnared by a Word,” International Herald Tribune, February 18,2004.
3.
A. P. Schmid and A. J. Jongman, Political Terrorism (New Brunswick: Transaction Publishers, 2005), p. 81.
4.
Secretary-General's Address to the Summit of the League of Arab States, March 23,2005.
5.
Colum Lynch, “U.N. Approves Anti-Terrorism Initiative,” Washington Post, October 9,2004, p. A26.
6.
Alexander Downer, Statement to the Sixtieth Session of the U.N. General Assembly, September 21, 2005.
7.
Caleb Carr, “Wrong Definition for a War,” Washington Post, July 28,2004, p. A19.
8.
See, for example, Nicholas Birch, “News Magazine in Secular Turkey Honors AI Qaeda,” Washington Times, August 22,2005.
9.
Aljazeera.net, June 9, 2004, translated by Middle East Media Research Institute (
), October 6,2004.
11.
Islamonline.net, translated by , July 8, 2005.
13.
Statement by Amb. Munir Akram, April 21, 2005.
14.
“International Conference on Middle East a Msnomer,” Daily Times (Pakistan), May 7,2002.
15.
Edward Said, “Islam and the West Are Inadequate Banners,” Observer, September 16,2001,p.27.
16.
Statement of John O. Brennan, Interim Director of the National Counterterrorism Center, before the U.S. House International Relations Committee, May 12, 2005.
17.
Barry Rubin and Judith Colp Rubin, Anti-American Terrorism and the Middle East: A Documentary Reader (New York: Oxford University Press, 2002), pp. 36-37.
18.
See, for example, Nasser Karimi, “Iran Leader Calls for Israel's Destruction,” Associated Press, October 26,2005.