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What is terrorism?

By Timothy Garton Ash

Saturday, Nov 10, 2001, Page 9

ILLUSTRATION: YUSHA

Terrorism, they say, is like an elephant on your doorstep. You recognize it when you see it.

But it is not that simple. The UN, NATO and the EU have all tried to find a common definition of terrorism. None have got very far. When they have come up with a form of words, it has been so general as to be largely useless. The member states of these organizations, many of them with ethnic oppositions or insurgencies of their own, cannot agree on anything more specific.

Yet nothing would be more dangerous in the world after Sept. 11 than to fall back into the easy relativism of "one man's terrorist is another man's freedom-fighter." We do need a working, operational definition of terrorism, but it has to be sophisticated, and customized for each case.

Here are four things to look at in deciding whether someone is a terrorist, and, if they are, what kind of terrorist: biography, goals, methods and context. Only a combination of the four will yield an answer.

`The UN, NATO and the EU have all tried to find a common definition of terrorism. None have got very far. When they have come up with a form of words, it has been so general as to be largely useless.'

Who are they, where are they coming from and what do they really want? The classic questions of intelligence work are also the first intelligent questions about any suspected terrorist. Biography may not be at the heart of all history -- but it certainly is for this patch. Why did 15 of the 19 assassins of Sept. 11 come from Saudi Arabia? Does Osama bin Laden really want to destroy the West, to purify Islam, to topple the Saudi royal house or merely to change the Saudi succession?

Whatever the tangle of biographically conditioned motives -- and human motives are often unclear even to ourselves -- one also has to look at the proclaimed goals of a terrorist group or movement. Sometimes, as in the case of al-Qaeda or the German Red Army Faction, the proclaimed goals are so vague, apocalyptic and all-embracing that they could never be realized in any real world. But sometimes they are clear and in some sense -- much as we deplore the resultant sacrifice of innocent lives -- rational objectives, which may sooner or later be achieved in the real world. The Kosovo Liberation Army wants independence for Kosovo; the Irish Republic Army (IRA), a united Ireland; the Basque terrorist organization ETA, independence for the Basque Country; the Albanian National Liberation Army seeks equal rights for Albanians in Macedonia.

An old man who stands on a soapbox at Speakers' Corner in London on a rainy Saturday afternoon demanding that the Lord raze to the ground all branches of Marks & Spencer is not a terrorist. He is a nutter at Speakers' Corner. The Scottish National Party has goals much more far-reaching than the National Liberation Army in Macedonia -- it wants full independence for Scotland -- but it works entirely by peaceful, constitutional means.

Does the individual or group use violence to realize its personal or political goals? Is that violence targeted specifically at the armed and uniformed representatives of the states, or does the group also target civilians? Does it attempt to limit civilian casualties while spreading panic and disruption - -- as Irish paramilitaries have sometimes done, by telephoning bomb warnings -- or does it aim for the mass murder of innocent civilians, as al-Qaeda plainly did on Sept. 11?

Basic Principle 1.1 of the NATO-brokered "framework agreement" for a peace settlement in Macedonia says: "The use of violence in pursuit of political aims is rejected completely and unconditionally." An admirable principle. But not to be taken too literally.

After all, in bombing Afghanistan, America and Britain are pursuing political aims through the use of violence. You reply that this is justified by the time-honored criteria of just war, and legitimated by international coalitions, organizations and law. Anyway, it is directed against organized international terrorism.

To use political violence from inside and against a legitimate state is a quite different thing. But who decides if a particular state is legitimate? Even within an internationally recognized state, there can be such oppression that armed resistance may be considered legitimate. This is the position expressed with incomparable force in Schiller's Wilhelm Tell. When the oppressed man can nowhere find justice, writes Schiller, then he calmly reaches up into the sky and pulls down his eternal rights that hang there, inalienable and imperishable, like the stars. If no other way remains, then he must take up the sword.

Such were the Polish uprisings for freedom in the 18th and 19th centuries. Such was the US War of Independence.

It therefore matters hugely what kind of state you're in. It is one thing for groups like the IRA and ETA to use political violence in states like Britain or Spain, where the means of working for peaceful change are equally available to all in a mature democracy. It is another thing for Palestinian groups to use political violence against an oppressive military occupation in the Gaza strip or the West Bank.

It is another again for the ANC against the South African apartheid regime. Yet another for the violently repressed Kosovo Albanians to take up arms against the Milosevic regime in Serbia.

We may want to uphold the universal principle of "no violence!" but we all know that these are, in political fact and in moral content, very different things, and some violent political actions are -- shall we say -- less unjustified than others.

It is not treachery or weakness to make these distinctions. It is commonsense. We cannot realistically hope that everyone will agree on who fits what label. Russia will continue to denounce armed Chechens as terrorists while others celebrate them as freedom-fighters. The same goes for Turks and Kurds, Israelis and Palestinians, Macedonians and Albanians. But if analysts drawn from as wide a range of countries and cultures as possible were to use this fourfold template -- biography, goals, methods, context -- to make an examination of each particular case, they might at least agree on some of them.

This would be a basis for the UN to persuade as many states as possible, from as many regions and cultures as possible, to subscribe to that finding, case by case.

Where possible, common actions should follow from shared analysis. We won't identify all the elephants this way, let alone shoot them. But it might help us to corner a few.

Timothy Garton Ash is a fellow of St Antony's College, Oxford, and the Hoover Institution, Stanford. A fuller version of this article appears in the latest New York Review of Books.
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