The Local Face of Terror

The day before last week’s slaughter in the United States, a suicide bomber protesting the abysmal state of Turkish prisons set off an explosion in a busy shopping district of Istanbul, killing himself, three other Turks and an Austrian tourist.

As the world was absorbing scenes of horror from the World Trade Center and the Pentagon, three police officers in Londonderry, Northern Ireland, narrowly escaped death when a roadside bomb, apparently planted by Irish Republican Army dissidents, exploded in their path.

In Colombia one night this week, a right-wing paramilitary squad rousted most of the inhabitants of three neighboring villages from their sleep, accused them of collaborating with the country’s Marxist guerrillas and opened fire with assault rifles, killing 15.

Thousands of civilians die around the world each year in armed conflicts or politically motivated attacks that the U.S. State Department classifies as terrorism. But relatively few of the killers are likely to end up in the cross hairs of President Bush’s declared war on “every terrorist group of global reach.”

The United States is gathering support to fight a highly specialized form of terror--a wealthy, mobile, technologically savvy transnational network of groups linked to Osama bin Laden, the Saudi expatriate identified by U.S. officials as the prime suspect in last week’s attacks. Concentrated in the Middle East and Asia, inspired by an extremist interpretation of Islam, these groups have vowed to kill Americans and their allies.

Yet most of the world’s terror is local. It is rooted in narrow conflicts that have little or nothing to do with America. Millions who live in fear of terrorism around the world are unlikely to breathe easier, specialists on terrorism say, if the United States wins what Bush has called the first war of the 21st century.

Barely noticed by a grieving America, the rest of the world’s bloodshed goes on. It’s been business as usual these days for violent separatists, ethnic hate warriors, politically driven kidnappers and the paramilitary thugs who strike back at them, killing civilians in the process.

“Because there is such a variety of conflicts and underlying causes, it would be unrealistic to think that all of them are going to be swept away by a concerted strategy against the international network that carried out these atrocities in America,” said Paul Wilkinson, professor of international relations at St. Andrews University in Scotland. “These battles are going to have to be won by the local governments most under attack.”

Yet the blow to America could have a ripple effect, for better or worse, on other countries’ battles.

In some conflicts, it has put guerrilla groups that use terror tactics on the defensive. It has quickened a move to make arrest and search warrants enforceable in all 15 countries of the European Union. It may give a boost to some peace negotiations while undermining others. It also may embolden authoritarian governments to rally to America’s side and then terrorize their own peaceful critics at home, in the hope that Washington will turn a blind eye.

The U.S. State Department listed 138 “significant terrorist incidents” last year in 29 countries. They were perpetrated by 43 armed groups, 31 of which are on the department’s blacklist, barred from getting money from American citizens.

Few realists believe that last week’s attacks will shock many of these warriors into embracing peaceful politics.

“Sometimes terrible things happen to make way for better things,” said Adriana Delgado, a political scientist at Javeriana University in Bogota, Colombia. “The only sensible thing is that the world will understand that this craziness, wherever it started, has no reason to be. But this is utopian.”

The United States may be drawn into new conflicts--and make new enemies--as it goes after Bin Laden’s network, but it remains unclear just how far-reaching the mission will be.

Many Islamist groups suspected of loose ties to Bin Laden’s network--separatist guerrillas in Indonesia’s Aceh province, for example, or the Abu Sayyaf, which specializes in kidnapping in the Philippines--have intensely parochial agendas that in general do not concern America.

The United States is unlikely to directly take on such groups as the Revolutionary United Front, which seeks to topple the government of Sierra Leone and keep control of its diamond mines, or the ETA guerrillas fighting to carve an independent Basque state from northern Spain and southern France. They are notoriously brutal, but neither has spread its terror beyond those countries’ borders.

Yet no Western leader is struggling harder to link his own enemies with America’s than Spanish Prime Minister Jose Maria Aznar. “There can be no distinction among terrorists,” he said last week. “They are the main adversary of the world.”

A Basque separatist newspaper gave Aznar some ammunition by applauding the destruction of the World Trade Center. But there are real differences in motivation among groups that practice terror.

Bin Laden’s holy war excludes compromise. Other armed groups, including the ETA--an acronym for Basque Homeland and Freedom--have civilian constituencies and often feel moral constraints. They rarely go for mass slaughter and--with the exception of some fanatics in Turkey, the Middle East and Sri Lanka--do not carry out suicide attacks. Most guerrillas, like the governments they fight, calibrate violence to seek advantage in negotiations over local disputes.

Even so, the violence in America has put some armed insurgents on the defensive. Danny Morrison, a former IRA prisoner, felt compelled to declare in a radio interview this week that his group “by and large made attempts to issue warnings before bomb attacks.” The IRA has joined other guerrilla groups in condemning the suicide hijackings in America.

America’s tragedy has radically altered the climate in the Middle East, prompting Israeli and Palestinian leaders to order a pullback from their yearlong bloody conflict. To a lesser extent, it has added to outside pressure for disarmament in Northern Ireland and Macedonia to end guerrilla conflicts there.

IRA inaction on handing over weapons has impeded Northern Ireland’s 1998 peace accord, but now the group may be forced to yield. Since the U.S. attacks, the Bush administration has hardened its attitude toward the IRA’s political wing, Sinn Fein, over the arrests last month of three IRA terrorist suspects in Colombia, where they were allegedly collaborating with Marxist guerrillas. Protestant politicians in the British province are demanding that the United States ban Sinn Fein’s fund-raising in America.

In Macedonia, North Atlantic Treaty Organization troops are collecting guns from ethnic Albanian rebels under a recent cease-fire accord. After the attacks in America, NATO Secretary-General George Robertson called the effort “a tiny ray of sunshine . . . that might break the blackness of this terrible week.”

Since fighting started earlier this year, Macedonia’s ethnic Slav leaders have pressed Washington to side with them against ethnic Albanian “terrorists.” Now the Macedonians believe that a U.S. war on global terrorism will weaken the Albanian rebels, whom they say get help from Bin Laden’s network.

But there is also concern in Macedonia that the United States, focused more on the threat to itself, “will not be involved in the way that it was involved until now” and that the Balkan region’s latest hot spot will flare anew, said Iso Rusi, a political analyst.

In Colombia, where the United States has invested $1.3 billion in a war on drugs, some fear the opposite: that the U.S. will take a more militaristic approach and undermine the Colombian government’s peace talks with guerrillas, who control a swath of territory used for coca production.

Seeking U.S. help to crush armed foes at home, national rulers in Asia and Africa have rushed to pledge support for a wounded America.

The latest was Indonesian President Megawati Sukarnoputri, who met with Bush on Wednesday. Bush promised to ask Congress to ease a ban on funding for Indonesia’s armed forces, whose brutal police actions in East Timor and elsewhere have fueled violent rebellion in the world’s most populous Muslim country.

In Algeria, a Muslim country embroiled in a conflict with massive human rights violations on both sides, the authoritarian government is seeking sophisticated U.S. military hardware, including night-vision equipment, to aid its fight against Islamist extremists.

South Africa wants the FBI and Britain’s Scotland Yard to help stop a 3-year-old terror campaign in Cape Town, which it blames on an Islamist-allied group called People Against Gangsterism and Drugs.

It remains to be seen whether the United States, spread thin as a world policeman, can help. With counterinsurgency training missions in 55 countries, Washington may have to retrench to fight its own battles. Also, previous U.S. administrations have been reluctant to aid many of these supplicants because of their dismal human rights records.

Some strong-arm governments are seeking moral support, not material aid, from Washington as they get tougher at home. China, India, Sri Lanka, Turkey, Russia and Uzbekistan hope the United States will simply not condemn their crackdowns on violent separatists, home-grown guerrillas and unarmed dissidents.

Sri Lankan President Chandrika Kumaratunga, partially blinded by a separatist suicide bomber in 1999, is especially vocal these days. Often criticized by the West for her country’s human rights abuses, she now says the attacks on America have given the “so-called superpower” a “wake-up call to end its double standard on terrorism.”

The expectation that Washington will be more tolerant of harsh anti-terror tactics abroad filters down to ordinary citizens in violence-plagued countries.

“When our women and children were being killed, the West did nothing,” said Sebnem Ozsuer, an accountant in Ankara, Turkey, recalling the worst years of separatist conflict in the country’s predominantly Kurdish southeastern provinces. “The West called those terrorists freedom fighters. But now that their own freedom is under attack, they may understand us better.”

Reed Brody, advocacy director for Human Rights Watch in New York, said Bush’s signaling of a U.S. foreign policy geared toward fighting terrorism could sweep away concerns about civil liberties abroad and lead to more atrocities on both sides of armed conflicts.

“Around the world, this is something that worries us, not just for moral reasons,” Brody said. “Indiscriminate killings do nothing to eliminate terrorism. If anything, it is going to create a backlash and breed more terrorism.”

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Past Terror Attacks

Single acts of terrorism with the United States as main target:

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Death Toll Date Bombing of U.S. Embassy in Beirut 63 Apr. 1983 Bombing of barracks in Beirut 241 Oct. 1983 Pan Am flight over Scotland 270 Dec. 1988 World Trade Center bombing 6 Feb. 1993 Oklahoma City bombing 168 Apr. 1995 Military bombing in Saudi Arabia 19 Jun. 1996 Attacks on U.S. embassies 147 Aug. 1998 Bombing of warship in Yemen 17 Oct. 2000

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Other political targets

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Death Toll Date Air India flight over Irish coast 329 Apr. 1983 Bus station in Sri Lanka 150 Oct. 1983 UTA flight over Chad 170 Dec. 1988 Jewish center in Buenos Aires 96 Feb. 1993 Bus bomb in Tel Aviv 22 Apr. 1995 Tourists gunned down in Egypt 62 Jun. 1996 Omagh, Ireland, bombing 29 Aug. 1998 Apartments bombed in Moscow 118 Oct. 2000

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Sources: The Economist, Times files