Tuesday, August 11, 2009
Terrorism
There was an interesting programme Radio 4 this afternoon which I caught - some of it, anyway. It was a discussion, led by Matthew Parris, about the white South African anti-apartheid campaigner Joe Slovo. One of his daughters, and a British cabinet minister, David Milliband, were discussing his life.One of the issues that they raised was whether the ANC had used terrorism to achieve their aims. Slovo's daughter thought not, and queried Parris' use of the word "terrorism" to describe what she would have called an "armed struggle". He responded that he didn't think that terrorism was necessarily wrong, and Milliband attempted to apply the dual tests of "justifiability" and "effectiveness" to the action. None of these works, for me, and neither did Parris' definition of terrorism as "the use of violence in an attempt to achieve political aims."
For me, this is missing the point of terrorism. There will always be the difficult subjective test of "my freedom fighter is your terrorist", but for me, the mark of terrorism, as opposed to other forms of violent protest, is that terrorism uses violence, or the threat of violence, in an attempt to impose political change through terror and fear. I might go further and talk about targeting non-military targets and personnel, but I'm wary of that, particularly thinking of Northern Ireland. Slovo's daughter made a good point that the ANC attempted to target not people but structures/installations, such as oil depots, and I think that there's a good point to be made here. Anyway, that's my tuppence, and I hope it's interesting to somebody.
The key word is "attempted". This can mean anything or nothing. The Church Street bombing of SAAF HQ was carried out in a public space in the rush hour, when passers-by were bound to be victims (estimated 12 dead, over 100 injured). The "attempt" does not seem to have been very strenuous.
As for the old freedom-fighter vs terrorist distinction, I think this is utterly spurious and subjective. As a test, would Gilliam Slovo describe Hamas suicide bombers as freedom fighters? What about the IRA group responsible for the Omagh bombing? What about ETA?
There is no objective difference that I can see between these groups and the ANC, except that that the ANC won, and are now writing the history books.
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