3: TERMS OF ANALYSIS

Defining Terrorism and Terrorists

Unable to achieve their unrealistic goals by conventional means, international terrorists attempt to send an ideological or religious message by terrorizing the general public. Through the choice of their targets, which are often symbolic or representative of the targeted nation, terrorists attempt to create a high-profile impact on the public of their targeted enemy or enemies with their act of violence, despite the limited material resources that are usually at their disposal. In doing so, they hope to demonstrate various points, such as that the targeted government(s) cannot protect its (their) own citizens, or that by assassinating a specific victim they can teach the general public a lesson about espousing viewpoints or policies antithetical to their own. For example, by assassinating Egyptian President Anwar Sadat on October 6, 1981, a year after his historic trip to Jerusalem, the al-Jihad terrorists hoped to convey to the world, and especially to Muslims, the error that he represented.

This tactic is not new. Beginning in 48 A.D., a Jewish sect called the Zealots carried out terrorist campaigns to force insurrection against the Romans in Judea. These campaigns included the use of assassins (sicarii, or dagger-men), who would infiltrate Roman-controlled cities and stab Jewish collaborators or Roman legionnaires with a sica (dagger), kidnap members of the Staff of the Temple Guard to hold for ransom, or use poison on a large scale. The Zealots' justification for their killing of other Jews was that these killings demonstrated the consequences of the immorality of collaborating with the Roman invaders, and that the Romans could not protect their Jewish collaborators.

Definitions of terrorism vary widely and are usually inadequate. Even terrorism researchers often neglect to define the term other than by citing the basic U.S. Department of State (1998) definition of terrorism as "premeditated, politically motivated violence perpetrated against noncombatant targets by subnational groups or clandestine agents, usually intended to influence an audience." Although an act of violence that is generally regarded in the United States as an act of terrorism may not be viewed so in another country, the type of violence that distinguishes terrorism from other types of violence, such as ordinary crime or a wartime military action, can still be defined in terms that might qualify as reasonably objective.

This social sciences researcher defines a terrorist action as the calculated use of unexpected, shocking, and unlawful violence against noncombatants (including, in addition to civilians, off-duty military and security personnel in peaceful situations) and other symbolic targets perpetrated by a clandestine member(s) of a subnational group or a clandestine agent(s) for the psychological purpose of publicizing a political or religious cause and/or intimidating or coercing a government(s) or civilian population into accepting demands on behalf of the cause.

In this study, the nouns "terrorist" or "terrorists" do not necessarily refer to everyone within a terrorist organization. Large organizations, such as the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC), the Irish Republic Army (IRA), or the Kurdistan Workers' Party (PKK), have many members--for example, accountants, cooks, fund-raisers, logistics specialists, medical doctors, or recruiters--who may play only a passive support role. We are not particularly concerned here with the passive support membership of terrorist organizations.

Rather, we are primarily concerned in this study with the leader(s) of terrorist groups and the activists or operators who personally carry out a group's terrorism strategy. The top leaders are of particular interest because there may be significant differences between them and terrorist activists or operatives. In contrast to the top leader(s), the individuals who carry out orders to perpetrate an act of political violence (which they would not necessarily regard as a terrorist act) have generally been recruited into the organization. Thus, their motives for joining may be different. New recruits are often isolated and alienated young people who want to join not only because they identify with the cause and idolize the group's leader, but also because they want to belong to a group for a sense of self-importance and companionship.

The top leaders of several of the groups profiled in this report can be subdivided into contractors or freelancers. The distinction actually highlights an important difference between the old generation of terrorist leaders and the new breed of international terrorists. Contractors are those terrorist leaders whose services are hired by rogue states, or a particular government entity of a rogue regime, such as an intelligence agency. Notable examples of terrorist contractors include Abu Nidal, George Habash of the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP), and Abu Abbas of the Palestine Liberation Front (PLF). Freelancers are terrorist leaders who are completely independent of a state, but who may collude with a rogue regime on a short-term basis. Prominent examples of freelancers include Sheikh Omar Abdul Rahman, Ahmed Ramzi Yousef, and Osama bin Laden. Contractors like Abu Nidal, George Habash, and Abu Abbas are representative of the old style of high-risk international terrorism. In the 1990s, rogue states, more mindful of the consequences of Western diplomatic, economic, military, and political retaliation were less inclined to risk contracting terrorist organizations. Instead, freelancers operating independently of any state carried out many of the most significant acts of terrorism in the decade.

This study discusses groups that have been officially designated as terrorist groups by the U.S. Department of State. A few of the groups on the official list, however, are guerrilla organizations. These include the FARC, the LTTE, and the PKK. To be sure, the FARC, the LTTE, and the PKK engage in terrorism as well as guerrilla warfare, but categorizing them as terrorist groups and formulating policies to combat them on that basis would be simplistic and a prescription for failure. The FARC, for example, has the official status in Colombia of a political insurgent movement, as a result of a May 1999 accord between the FARC and the Colombian government. To dismiss a guerrilla group, especially one like the FARC which has been fighting for four decades, as only a terrorist group is to misunderstand its political and sociological context.

It is also important to keep in mind that perceptions of what constitutes terrorism will differ from country to country, as well as among various sectors of a country's population. For example, the Nicaraguan elite regarded the Sandinista National Liberation Front (FSLN) as a terrorist group, while much of the rest of the country regarded the FSLN as freedom fighters. A foreign extremist group labeled as terrorist by the Department of State may be regarded in heroic terms by some sectors of the population in another country. Likewise, an action that would be regarded as indisputably terrorist in the United States might not be regarded as a terrorist act in another country's law courts. For example, India's Supreme Court ruled in May 1999 that the assassination of Prime Minister Rajiv Gandhi by a LTTE "belt-bomb girl" was not an act of terrorism because there was no evidence that the four co-conspirators (who received the death penalty) had any desire to strike terror in the country. In addition, the Department of State's labeling of a guerrilla group as a terrorist group may be viewed by the particular group as a hostile act. For example, the LTTE has disputed, unsuccessfully, its designation on October 8, 1997, by the Department of State as a terrorist organization. By labeling the LTTE a terrorist group, the United States compromises its potential role as neutral mediator in Sri Lanka's civil war and waves a red flag at one of the world's deadliest groups, whose leader appears to be a psychopathic (see Glossary) serial killer of heads of state. To be sure, some terrorists are so committed to their cause that they freely acknowledge being terrorists. On hearing that he had been sentenced to 240 years in prison, Ramzi Yousef, mastermind of the WTC bombing, defiantly proclaimed, "I am a terrorist, and I am proud of it."

Terrorist Group Typologies

This study categorizes foreign terrorist groups under one of the following four designated, somewhat arbitrary typologies: nationalist-separatist, religious fundamentalist, new religious, and social revolutionary. This group classification is based on the assumption that terrorist groups can be categorized by their political background or ideology. The social revolutionary category has also been labeled "idealist." Idealistic terrorists fight for a radical cause, a religious belief, or a political ideology, including anarchism. Although some groups do not fit neatly into any one category, the general typologies are important because all terrorist campaigns are different, and the mindsets of groups within the same general category tend to have more in common than those in different categories. For example, the Irish Republic Army (IRA), Basque Fatherland and Freedom (Euzkadi Ta Askatasuna--ETA), the Palestinian terrorist groups, and the LTTE all have strong nationalistic motivations, whereas the Islamic fundamentalist and the Aum Shinrikyo groups are motivated by religious beliefs. To be at all effective, counterterrorist policies necessarily would vary depending on the typology of the group.

A fifth typology, for right-wing terrorists, is not listed because right-wing terrorists were not specifically designated as being a subject of this study. In any case, there does not appear to be any significant right-wing group on the U.S. Department of State's list of foreign terrorist organizations. Right-wing terrorists are discussed only briefly in this paper (see Attributes of Terrorists). This is not to minimize the threat of right-wing extremists in the United States, who clearly pose a significant terrorist threat to U.S. security, as demonstrated by the Oklahoma City bombing on April 19, 1995.