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ЗАДАНИЕ № 1

1. Analyze the following definitions of terrorism. Which one if any can be considered comprehensive? Which one describes the modern world's phenomenon in the most appropriate way?

• Terrorism is the unlawful use of force or violence against person or property to intimidate or coerce a government, the civilian population, or any segment thereof, in furtherance of political or social objectives. (FBI definition).

• Terrorism is the use of violence or the threat of violence to obtain political demands. (Longman Dictionary of Contemporary English).

• Terrorism is the use of terrorizing methods; the state of fear and submission so produced; a terroristic method of governing or of resisting a government. (Webster's New Universal Unabridged Dictionary).

2. Do you know anything about such notorious terrorist organizations as the IRA (the Irish Republican Army), Hamas, the Tamil Tigers of Sri Lanka, the Shining Path movement (Peru)?

3. Read the text and find which definition the author makes use of.

What Is Terrorism?

1. This notion, suggested by Schelling, that states may use the threat of indiscrimi­nate violence against civilians to intimidate adversaries—to terrorize them— suggests parallels between how states sometimes use violence and how "terrorist groups" sometimes do. Terrorist groups—national and transnational political organizations violently Contesting the authority or policies of states— often use the threat of indiscriminate attacks on civilians as a means of imposing pain or causing trouble for political authorities and thereby compelling political change. Many of these groups (for example, the Irish Republican Army, Hamas, and the Tamil Tigers of Sri Lanka) seek independence or autonomy for their national, religious, or ethnic group. Others, like the Shining Path movement in Peru, are ideologically motivated. But like states, these organizations link violence to clear political objectives, and like modern states they may blur Clausewitz's neat Trinitarian distinction, choosing to attack civilians rather than ''legitimate military targets" like the other side's military forces.

2. As the following essay from the British news journal The Economist argues, what distinguishes terrorism from other kinds of violence is that it is politically motivated and it indiscriminately targets civilians as a means of intimidating opposing states or political groups into making concessions. Defined this way, both states and terrorist groups are capable of terrorism. The difference between states and terrorist groups is not in their use of violence or the threat of it, nor is it that one or the other may violate the distinction between military and civilian targets. Rather it is that states are accepted as sovereign governments by the international community and their right to use violence to suppress disorder at home or protect national interests abroad has been accepted as legitimate and necessary.

3. June 1914: a young man in Sarajevo steps up to a carriage and fires his pistol. The Archduke Ferdinand dies. Within weeks, the first world war has begun. The 1940s: the French resistance kill occupying troops when and how they can. June 1944: at Oradour-sur-Glane, in central France, German SS troops take revenge, massacring 642 villagers. August 1945: the United States Air Force drops the world's first nuclear weapons. Some 190,000 Japanese die, nearly all of them civilians. Within days the second world war has ended.

4. Which of these four events was an act of terrorism? Which achieved anything? Which, if any, will history judge as justified? And whose history? Terrorism is not the simple, sharp-ended, bad-guy phenomenon we all love to condemn. No clear line marks off politics from the threat of force, threat from use, use from covert or open war. Who is or is not a terrorist? The suicide bomber, the rebel guerilla, the liberation front, the armed forces of the state?

5. In practice, what act or person earns the label depends on who wants to apply it. To Ulster loyalists all IRA violence is terrorism; to Sinn Fein it is part of a legitimate war. To many Israelis, everyone from the suicide-bombers in Jerusalem or Ashkelon to the Hizbollah grenade-thrower in South Lebanon is a terrorist; to many Arabs during the 1982 Lebanon war, the worst terrorists in the Middle East were the - entirely legitimate, uniformed - Israel Defense Force.

6. If the concept is not to vanish into all-embracing fudge, two distinctions can be drawn, though habitually they are not. Terrorism is indeed about terror; not just violence, but its use to spread terror. And the violence is aimed specially at civilians....

7. Even in the distinction between guerrilla warfare and terrorism, there are grey areas. The soldier in a tank is a military target. What about one in a jeep escorting civilian vehicles? Or returning on a bus from leave? A bus that may— and was, when a suicide bomber attacked it in Gaza last April [1995] — be carrying civilians too? There are, in contrast, distinctions often made that ought not to be ...

8. The fact is that a good cause may use terrorism just as a bad one may. South Africa has provided a clear example. The ending of white dominance was a plainly good cause. For the most part, the African National Congress used mass demonstrations and industrial'sabotage to advance its cause. But the men who shot up a white church congregation or planted a bomb outside a cinema were terrorists in the purest sense of the word.

9. Nor does the terrorists' ultimate success or failure alter the truth. Menachem Begin got to lead a country; Yasser Arafat may do; Velupillai Prabhakaran, who leads the Tamil Tigers, probably will not. None of that changes the fact that Deir Yassin (a massacre of Palestinian villagers by Israelis fighting to establish their state), the killing of 11 Israeli athletes at the Munich Olympics in 1972 and Tamil Tiger bomb in Colombo were all acts of terror. The Terror of the State

10. So much for the underdogs. Can there be terrorist governments too? The Americans certainly think so when they accuse Libya or Iran of supporting international terrorism. In the cold war, international terrorists were used to wage war by proxy: the East German regime provided safe houses for Baaders and Meinhofs; the modern era's most notorious terrorist, the-gun-for-hire Carlos the Jackal, made his career in this world of state-sponsored terrorism.

11. All that was diplomacy by terror. Can a recognised government also be guilty of terrorism against its own people?

12. Yes. Stalin used terror systematically to consolidate his power—random murders of Communist-Party members and army officers in the 1930s, massacres and exiles of smaller ethnic groups throughout his rule. Much of Latin America practised state terrorism in recent decades. The brasshat regimes of the day faced left-wing, sometimes terrorist movements. Many fought back with terror. And not just through paramilitaries or unacknowledged death squads. The infamous massacre at El Mozore in El Salvador in 1981 was the work of that country's regular army. . . .

13. Can regular armies, in regular war, be guilty of terrorism? The answer, surely, is yes. Look at the Japanese rape of Nanking in 1937, when not hundreds or thousands but tens of thousands of civilians were murdered, to terrorise the rest of China. Then go a step further. Can the armies of proud democracies be guilty too? A century ago, the rich world, with the rules of war that it claimed to use, would have called attacking civilians impermissible. The modern world has other ideas. The Allied bombing of Germany was aimed at civilians in the hope of shattering morale: in short, terror. The fire bombing of Tokyo and the atomic weapons that vaporised Hiroshima and Nagasaki were arguably aimed at government morale, not that of Japan's population. Their victims did not notice the difference. Who Kills and How?

14. What use, one can ask, is a definition so wide that it can go from Stalin to the American air force? There are two answers.

15. First, it is a reminder that terrorism, historically, has been the tool of the strong, not the weak. Medieval armies, having taken a besieged town, would slaughter some or all of the citizens to encourage other towns to surrender faster. During India's struggle for independence, by far the worst terror was the Amritsar massacre in 1919, when British-officered troops shot up a political gathering, and carried on shooting until the bullets ran out; 379 civilians died (and it worked: the rebellious province of Punjab returned to order). In contrast, discriminate assassination was the typical weapon of the 19th-century anarchist and nihilist. . . .

16. The second thing one can learn from the wide definition of terrorism is that the phenomenon is neither uniquely wicked, nor—still less—uniquely deadly. People fight with the weapons they have: knives, Semtex, rifles, fighter- bombers. All their users are alike convinced of their own righteousness, all kill and all their victims are equally dead. What they are not is equal in number. The Munich terrorists killed 11 Israelis; Israel's retaliation against the Lebanese town of Nabatiyeh, however justified, killed about 100 Arabs. The State Department has totted up the deaths due to international terrorism from 1968 through 1995. Its total, and it defines terrorism broadly, is 8,700. Twenty-four hours of air raids killed six times as many civilians at Dresden in 1945. One is a crime, says international law, the other a legitimate act of war. I from "World Politics " by Charles W.Kegley and Eugene R. W. Wittkoph/