Since 911, 11 September 2001, terrorism has been very much in the news. Soon after September 11, one phrase was frequently heard: "One person's terrorist is another persons freedom fighter".
News commentators repeated this phrase regularly, as though they had discovered a new universal truth, an ultimate wisdom they felt compelled to communicate to their less well-informed audience. For many, it seems to have a ring of truth, some accept it as correct, others are not certain, and others consider it wrong. Is it just a matter of personal perspective or is there a way of discriminating between the two - of deciding when the acts of a freedom fighter might be justified, and when it is terrorism? To answer this we need to look more closely at terrorism and at freedom fighting.
Terrorism can take several forms. First, it can be used by a government in the rule of its people, such as the "Reign of Terror", or "The Terror", in France during 1793 and 1794. Led by Maximilien Robespierre, an extreme leftist of Irish origins, "The Terror" saw thousands of people sent to the Guillotine. Robespierre ultimately met the same fate in 1794. Although this was not the first time a government had used terror to control the population, it was during this period that the words terrorism and terrorist entered the English language. Since then, many non-democratic governments have used terror as a prime instrument of government. Such terrorism usually consists of the arbitrary arrest, imprisonment, torture, and execution of political opponents and others deemed a risk to the government, or of a percentage of the population selected at random, to install a level of fear in the rest.
Probably the worst examples of state terrorism have been the Soviet Union under Stalin and China under Chairman Mao - both are thought to have eliminated more than 50 million people through their respective reigns of terror. Nazi Germany under Hitler eliminated some 6 million Jews, half the world Jewish population, and many others that it did not like including Gypsies and homosexuals. Most communist countries have used some level of terror to maintain their rule, as have the right wing military dictatorships of South America and despotic governments in Africa. Some countries still use terror to control their citizens with the worst examples probably being North Korea and until recently, Afghanistan under the Taliban and Iraq under Saddam Hussein. Other countries using terror to varying degrees include Iran, Syria, Saudi Arabia, and now Zimbabwe under Robert Mugabe. So pervasive was the influence of Saddam Hussein's secret police that refugees in countries as far away as New Zealand were afraid to say anything that might be construed as criticism of him or his government in case his agents heard of it and tortured or killed their relatives still in Iraq.
In Iran and Saudi Arabia, and in Afghanistan under the Taliban, we find a religious dimension to the terrorism with state backed religious police used to control the population and enforce a level of religious conformism. State backed religious terrorism is also found in Pakistan with the blasphemy laws and is developing in other Islamic countries like Bangladesh.
There is another form of state backed terrorism, when one state uses its agents to carry out acts of terror in another state. Pakistan, the country that created the Taliban in 1994 to take control of Afghanistan, has been accused of training and sending agents into Kashmir to carryout terrorism and to incite local people to do likewise. The sinking of the Greenpeace ship, the Rainbow Warrior, on 10 July 1985, in Auckland harbour, New Zealand, by agents of the French government was an act of state sponsored terrorism.
The third type of terrorism is a violent act against the population of a country by a non-government individual or group for political reasons. Such acts might include the blowing up of infrastructure like bridges and pipelines, but the worst form of such terrorism is usually the arbitrary killing of innocent members of the general population through random explosions and gun attacks.
Why would terrorists attack and kill innocent people rather than attack
the government that they are opposed to or its instruments, when such acts
are likely to reduce public sympathy for the terrorists? In practice, it is
often found that groups that attack innocent people can increase their
support, initially at least. The reasons are that acts of terrorism:
i) undermine the confidence of the population in the governments ability to
protect them - this is prime function of government;
ii) force governments to take action against the terrorists that are either
unpopular with or antagonise the general population and;
iii) violent acts convince some people that the terrorists may have a genuine
grievance or cause even when they do not.
Although the reasons are not very rational, a terrified population will often, in the hope that the violence will stop, turn to the perpetuators of the violence for protection when the government does not seem able to protect them. But governments that come to power through violence seldom stop the violence but maintain it at a sufficient level to suppress all opposition.
In a society where free speech and genuine democracy exist, violent acts are generally the work of minority groups with extreme views that are either unable or unwilling to use the normal political process to convince others that they have a just cause. The leaders of some extreme philosophies deliberately seek to incite violence in others as a means to an end. They will try to convince less sophisticated individuals that they, or others like them, are the victims of some injustice and that the only alternative is for them to retaliate violently. A clearer analysis of such movements reveals that the leaders are manipulating people to achieve their own political ends.
There are cases where people that could be considered freedom fighters might justify violence. When we have a one party state that uses terror to control the population, a movement to remove the government and replace it with an open and free government might be justified if it minimises the harm to the population in the longer term. A freedom movement against an invading power that is using terror to control the population, intends to stay indefinitely, denies all political power to the local people, and expropriates the wealth of the country, might be justified if it expels the invader and restores free open and liberal democratic government to the country. For legitimacy, such freedom movements must target genuine military and political targets and refrain from acts of violence against innocent people. An example of a genuine freedom movement was the French resistance against Nazi German occupation in the 1940s.
A movement that uses terrorism to prevent the establishment of, or seeks the replacement of, an open liberal democracy with a government that does not have the legitimacy of a popular plebiscite and that will use terror to control the population, cannot be considered legitimate. Movements that use violence to install non-democratic governments, or to create religious states that can only be maintained with terror, cannot be considered legitimate. It is sometimes easy to decide which are the genuine freedom movements and which are just terrorist movements but some cases require more careful thought.
Deliberate acts of terrorism by despotic states against innocent members
of their own population; acts of terror by states against innocent members of
the population of other countries; and terrorists acts against innocent
people resulting in deaths by individuals and political movements that do not
have genuine democratic legitimacy, are all crimes against humanity and must
be recognised as such.
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