National Post, Canada
November 13, 2004 Saturday
>>From guillotines to suicide bombs
Sir Martin Gilbert, National Post
Terrorism is as old as time. The killing of civilians, men women and
children picked at random, has been a feature of human life for as
long as history has recorded it.
States began implementing terror in a systematic way during the
French Revolution. In 1793 and 1794, what was called “The Terror”
was a daily way of life and death in France. Execution by guillotine
was used as a means to create a docile population. Forty thousand
French men and women were executed by Dr. Guillotine’s newfangled
but effective machine.
But state terror reached its most destructive apogee in the twentieth
century. It was Vladimir Ilyich Lenin who first used terror as a main
instrument of state policy. During the Kronstadt uprising in 1918,
Lenin’s right-hand man, Leon Trotsky, was sent to negotiate with the
rebels. Lenin telegraphed to him that what was needed was not talk but
terror; that Trotsky should shoot the leading rebels and all would
quiet down. Trotsky did as ordered: 600 of the rebels were killed,
and 900 executed soon afterwards.
The Gestapo symbolized the State terror that dominated Germany
between 1933 and 1945. It was Nazi state terror that led to the murder
by gassing and injections of more than 100,000 disabled non-Jewish
children judged to be unworthy of life. It was Nazi state terror that
put hundreds of thousands of non-Jewish Germans — opponents of the
regime — into concentration camps from the first days of Nazi rule
in 1933. Six million Jews were killed. Gypsies and homosexuals were
also among those singled out for death. These were all victims of an
act of state terrorism without parallel in history.
On Nov. 14, 1914, in Ottoman Turkey, the spiritual leader of the
Sunni Muslims, the Sheik Ul-Islam, called for jihad against all
“infidels and enemies of the faith.” The principal “enemies of the
faith” were the Armenian Christians, whose ancestors had lived in
the Turkish region for two millennia .
On April 24, 1915 — a black day — Ottoman Turkey began a reign of
terror against its Armenian Christian minority throughout Anatolia. A
million and a half Armenians died, many during deportations and
death marches.
In Cambodia, the state terror of Pol Pot’s regime resulted, during the
course of five years, in one and a half million dead and gave us the
phrase “killing fields.” In East Timor, Indonesian state terror lasted
24 years: from the Indonesian invasion in 1975 to independence in
1999. Twenty-four years of misery were imposed on an independent-minded
people, and more than 200,000 East Timorese citizens were killed in
what would become the 188th state to enter the United Nations.
During the early 20th century, colonial powers faced terrorist attacks
from local insurgents who used ambush, mutilation and massacre as part
of their national struggles, targeting civilians as well as soldiers.
Britain faced this at the turn of the century on what was then the
North-West frontier of India. The Italians faced it in Tripolitania —
part of today’s Libya, which until recently, was itself a center of
modern global terrorism.
When I entered the British army in 1955, there were terrorist actions
being carried out against British civilians as well as soldiers in
Aden, Kenya, Cyprus and Malaya. In Cyprus, the saintly Archbishop
Makarios instructed the military leader of the insurgency, General
Grivas, to make his struggle more effective by placing bombs in the
markets where the wives of soldiers shopped.
In Kenya, the Mau Mau of the Kikuyu tribe turned on the Christians in
their tribe who refused to take the Mau Mau oath, murdering 1,800 of
them — 97 in a particularly repellent massacre in the village of Lari
on March 26, 1953. In Sri Lanka, the terrorism of Tamil extremists,
the Tamil Tigers, brought more than a decade of violence — including
massive suicide bombings — to a beautiful land. Such terrorism harms
the very cause it seeks to enhance and endangers the reputation of
those whom it claims to represent.
Two remarkable leaders of national movements have deflected their
followers from the path of terrorism. In India, Mahatma Gandhi
disassociated himself from the Indian terrorists who, in 1919, murdered
British civilians throughout the Punjab. Gandhi described the lurch of
some of his supporters to terrorist acts as a “Himalayan blunder,” and
insisted on a new tactic in the struggle for independence, satyagraha:
non-violent protests through non-co-operation, boycotts and strikes —
but not acts of terror.
Fifty years later, in South Africa, Nelson Mandela likewise moved the
African national struggle away from terrorism and violence toward the
Gandhian concept of non-violence. In Northern Ireland, the terrorist
killings of more than half a century, including those on the British
mainland, met a powerful opponent in the women’s peace movement —
women from both the Catholic and Protestant communities who banded
together to protest against the unending violence. Their leaders,
rightly, were awarded the Nobel Peace Prize.
Other forms of terrorism to cow a civilian population proliferated
during the 20th century. On June 1, 1941, during the Jewish festival
of Shavuot, a mob of Iraqis — incited by the local Mufti — turned
with savagery on the Jews of Baghdad, a venerable community that had
been at the forefront of the prosperity and modernization of inter-war
Iraq. As many as 500 Jews were killed — slaughtered in the streets
and in their homes.
This proved to be only a prelude to more than a decade of attacks on
Jews throughout the wide arc of Arab-Muslim lands, leading to great
hardship — and mass flight — of hundreds of thousands of Jews who
had lived as an integral part of Muslim communities since the rise
of Islam.
With the emergence of the PLO in 1964, terrorist actions were waged
against Israelis and Jews across the globe under the banner of
Palestinian liberation: Against a Jewish community centre in Buenos
Aires; against Israeli Olympic competitors and their coaches in Munich;
against airliners; against the Israeli ambassador in London.
A continuous line of thought and action, dating back to the dawn of
Islam as modern fanatics would have it, underpins these terrorist
outrages: The Muslim terrorist who was about to be sentenced for the
Bali terrorist bombing called out in court, “Jews, remember Khaibar.”
He was warning Jews to remember the time, 1,364 years earlier, when
Mohammed conquered the Jews of the Khaibar Oasis in the Arabian
peninsula.
A turning point in 20th-century terrorism came in 1987 when a new
organization, the Islamic Resistance Movement, was founded. Better
known by its acronym Hamas, it intensified the terrorist actions
against Israel, introducing the suicide bomber to the conflict.
In the Gaza Strip, Hamas created an infrastructure of welfare
institutions, schools and hospitals, taking over after 1995 many
of the social functions that ought to have been undertaken by the
Palestine Authority. But its main focus was terror. So frequent,
and so brutal were its terrorist acts that Israel adopted a method
of counter-attack that had earlier been used by Britain against the
IRA: targeted assassinations of those who perpetrate, plan, or direct
terrorist actions.
This policy, draconian and controversial though it may be, has led to a
drastic reduction in Hamas acts of terror, especially after the killing
of the two leaders, Sheik Ahmed Yassin and Dr. Abd-el Aziz Rantisi.
The acts of terror committed against Jews in every decade of the 20th
century are a part of a large published record, shown most recently
in Esther Goldberg’s pioneering guide for teachers and students,
Holocaust Memoir Digest. Other groups have not been so fortunate.
Several times in recent decades, the Christians of southern Sudan were
the victims of a merciless Muslim onslaught. In 1965, several thousand
black Sudanese Christians were killed, literally hacked to death,
by the military arm of the ruling National Islamic Front. In 1988,
an estimated 70,000 black Sudanese Christians were killed in their
villages and thousands more forcibly converted to Islam.
On June 30, 1989, a military regime espousing a fundamentalist Islamic
orientation came to power in the Sudan. One of the first acts of its
leader, Hassan al Turabi, was to obtain the services of a wealthy
Saudi Arabian and his organization in his terror campaign against
Sudanese black Christians. That Saudi Arabian was Osama bin Laden
and his organization, al-Qaeda.
Aspects of the Sudanese State terror inaugurated 15 years ago included
the execution of Christian Sudanese who refused conversion to Islam,
and the abduction of Christian boys and their use as slaves. When
the United Nations failed to act to prevent this state terror, its
special rapporteur, Dr. Gaspar Biro, resigned in protest. Sudan is
of course a member of the United Nations whose supreme and sublime
Universal Declaration of Human Rights it ignores and subverts.
Unfortunately, this is not the last time that terrorists will flout
basic human-rights standards by murdering innocents. Terrorism is an
integral part of the human story. And there seems little chance it
will end any time soon.
GRAPHIC: Black & White Photo: STR, AFP, Getty Images; Israeli
policemen inspect bodies in front of a bus attacked by a suicide
bomber in Jerusalem on Feb. 22.