The postwar wave of urban terrorism began in the late 1960s and has now continued, on and off, for about a decade. It has occurred in many countries and taken many different forms but, broadly speaking, it can be divided into three different subspecies. First, there is separatist-nationalist terrorism, such as in Ulster or the Middle East, Canada or Spain, an old acquaintance from past ages. Second, Latin American terrorism, the trendsetter and, in many respects, a phe nomenon sui generis. The continent has seen more civil wars, coups d’etat and assassinations than anywhere else, but systematic urban terror was an innovation. Last, there was the urban terrorism in North America, Western Europe and Japan, which grew out of the New Left or, to be precise, the failure of the New Left in West Germany, Italy, America and Japan, and which on occasion was also practiced by quasi-Fascist groups. The terrorists of the New Left mistakenly assumed that methods used in Latin America would work elsewhere or that Latin American conditions could be created artificially in the more developed countries, and this at a time when these methods had not even been too effective south of the Rio Grande. It was perhaps accidental that the emergence (or reemergence) of these three strands of terrorism coincided in time for basically they had little in common. Neither the IRA nor Fatah owed anything to the New Left; Latin American terrorism certainly developed quite independently. As the terrorist wave gathered momentum, there was a certain amount of cooperation between terrorist movements (on which more below) and also some cross-fertilization: West Ger man terrorists, for instance, freely admitted that they had been in fluenced by the example of the Tupamaros and learned from their experience.1 Other groups took the battle for Algiers as their model, even though it had ended in failure for the insurgents.
There were important differences between the terrorism of the 1960s and 1970s and previous terrorist waves. Above all, there was the fact that most of the terrorist groups of the 1960s were left-wing in orientation or, in any case, used left-wing phraseology in their ap peals and manifestoes. Right-wing terrorist groups operated in Tur key, Italy and Guatemala, in Argentina and Brazil, but their impact was felt on the domestic scene only.
The use of certain slogans is admittedly not sufficient evidence of the real character of a political group. This is not to imply that left-wing slogans were used to deceive the public; most “left-wing” terrorists no doubt genuinely believed that they were the heirs of the French Revolution, of Marx and Lenin. But it is also true that their policies differed in essential aspects from those of the traditional left. They were certainly radical in the sense that they opposed the “system,” the “establishment,” that they wanted violent change. But their belief in the historical mission of a small group of people had more in common with voluntarist and idealist traditions than with Marx; they were not radical democrats, and the cult of violence propagated by them resembled Fascism rather than socialism.
Another major difference was the intervention of foreign powers, directly or discreetly, who provided help to terrorist movements. There had been some precedents before the Second World War, with Italy and some Balkan countries as the main wirepullers. But this had been the exception; it was only in the 1960s that this new form of warfare by proxy really came into its own, thus opening entirely new possibilities for terrorism. Operations in third countries became far more frequent; in past ages it had been the rule that Russian terrorists would limit their attacks to Russia, and the Irish to Ireland (or England). In the 1960s, on the other hand, Palestinians would operate in Paraguay or France; Japanese terrorists in Kuwait, Israel and Holland; Germans in Sweden or Uganda. This new multi national terrorism was bound to create occasional confusion with regard to the identity of the attackers and the purpose of their action. Last, mention has to be made of the new weapons and techniques which had not existed before.
While political violence became intellectually respectable in the 19605 in some circles, the ability of the authorities to counteract terrorism was more restricted than in the past. Up to the Second World War, terrorists who had been apprehended by the authorities faced, at best, lengthy prison terms. With the dawning of the permis sive age, it became far less risky to engage in terrorism, except in a few less-enlightened countries. Where terrorism would have been dangerous, it was rare. If the judiciary was reluctant to impose draconian penalties on its own citizens, the foreign terrorist could expect to get away with light sentences if his case reached trial at all,2 for his imprisonment would have exposed the “host” country to retaliation, to fresh terrorist attacks, to the seizing of hostages and blackmail. Few Western leaders were willing to accept this risk even if their own nationals had been killed; the outcome of the contest between the philosophy of the bomb and the philosophy of the per missive society was predictable. Thus the general climate seemed more auspicious from the terrorists’ point of view than ever before: if there were no mass support and no prospect of gaining it in the forseeable future, there were other factors that seemed to work in favor of terrorism. But to some extent these advantages were decep tive as the terrorists found out to their cost. It was relatively easy to provoke a Latin American government, to discredit it and cause its overthrow, but it was far more difficult to survive the backlash of a military dictatorship. Even in Western countries terrorism became distinctly unpopular the moment it ceased to be a nuisance and caused real inconvenience to society. Once this point had been reached, governments had no difficulty in introducing more strin gent laws to combat terrorism. These laws did not always have the expected results because there were fairly narrow limits to the mea sures that could be applied by the security services in a democratic society, even in an emergency. Above all, the international character of the new terrorism provided backing and reassurance, both moral and material, so that terrorist groups would continue their campaigns where in the past they would have given up the struggle.
These generalizations apply to most terrorist movements but not to all; conditions, as stressed more than once in this study, varied from country to country. To establish these distinctions one has to look more closely at the three main varieties of terrorism.
In the 1950s and the early 1960s terrorism seemed all but forgotten, although there was no shortage of guerrilla warfare in Asia, Africa and Latin America, which proceeded, however, according to a very different pattern. Underlying the guerrilla warfare were the assump tions that a revolutionary movement would develop in some distant province of the country and gradually gather strength and that even tually, in the final phase, as happened in China, the “countryside” would envelop the cities. The prevailing idea was that a contest of this kind ought to be based on mass participation. The concept that a small group of people could and should be the main agent of political change was rejected for both doctrinal and practical reasons. This then was the rule, and if there were a few exceptions, they could easily be explained as a result of unique local conditions: Cyprus was a small island, easy to control by the rulers — it was impossible to establish a “National Liberation Army” in the countryside and, in these circumstances, the use of urban terror was quite natural. But tactics used in an island of half a million inhabitants were not thought to be applicable elsewhere. Equally, the incidence of urban terror in the struggle for Algeria was explained as part of the political mobili zation of the masses in the capital of the country; demonstrations and propaganda were part of it, but bombs had also much to recommend themselves. The city of Algiers, in any case, was not really considered the main battlefront; the defeat of the ALN in the capital did not, in the event, affect the outcome of the struggle.
The transition from rural guerrilla warfare to urban terror came after disaster overtook Che Guevara in Bolivia; it was also connected with the radicalization of sections of the New Left in industrialized countries, and reached its climax in the years 1969-1972. If this was the general trend on a global scale, the situation in individual countries did, of course, vary. In a few places urban terror had been launched well before 1967 and it had already petered out by the time it reached its climax elsewhere. In other places, the fashion arrived after some delay, and in these countries urban terror continues to the present day.
The earliest and, in some ways, most interesting manifestation of urban terror on a substantial scale was in Venezuela in 1962-1963 — well before the wave had spread elsewhere. Venezuela seemed in some way predestined: about two-thirds of the population lived in urban centers and urban terror had the support of the activist wing of the local Communist party, which had persuaded itself that an “objective revolutionary situation” existed and that only a little push was needed to topple the regime. The cadres were mainly students with a sprinkling of the urban working class or, to put it less charitably, the Lumpenproletariat of the barrios (slums) of Caracas. True, urban terror was considered only one of three approaches to be tried simultaneously: the rebels also endeavored to win over sections of the army, in an attempt to stage a military coup; nor did they rule out rural guerrilla warfare. The Venezuelan urban terrorists had no specific doctrine to guide them — they acted by instinct — but their repertoire was nevertheless a wide one, ranging from bank robberies to hijacking planes and ships to the kidnapping of prominent per sonalities (including the Argentine soccer star di Stefano). They un derstood perfectly well the paramount importance of gaining public ity for their struggle. It has been said that the whole arsenal of the urban guerrilla operations, later used in many other countries, was in fact developed with much imagination in Caracas.3 But it was the misfortune of the MIR “urban guerrillas” that they faced, not an inefficient dictatorship such as Batista’s in Cuba, but a regime that had come to power in free elections; it was headed by Betancourt, leader of the Accion Democratica. Betancourt’s countermeasures against the terrorists seemed halfhearted; there was no massive po lice repression or army counterattack. He acted decisively only when the terrorists became more and more of a nuisance to the general public, causing disruption to daily life in the capital, and after a popular ground swell against the terrorists had developed. With in sufficient support from the middle class and even less from the work ers, the terrorists found themselves isolated, only to be told by the older Communist cadres that this was the inevitable result of their adventurist tactics. Following a particularly senseless and counter-productive attack against an excursion train, forceful action was at last taken by the government and this finally broke the terrorists’ will to continue the struggle in the city; rural guerrilla fighting continued for a number of years.
Events in Venezuela seemed to confirm what Castro and Guevara had taught the revolutionaries all along — that in underdeveloped Latin America the countryside was the basic area for armed fighting. They had to establish rural foci, which could not overthrow the system but would act as a detonator. The countryside, according to the Cubans, had much to recommend itself, both from a political point of view — with its enormous untapped revolutionary potential — and also militarily, because access to the rural areas was much more difficult for the government troops. Fidel’s slogan had been, “All guns, all bullets, all reserves to the Sierra”; the idea of leading a guerrilla movement from the city seemed altogether absurd, for an urban terrorist group could not develop into a revolutionary force, it could not transform itself into a people’s army and ultimately seize power. The “urban guerrilla” (the Cubans, in fact, frequently used the derogatory term “urban terrorism”) was at best an instrument for agitation, a tool for political maneuver and negotiation. But, lacking any central command in the cities, the guerrillas were forced to disperse and this was bound to weaken the insurgents far more than the governmental forces. Moreover, there were sound political and psychological reasons militating against the “urban guerrilla.” The Cubans and, following them, Regis Debray, regarded the urban working class (not excluding the Communist parties) as an essentially conservative element. The city, as Castro put it, was the “grave of the guerrilla.” Debray was even more outspoken: life in town is tantamount to an “objective betrayal,” for the mountain proletarianizes the bourgeois and peasant elements, whereas the city embourgeoises the proletarians.4 Living conditions in the towns were fundamentally different from those prevailing in the countryside; even the best comrades were corrupted in the cities and affected by alien patterns of thought. This sounded more like Rousseau and the twentieth-century Kulturkritiker than Marx and Lenin, but from a military point of view it seemed to make sense, at least for a while.
It was only after 1967 that guerrilla doctrine was adjusted: the Venezuelans and the guerrillas in Peru and Colombia had been defeared; the death of Guevara in Bolivia in 1967 and the arrest of Debray highlighted the failure of rural guerrilla practice. The age of urban terror dawned with Uruguay, Brazil and Argentina as the main scene.
The Uruguayan MLN (Movimiento de Liberation National — the Tupamaros) was founded in the early 1960s; in the beginning they displayed only sporadic activity. Their very first operation was an attack against a Swiss rifle club in July 1963. Their activities reached a peak in 1970-1971; the following year they were decisively defeated.
In Brazil there were several urban terrorist groups — the ALN (Ac So Libertadora National), the VPR (Vanguarda Armada Revolucionaria) and the VAR-Palmares (Vanguarda Armada Revolucionaria), all considerably smaller than the Tupamaros. They launched an urban terrorist campaign in 1968 which was to last for three years. In Argentina, too, the urban terrorists were split into several factions; the main group, the ERP, started its activities in 1970, as did the left-wing Peronist FAR (Fuerzas Armadas Revolucionarias) and the Montoneros, whose first publicized operation was the kidnapping and murder of ex-President Aramburu, also in 1970. In addition there were a great many other small groups in various Latin American countries. From time to time there would be reports about bank robberies, kidnappings and assassinations in Mexico, Guatemala, Co lombia, the Dominican Republic and other places; a detailed analysis of these countries’ terrorist groups is of considerable importance for the student of Latin American politics, but on the whole they were politically ineffective and a detailed review of their activities would not add much to the understanding of the general phenomenon of terrorism.5 For, in the present context, Latin American terrorism is of interest mainly in so far it throws some new light on the possibili ties and limitations of terror as a political weapon in modern conditions.
The upsurge of terrorism in Uruguay occurred against a background of a deep economic structural crisis and the same is true, mutatis mutandis, with regard to Argentina; in Brazil, on the other hand, it took place precisely at the time of a major boom. The Tupamaros confronted a liberal government; they suspended their activities during the elections of 1971. The Brazilians, on the other hand, faced an army dictatorship and their terrorism, in some ways, was “defensive.” In Argentina, urban terror developed in the period preceding Peron’s second coming, after years of inefficient military rule. But the return of the popular leader by no means induced the ERP to cease their activities, whereas their main rivals, the Montoneros, stopped operations for a while. Tupamaros terrorism was far more discriminating and sophisticated than the operations carried out by their Brazilian counterparts; no doubt this reflected the less violent political culture in their country. Cold-blooded murder was not approved of by public opinion in Uruguay and the Tupamaros were well aware of this fact. They mainly raided banks, businesses, offices and arms stores; on occasion they distributed stolen goods and published documents they had seized revealing corruption in high places. In February 1970 they raided a leading gambling house and stole a quarter of a million dollars, but later distributed the money among workers and employers. After 1970 their operations became more violent. Foreign diplomats and local officials were kidnapped and Dan Mitrione, an American police adviser, was killed.6 A further escalation in violence took place in 1972 when it was decided to launch a “direct and systematic attack against the repressive forces”; an army officer and several police officials engaged in countersubver-sion were killed in hit-and-run attacks against army personnel. It quickly appeared that the attempt of the Tupamaros to establish a real “alternative power” (people’s courts and people’s prisons) to the government had less support than they thought. “The Tupamaros are the people and the people are the Tupamaros” was a fine slogan; but the Frente Amplio, which the Tupamaros supported in the elec tions of November 1971 (and which was also backed by the nonterrorist left), polled less than 20 percent.
Terrorist operations in Argentina likewise were at first on a modest scale (bank raids, kidnappings), but by 1970 the first assassinations had occurred.7 The ERP and the Montoneros claimed that this was in retaliation for the Rawson jail escape (in Patagonia) when sixteen out of nineteen recaptured prisoners were shot while allegedly trying to escape for a second time. But this massacre did not take place until August 1972, whereas the killing (by the ERP) of Dr. Sallustro, general manager of Fiat, had been committed five months earlier and the Montoneros had killed ex-President Aramburu in May 1970. Later on murder became quite indiscriminate; the victims included moderate trade union officials, who were accused of having betrayed the working class. True, the ERP stopped their assassinations for a short time when, in December 1974, some of their militants had murdered the small daughter of an army captain together with her father, but there is reason to believe that they were more concerned with the impact on public opinion than with the purity of their souls. Meanwhile, Santucho (killed in a shoot-out with the police in July 1976) and Firmenich, the leaders of the ERP and the Montoneros, had met and coordinated the activities of their organizations which, since 1974, had spread to the countryside. While the Montoneros were the far larger group, with the whole left wing of the Peronist movement as its base and (allegedly) some 25,000 armed members, it had little political cohesion or discipline and the smaller ERP, with a mere 5,000 members (but better and heavier military equipment), was a more dangerous foe for the government. During 1975 and the first part of 1976 there was an escalation of terrorist attacks and government repression, and Argentina became one of the very first cases in history of terrorism turning into urban guerrilla warfare.
In Brazil, where government repression was strongest, the character of the terrorist campaign was also the most cruel. The terrorists were accused, even by the extreme left wing, of “militarist devia tion” in trying to crush the enemy rather than win over the masses, and of neglecting “armed propaganda.”8 The Brazilian security forces, like those of Uruguay, were quite unprepared in the begin ning to cope with urban terrorist tactics, but after a year or two they too gained experience. Carlos Marighella, the leader of the ALN, was killed in a police ambush in Sao Paulo in November 1969, Camara Ferreira, his successor, in October 1970; in December 1970, Fujimora, one of the leaders of the VPR, was shot. By that time the number of active terrorists had fallen to fifty and Carlos Lamarca, a former army captain and the leader of the VPR, was hunted down in the country side and shot in the state of Bahia in September 1971. Most of the terrorist operations took place in Rio de Janeiro and Sao Paulo and the number of victims, excluding terrorists, was relatively small — about one hundred killed over a period of five years. But the terrorists had an excellent flair for publicity and good connections with the media and their exploits were extensively reported all over the globe. There is no reason to disbelieve the reports about systematic torture used against captured terrorists; but it is also true that the terrorists had few, if any, scruples; their victims included farm workers who had stumbled on terrorist hideouts, motorists killed by terrorists who needed their cars, and boatmen cut down after a getaway at gunpoint.9
Latin American urban terrorists developed a doctrine, but more by instinct than on the basis of sociopolitical analysis. They realized that a strategy that had worked in China (and in Cuba) would not be successful in countries in which the majority of the population lived in cities. Latin America, after all, had the fastest rate of urbanization in the world; to talk about the “encirclement of the city by the village” in Uruguay or Argentina was to invite ridicule. The political as well as the military and economic centers of power were in the big conurbations; hence the decision to attack the enemy there, not on the periphery. True, all Latin American “urban guerrillas” stressed the importance of building up rural guerrilla foci but this resolution remained a dead letter in most cases and almost their entire effort was concentrated in the cities.
The two chief ideologists of urban terrorism in Latin America were Abraham Guillen (a refugee from Spain) and Carlos Marighella. Guil len’s writings initially influenced both the Tupamaros and the Argen tinian ERP but he did not belong to either organization, criticized their strategy on various occasions; there is no reason to assume that he ever had any decisive influence on their strategy. Guillen advised the terrorists to engage in many small actions and thus to compel the security forces to cede terrain. His ideal cell consisted of five people who had to decide whether to launch an attack without referring the matter to the high command. Guillen explained the subsequent set backs of the Tupamaros as the result of their decision to engage in big (“Homeric”) battles as well as the establishment of “fixed fronts” (supply depots, hospitals, “people’s prisons,” etc.). Guillen advocated constant mobility and clandestine existence but at the same time insisted on the importance of political work so as to gain mass sup port. This was excellent advice but not very practical, since a move ment observing strict rules of conspiracy could not possibly engage in political and propagandistic activity at the same time.
A similar contradiction pervades the writings of Carlos Marighella. Marighella had been a leading member of the Brazilian Communist party but left in disgust over its “reformist” character. His reputation spread after his death in battle; the Minimanual was translated into many languages and almost as often banned by the authorities, even though it contained little that was not known. If Guillen was preoccupied with the politics of guerrilla warfare and condemned senseless murder, Marighella was predominantly interested in military (i.e., terrorist) action: the more radical and destructive, the better. He advocated a scorched-earth strategy, the sabotage of transport and oil pipelines, and the destruction of food supplies. His assump tion was that the masses would blame the government for the resulting calamities. True, he also wrote that “urban guerrillas” should defend popular demonstrations, but this was hardly ever done. Typi cal for Marighella and also for the Argentinian terrorists was the burning conviction that shooting was far more important than any other activity — especially intellectual discussion. There was con tempt for ideology and “politics” — the future society (Marighella wrote) would be built not by those who made long-winded speeches or signed resolutions but by those steeled in the armed struggle. His writings are permeated with a fanatical belief in the justice of his cause and the single-minded advocacy of “the revolution”; political details were of little importance. For this anti-intellectual and even irrational attitude there were perhaps mitigating circumstances: the sterile and unending ideological debates of the Latin American left, usually a rehash of ideas imported from France. The Tupamaros, too, for years scrupulously refrained from issuing specific political state ments, remaining deliberately vague with regard to their aims, stressing that “words divide us, actions unite us.” The contempt of the Argentine ERP for the doctrinal hairsplitting of their erstwhile Trotskyite mentors has already been mentioned. Such ideological vagueness was partly tactical but, to a large degree, it was genuine, reflecting the prevailing state of ideological confusion: for many of these young men and women “nationalist,” “socialist,” “revolutionary” and “anti-American” were more or less synonymous. Erstwhile leading members of quasi-Fascist organizations, or Peronist ideologists could switch to the Castroite-Trotskyite camp with the greatest of ease.10 When the Montoneros first appeared on the scene in 1970 with the murder of ex-President Aramburu, their political character genuinely puzzled outside observers: some commentators called them a movement of the extreme left, others wrote that they be longed to the far right.11 Both, in a way, were right.
Like the early Russian Narodniki, Latin American terrorists assumed that the intelligentsia, especially the students, constituted the revolutionary vanguard, even though lip service was paid to the central role of workers and peasants. Sabino Navarro, the chief of the Montoneros in 1970-1971, was a worker, but he was the exception, not the rule. From other, earlier, terrorist movements they borrowed the concept of provocation; violence would produce repression, re pression would result in more violence; by constantly harassing the government, they would compel it to apply even more draconian measures. Thus, the establishment would have to shed its liberal-democratic “façade” (Venezuela, Uruguay) or quasi-populist-front (Argentina) and antagonize large sections of the people. At the same time, attacks against the army would push the officers to the right and prevent a left-wing military takeover — such as in Peru — which the terrorists considered a major danger. This theory of increasing polari zation was based, as the Tupamaros and the Brazilians admitted after their defeat, on a serious overestimation of their own strength and the underestimation of the “forces of repression.” The Tupamaros had intimidated (and infiltrated) the police but the moment the army took over the combat against terrorism, their strategy no longer succeeded. The Brazilian terrorists were also quite unprepared for the intensity of the government’s backlash. Torture evoked much protest but it did not provide new recruits; the heroism of a Marighella and a Lamarca was admired among intellectuals but not emu lated and, in the end, even the left came to consider the terrorist tactics quite pointless. Conditions in Argentina were more promising inasmuch as the social basis of the terrorist movement was somewhat broader; they had the support of some trade unions, which were considerably stronger than in Brazil or Uruguay. Furthermore, the terrorists benefited from the political vacuum caused by a succession of ineffective military juntas and the equally incompetent interlude provided by Peron and his widow. Thus the ERP and the Montoneros grew stronger but eventually all they achieved was the overthrow of a quasi-democratic regime and its replacement by another military dictatorship.
The innovations of Latin American urban terrorism were in the practical field rather than in producing any new concepts. Like the Palestinians, the Latin Americans realized that the mass media, do mestic and foreign, were of paramount importance; on various occa sions they seized radio and television stations and broadcast their propaganda. They were the first to engage in the systematic kidnap ping of foreign diplomats and businessmen, correctly assuming that such operations would both embarrass the local government and attract worldwide publicity. It should be noted in passing that hardly any prominent political figures (other than foreigners) were killed by Latin American terrorists. This may have been accidental; more probably it was part of their strategy, based on the assumption that acts of violence against foreigners would always be more popular. On a few occasions the Tupamaros engaged in major military operations (the seizing of public buildings in 1969, the occupation of police stations and airports in some provincial towns in 1971-1972), as did the ERP and the Montoneros on a few occasions when they attempted to storm army camps. This was in line with their doctrine of escalating individual terror to mass action. But these operations were never quite successful; sooner or later the terrorists returned to the small-scale raids, kidnappings, bank robberies and hit-and-run attacks which were less risky and not necessarily less rewarding.
The most interesting innovation made by Latin American terrorists was the foundation of a “Junta of Revolutionary Coordination,” a terrorist international of sorts established by the Argentine ERP, the Tupamaros, the Chilean MIR and the Bolivian ELN. The ERP contributed an initial five million dollars to the Junta’s budget, which was used for arms production and procurement, operations in Europe (the assassination of Latin American diplomats) as well as the publication of a journal (Che Guevara). However, since among the four associates of the Junta only one was in a position to provide money and strength, the establishment of the new body only meant that the center of gravity of Latin American urban terrorism moved for a few years to Buenos Aires.
Of the nationalist-separatist urban terrorist groups of the last decade the Irish and the Palestinians have received more publicity than any others. There were many such groups — the Basque ETA and the Quebec FLQ, to mention only two, and, of course, countless national istseparatist groups in Asia and Africa which predominantly en gaged in rural guerrilla warfare. The Ulster and Palestinian terrorists received greater publicity because of their greater visibility and their international connections. Both groups have certain features in com mon, such as the great impact of religion, even though they have absorbed a great deal of revolutionary verbiage; this is true, in partic ular, with regard to the Official IRA and the Arab PFLP and the PDFLP. The conversion to Leninism was no doubt genuine so far as the orientation of some intellectuals was concerned, but the motiva tion of the great majority of the rank and file was nationalist-religious, the desire to unite Ireland or the wish to destroy the “Zionist state.” While the ideological pronouncements of these groups should, of course, not be ignored, they should not be attributed undue impor tance. There is no systematic exposition of the uses and purposes of terrorism in their writings. In theory, they are engaged not in terrorism but in a “people’s war.” The history of armed struggle for Irish independence did not end with the establishment of the Free State; the fight had to go on, as some Irish nationalists saw it, until the six counties of Northern Ireland are united with the rest. The fact that Catholics in Ulster are politically discriminated against, and that many of them are socially underprivileged is not in dispute. But the attempt to describe the clash in Ulster mainly as a class war is uncon vincing, since the terrorist organizations of the Protestants are also predominantly working class. Class struggles have hardly ever led to terrorism in the twentieth century, and in any case, it would not explain the particular bitterness of the terrorist struggle which developed around 1970 following several years of a Catholic civil rights campaign. The specific character of Ulster terrorism has its roots in the nationalist mystique of the anti-British struggle on one hand and Protestant fears on the other. Furthermore, free-floating aggression has been a frequent phenomenon in Irish history. The nineteenth-century “faction fighters” were in the tradition of the old warrior clans of Ulster; they fought each other savagely: “I never saw fellows more determined on the destruction of each other,” wrote a British army lieutenant stationed in County Limerick in 1824, having watched one of these faction fights, which had no other visible pur pose than the desire to fight; neither politics, nor religion nor social factors were involved.12 It ought to be noted, at least in passing, that many acts of violence in the recent Troubles have also been quite motiveless.
The history of the IRA is well known and need not be retold; we are not concerned, in any case, with its activities after the end of the civil war of the 1920s or the resurgence in 1938-1939, and again in the late 1960s.13 For these were mainly guerrilla raids across the border; systematic terrorism which began with the formation of the Provi sional IRA in 1970 was of very different character indeed. It was initiated by the Provisionals, the Official IRA did not engage in indi vidual terror before 1972 — and the Protestant counterterror (headed by the UDA and UFV) also began only in that year. Both IRA Provisionals and Officials have always maintained that the character of their struggle is not sectarian, that the enemy are not the Protes tants but the British army (which was originally sent to Ulster to protect Catholics against Protestant mobs). But in fact many more civilians were killed in the Troubles than soldiers and, furthermore, Provisional and Officials also engaged from time to time in assassinating each other. In brief, what happened in Ulster was to all intents and purposes a civil war. The presence of the British army imposed certain limitations and this was perhaps the main reason that terrorism rather than open street fighting became the prevalent mode of struggle. What distinguishes Ulster terrorism from most other terror ist groups is the social composition of the movements, which, as already mentioned, is predominantly working and lower middle class on both sides; it is one of the few terrorist campaigns in which middle-class intellectuals (students, in particular) have not played any significant role. It was precisely the sectarian character of the terrorist groups that gave them a good deal of popular support, more than any social-revolutionary terrorist group could ever count upon. Thus, almost uniquely in terrorist history, the IRA established “no go zones” in some urban areas for Protestants and the British army, which in any case was inhibited in its operations by the doctrine of graduated response. The Protestant terrorists tried, with varying success, to do the same. With a little imagination these “liberated areas” could be compared to the foci of the rural guerrilla move ments.
Terrorism was indiscriminate; it was not directed against the lead ers of the enemy camp; but, on the other hand, bars, stores and public transport were among the favorite aims of bomb attacks both in Ulster and in England. It was perhaps because terrorist operations were so easy that the IRA did not engage in some of the more far-fetched terrorist techniques, like the hijacking of planes, that were so popular among terrorist movements elsewhere. IRA terror ists could cross into the Irish Republic without much hindrance and this was of invaluable help. The Irish government and the great majority of the population in the south were far from enthusiastic about the activities of the IRA, but, on the other hand, there were obvious limits to cooperation between Dublin and London in com batting terrorism. The IRA, however, confined its operations in the south to such actions as the liberation of prisoners or the occasional assassination of a prominent Englishman, correctly assuming that any other course of action would deprive them of their sanctuary, training ground and supply base.
What distinguishes the most recent phase of Irish terrorism from all previous outbreaks is on the one hand its greater efficiency and on the other its even greater cruelty. Up to the days of Michael Collins, Irish terrorists almost always bungled their operations; there was an appalling lack of secrecy, of discipline and of planning. Of late, Irish terrorists greatly improved in this respect, though it is, of course, also true that they have had less reason to fear the British security forces, which could no longer respond as they had done in a less civilized age. But if army and police had to act more humanely the terrorists of both sides behaved with almost pathological cruelty, which was not in the tradition of even the most extreme Irish free dom fighters of past generations who had advocated and practiced terrorism. For this particular viciousness the key is not to be found in an analysis of social and economic statistics of Ulster.
Comparisons have been drawn between the situation in Ulster and Israel; both the IRA and the Palestinians intend to liberate a country against the desire of the majority of its inhabitants. The comparison is of doubtful value, for the differences are far more pronounced than the common patterns. The history of the Palestine resistance can be briefly recapitulated: Palestine militants did not accept the existence of a Jewish state and organized armed resistance against it. There had been small scale hit-and-run operations in the 1950s; in 1964 the PLO (Palestine Liberation Organization) came into being, and acted as the cover organization for Fatah and smaller terrorist organizations such as Dr. Habash’s PFLP (which had 500 militants in 1975), Naif Hawatmeh’s PDFLP (300), the Syrian sponsored Saiqa (2,000) and others. Their bases were outside Israel though they had, of course, members and sympathizers inside the Jewish state. Attempts to set up a rural guerrilla movement in Israel, shortly after the Six Days’ War, failed — the terrain was unsuitable, the Israeli security forces too watchful. A little more successful was an early attempt at urban terror in the refugee camps of Gaza in 1968-1969; but by resettling the refugees in new camps the Israeli authorities soon regained the initiative and terrorism ceased. Since then the Palestinian organizations have engaged, roughly speaking, in three kinds of operations: shelling Israeli settlements from beyond the border; hit-and-run attacks by small units against Israeli transport or settlements, some times combined with an attempt to obtain hostages; and attacks against Israeli and Jewish individuals and offices in third countries and the hijacking of third-country planes. These operations launched outside Israel were of considerable importance in view of the public ity they received.14 While Fatah and a fortiori PFLP and PDFLP doctrine stressed the participation of the masses in the Palestinian revolution, there was near total divergence between theory and practice; the masses, for obvious reasons, could not take part in ter rorist operations such as hijacking or the attack at the Munich Olym pic Village in 1972. But such inconsistencies between doctrine and reality are frequent in the history of terrorism and it may be unfair to single out the Palestinians in this respect. There are certain unique features distinguishing Fatah and the other Palestinian movements from all other terrorist groups. One is the great financial support provided by Arab governments, to which attention has already been drawn, another is the size of Fatah. It has kept between 10,000 and 15,000 men under arms, first in Jordan and later in Lebanon. How- ever, only a very few of these were trained for or participated in terrorist actions. Furthermore, Fatah and the other Palestinian or ganizations received more massive outside political support than any other terrorist movement. That the Palestinians had legitimate grievances against Israel was not the decisive issue; many millions lost their homes in the three decades following the Second World War, or lost their independence. But whereas the Lithuanians, the Kurds, the South Moluccans or the inhabitants of Biafra looked in vain for international support, the Palestinians were backed by the whole Arab world, including some of the world’s leading oil produc ers. This explains an apparent paradox, the disproportion between the size and number of the terrorist operations, which were rela tively few and on a small scale, and the political achievements, which were considerable. Fatah operated in conditions that were alto gether unique and it would be misleading to draw far-reaching con clusions from its successes. Israel, a small country, found itself in virtual isolation, not as the result of Fatah operations but because of the hostility of the Arab world and its unwillingness to accept a non-Arab state in its midst. It may well be true that the PLO would have had the same achievements even if its supporters had not fired a single shot: it was the political support that mattered. On the other hand, a few spectacular operations were of great help both as a moral uplift for the Palestinians and to demonstrate to the world that there remained an unsolved political problem in the Middle East. Thus the actions of the Palestinians, even more than those of other terrorist groups, have to be considered in the context of their publicity im pact. While the Palestinian organizations were not the first to hijack planes, they carried out some of the most spectacular hijackings (Dawson’s Field, September 1970). In later years the practice was only infrequently employed; Dawson’s Field led to the expulsion of Fatah from Jordan. Summarizing the experience of eight years of hijacking, a leading Arab journal wrote that, far from harming Israel, past Palestinian hijackings had strengthened her and aroused hostil ity to the Palestinians in particular and the Arabs in general.15 It would perhaps be more correct to conclude that while the hijackings and similar operations were not popular in the democratic countries of the West, they were always of some value in view of their news-worthiness. The figure of the hijacker-kidnapper was usually one of fascination rather than horror (Leila Khaled, Carlos et al.); there was as much sympathy for him as for his victim, always on the assumption that if people committed atrocities they surely had good reasons for doing so, that people willing to die for a cause must have pure hearts and lofty ideals. One of the main problems with these spectaculars was that frequent repetition reduced their publicity value.16
Like most Latin American terrorist movements, Fatah (in contrast to the smaller PFLP and PDFLP) kept its political program deliber ately vague. For this it was sharply criticized, especially from the left, but the strategy had much to recommend itself. Helped by the inher ent vagueness of the Arab political language, the leaders of Fatah stated their aims in a way that they could appeal to the left as well as to the right, both domestically and on the international scene. The fact that the quasi-Marxist PFLP and PDFLP were more outspoken in their ideological pronouncements hardly mattered in practice. They would invoke death and damnation on the head of the “reac tionary circles” in the Arab world, yet in practice they would do little or nothing to annoy or provoke them. Thus the PFLP in its platform stated that it fought for a “popular war of liberation by arming and mobilizing the people in popular militias so that the war can be fought on the widest possible front . . . protracted war waged by a mobilized, self-reliant people, armed with proletarian ideology is the sole road for national socialism. . . .”17
If the PFLP had stuck to its program, its place would not be in the present study, the subject of which is urban terrorism rather than “war on the widest possible front.”* But it did not; the main opera tions of the PFLP were the hijacking and derouting of air planes to Dawson’s Field, the attack at Lod Airport, the attempt to blow up oil installations in Singapore (January 1974), the OPEC kidnapping (De cember 1975) and the Entebbe hijacking. Some of the actions were carried out by foreigners, others by mixed Arab-German, Japanese or Latin American teams, hardly an example of mobilizing the peo ple, popular militias and a national war of liberation.
The fact that the Palestinian resistance was split hindered its oper ations to the extent that there was no central planning and little coordination between the various organizations. There was much verbal battling, but until the outbreak of the Lebanese Civil War (1975-1976) there was little actual fighting between the various groups. The Palestinians were among the first to develop two new important techniques. They enlisted foreign nationals: terrorist groups from various nations had cooperated on occasion in the past — the collaboration between the Macedonian IMRO and the Ustasha was only one such case. Such cooperation was, however, to a great extent perfected and systematized by the PFLP. The Lod Airport massacre (May 1972), carried out by members of the Japanese Red Army, is perhaps the best-known example, but there were many others in which sundry Latin Americans, Frenchmen, Germans, Turks and others took a prominent role, not to mention the involve ment of foreign governments and secret services. Thus a new “inter national brigade” came into being, able and willing to participate in national liberation struggles all over the globe, provided the political context of these struggles happened to be of interest and profit.
The other important innovation was the foundation of ad hoc organizations for the execution of operations that were either particularly gruesome or involved international complications. Hence the establishment of “Black September” and other less well known groups which suddenly appeared on the scene, only to vanish equally rapidly. It was argued that these groups were constituted of particu larly dangerous and radical militants, over which the more responsi ble Arab groups had no control. This technique was used on many occasions, not only in the West but also in operations in Arab coun tries such as the murder of Wasfi Tal, prime minister of Jordan, and the murders at the Saudi Arabian embassy in Khartoum (March 1973). Thus the attack against a train carrying Jewish immigrants from the Soviet Union to Vienna was executed by a group calling itself “Eagles of the Palestinian Revolution,” whereas five Saudi Ara bian diplomats were kidnapped in Paris by a group called “Al Iqab” of which no one had heard before or since. The fiction was main tained even though the Sudanese and the Jordan governments pub lished documentary evidence that Black September was not an independent new group but a section of Fatah and that it was supported by Libya, and after a leading Black September member had confirmed this on Jordan television. For, given the advantageous international constellation, the division of labor (for which, of course, there were precedents in the history of terrorism) had invaluable advantages: it made it possible to pursue the terrorist struggle while the political leadership of the movement could at the same time dissociate itself from such operations. On a few occasions there were genuine splits and the sorcerer’s apprentice became truly indepen dent — but these were the exceptions.
Mention has been made of the fact that Fatah had a wider social appeal than its rivals; intellectuals and students congregated in the quasi-Marxist PFLP and PDFLP. In contrast to terrorist groups of earlier periods, or the Latin American terrorists of our time, the leaders of the Arab groups hardly ever took part in operations. In fact, among those who participated in terrorist operations inside Israel there were few educated young people; actions outside Israel, on the other hand, usually demanded some skills.
Of the many separatist-nationalist groups operating in Europe and North America, some are of no relevance in the context of the pres ent study because they used terrorist tactics only on rare occasions (this refers, for instance, to the various separatist groups in France, Britain or Italy). Among those who opted for “urban guerrilla” tactics the FLQ in Quebec, the Basque ETA, the Croatian Ustasha and the Puerto Ricans were the most prominent. The FLQ (Front de Libera tion de Quebec) was founded in 1963: its operations reached its peak in October 1970 with the kidnappings of Cross and Laporte. After that date, following energetic government action, terrorism ceased, even though the Quebec problem continued to exist. The Basque ETA first launched terrorist attacks in 1968; its most spectacular exploit was the assassination of Prime Minister Carrero Blanco in December 1973, and it continues its operations to this day. While FLQ and ETA acted from within their respective countries, the Croat Ustasha concentrated its activities on attacks on Yugoslav rep resentatives abroad, such as the killing of the Yugoslav ambassador to Sweden (April 1971) and of numerous other Yugoslav diplomats. Attempts were also made to infiltrate agents into Yugoslavia, some times individually, sometimes in groups. Puerto Rican terrorists, mainly concentrated in the FALN, have killed policemen in Puerto Rico, bombed hotels on the island, and blown up taverns and offices in New York and other American cities. In all these cases terrorism evolved out of separatist movements that had existed for many years. In some cases social grievances reinforced the nationalist demands: the average income of French-speaking Canadians in Quebec prov ince is 30 to 40 percent lower than that of English-speaking Canadi ans. On the other hand, the Basque region is among the more pros perous parts of Spain, and Croatia is one of the most developed parts of Yugoslavia. In these instances national-cultural (and/or religious) factors were obviously of decisive importance; the Croats and Quebeckois, in contrast to their neighbors, are Catholics. Most of the separatist terrorists could count on at least some public sympathy; even if the majority dissociated itself from violent actions (the revul sion among French-Canadians after the Laporte murder in 1970), there was a vague feeling of solidarity, a tendency to forgive unfor givable deeds because the motive had been sincere. Where such sympathy was not much in evidence (Puerto Rico had overwhelmingly voted in 1967 in favor of association with the United States) there was outside (Cuban) help as a countervailing factor.
The strong impact of religion on Irish militants and the Palestini ans has been noted; religious roots of Ustasha terrorism are also unmistakable and it has been said that the Basque clergy kept their language, the main vehicle of Basque nationalism, alive so that their flock should be unpolluted by modern ideas such as liberalism and socialism.18 The link between religious fanaticism in Ulster, the Basque regions, the Middle East and Croatia is too obvious to be ignored; fanaticism persisted even when the belief in religion had been eroded and when the terrorists had been excommunicated. Religion, like terrorism, offers certainty; religion, like terrorism, asks people to sacrifice themselves for a cause greater than themselves. When traditional religion is discarded, its place is taken by a new faith, be it nationalism or Communism — but the underlying inten sity of belief is still deeply religious in character.
Terrorist tactics varied greatly: the FLQ during its early years directed its attacks against establishments rather than persons. If there were a few victims, this was apparently not planned. ETA’s first operations were aimed at the security forces, but from 1973 on it also engaged in bank raids and abductions of businessmen — in one famous case in 1975 the victim was killed when the money demanded for his release was not forthcoming. ETA had a sanctuary in neigh boring France, but the movement was split on lines resembling the IRA internal division — with the populist ETA V resembling the Provisionals, and the quasi-Marxist ETA VI (1970) and a more recent group ETA VI-LCR (1973) [Liga Communista Revolucionar] compa rable to the IRA Officials. ETA V, with its broader nationalist appeal and its greater militancy, has been responsible for most terrorist operations and has pushed its rivals of the extreme left into the background. For both the FLQ and ETA the Algerian war of libera tion served as the great model, even though the situation there had been altogether different: Spaniards and English-speaking Canadians were not, after all, French colons.19
It is impossible to deny the validity of at least some of the demands, grievances and fears of the separatist-nationalist movements, from which these terrorist groups sprouted. The real difficulty facing them was that they were not simply dependencies to be decolonized by expelling the foreign rulers. Given the heterogenous ethnic composi tion of most modern nations, it is frequently impossible to fulfill the demands of one group, however justified, without discriminating against another. Not every ethnic group or minority can have a viable state of its own, and their problems can be solved only on the basis of a reasonable compromise. History unfortunately provides a great many precedents for the absence on .both sides of the desire to compromise; the reappearance of separatist movements in the 1960s and 1970s is not therefore a matter of great surprise.
Official Soviet spokesmen have always condemned international terrorism. It has been denounced as adventurist, elitist, objectively serving the interests of the class enemy and the forces of international reaction. Yet at the same time the Soviet Union has provided arms, financial aid, military training and, on occasion, political support to various terrorist groups. In practice, as distinct from doctrine, the Soviet attitude has been one of selective support to “national liberation” movements employing terrorist means and it has also assisted some groups that even by stretching a vivid imagination cannot be classified as belonging to the national liberation camp. This ambigu ity stems from the fact that the Soviet attitude to political terrorism is dictated not by humanitarian principle but by political expediency. The ambiguity is reflected even in the legal discussions on terrorism that have kept the United Nations busy for several years. On the one hand the Soviet Union stated in 1973 in the U.N. Ad Hoc Committee on International Terrorism that it had no objection to the adoption of an international convention which would impose definite obliga tions on states to prevent such illegal acts.20 But on the other hand the Soviet representative stressed that it was quite unacceptable to give a “broad interpretation” to the term “international terrorism” so as to cover national liberation movements which, it maintained, were justified from the viewpoint of international law. In the Soviet view, some national liberation movements are “just” whereas others are not. Soviet spokesmen would certainly take a dim view of any suggestion that Lithuanian, Ukrainian or Tadjik movements advocating political independence might be worthy of support. According to Soviet doctrine, only those national liberation movements should be supported which are part of the “world revolutionary process,” which weaken the West and promote Soviet interests. For a variety of reasons, the Soviet Union would probably prefer these groups to apply means other than terrorist, since such actions are usually difficult to control and, if they fail, their defeat has an adverse effect on the Communist parties. If on the other hand they succeed, the Chi nese or some ultra-left group may claim the credit. Terrorism, in any case, is problematical from the Soviet point of view, for there is always the risk that the example may be emulated and that terrorist operations may be used against Soviet representatives abroad, or even within countries belonging to the “Socialist Camp.”
The ambivalence vis-a-vis terrorist movements dates back to the days of Marx, Engels and Lenin: their opposition to Bakuninist, Blanquist and Mostian techniques is well known, but there was always room for some exceptions. Special allowances were made for the Fenians and the Narodnaya Volya. In a similar way, Soviet leaders may have reservations about the uses of terrorism today but, given the existence of such groups, assistance has been given whenever thought expedient. On the other hand, the Soviet Union cannot openly support terrorist groups without harming its image of respon sible statesmanship and complicating its relations with the United States and other countries. This, then, in brief outline, is the Soviet dilemma facing terrorism at the present time.
Soviet relations with the PLO were relatively uncomplicated, since this body received wide international recognition after 1968. The Soviet attitude to the PLO was initially fairly cool; prior to 1968 the militant Palestinians were sometimes even denounced in the Soviet press as reactionary, adventurist and ultra-revolutionary.21 After that date the attitude became gradually much more friendly, weapons were liberally supplied, training was given and PLO leaders have fairly regularly conferred with Soviet leaders. The reasons for the rapprochement were obvious; the PLO had been recognized by China as early as 1964 and while the Chinese could not do much for the Palestinians, there was always the danger of a pro-Chinese orien tation developing unless Moscow were more forthcoming. Soviet setbacks in the Middle East and the close cooperation between the PLO and the pro-Soviet regimes in the Arab world also helped the rapprochement. But the Soviet Union, directly and indirectly, also supported the PFLP and the PDFLP which, in contrast to Fatah, made no claims to moderation and statesmanship.
Similar problems existed in Latin America: the Venezuelan Com munist party opted for urban terrorism in the early 1960s; there is reason to assume that this was their own decision, not Moscow’s, but on the other hand the Soviet Union could not dissociate itself from the sister party. Among other Latin American Communist parties which have engaged in terrorist operations during the last decade are those of Colombia, Guatemala, Haiti and the Dominican Repub lic. These were small parties and their attitude was not representa tive; in Latin America, only the Dominican Communist party refused to sign the Moscow manifesto of Communist parties in 1969, on the grounds that it was not sufficiently revolutionary. (The Dominicans changed their views in 1972.) The FARC terrorists in Colombia were orientated toward the Soviet Union and received some assistance; their leader was Manuel Marulanda, a member of the Central Committee of the Colombian Communist party. But again, as far as the Colombian Communist party was concerned, terrorism was only one form of the political struggle. On the other hand, there were declarations by leading Latin American Commu nist spokesmen sharply condemning the “desperate adventures of ultra-leftists” who engaged in kidnappings and attacks which had no working class support and which contributed nothing to the revolu tionary cause.22 Rodney Arismendi, leader of the Uruguayan Com munist party, said in an interview with the Italian Unita that his party considered the Tupamaros sincere, honest and courageous rev olutionaries and that they had defended them on occasion. But in the final analysis Tupamaro tactics did not correspond to the needs of Uruguay. To make the overall picture even more confused, it ought to be added that some Soviet help has apparently been extended to the Tupamaros, the ERP and other such groups without the media tion and probably even without the knowledge of the local Commu nist party.
Until about 1969-1970 the Cubans gave more or less indiscriminate support to Latin American guerrilla and terrorist movements. Doctrinally, the Cubans should have assisted only rural guerrillas but, in fact, they also supported urban terrorism, especially after the col lapse of most Latin American rural guerrilla movements.23 Cuban support became somewhat more selective after 1970, partly no doubt under Soviet pressure, partly in view of the realization that the “revolutionary wave” of the 1960s had passed and that it was only desirable to normalize Cuba’s relations with other Latin American governments. This led to bitter recriminations on the part of the more militant Latin American guerrilla and terrorist groups, which claimed that Cuba had sacrificed (if not betrayed) the revolutionary cause. These charges were, on the whole, unjustified, since Cuba continued to provide training, arms and money to Latin American terrorists — as well as to some groups in other parts of the world; this emerged quite clearly after the expulsion of several Cuban “diplo mats” from France in connection with the “Carlos” affair in 1975. The Soviet Union did not act only through the good offices of the Cubans; Soviet diplomats were expelled from Mexico in March 1971, from Bolivia in March 1972 and from Colombia in August 1972, after evidence of links with local terrorist groups had been revealed. By and large, however, a division of labor has been established, with the Soviet Union gradually disengaging itself from direct involvement and with Cuba and North Korea taking over a large share of the burden. Beginning in 1968-1969, terrorist training centers were established in North Korea; the trainees have been traced to, and in some cases apprehended in, Latin America (Mexico, Brazil, Bolivia, Colombia and other countries), the Middle East (PFLP) and Asia (Sri Lanka, Malaya, Indonesia) and Africa. Cuba has concentrated its activities on Latin America and the Latin American emigration in Europe and Spain. At the same time, Soviet links with various terror ist movements such as the Croatians, various Paris-based groups and others farther afield have not apparently been altogether discon tinued.24 There seems to have been some coordination between the Soviet bloc and Algeria and Libya, the other two main supporters of terrorist movements. Algeria has provided shelter and assistance to North American terrorist groups as well as to the ETA and most African and Middle Eastern terrorists. The list of groups that have received Libyan support is long, even though Libyan promises have been even more numerous. While Cuba and North Korea have acted in close contact with Moscow, Soviet coordination with Algeria and Libya has been looser.
The question of the armed struggle has figured prominently in the internal debates of the world Trotskyite movement. If the Commu nist camp has become polycentric over the last two decades, Trotsky ism was split into several groups almost from the beginning, and this makes generalizations almost impossible. The Ninth World Congress of the Fourth International (April 1969) accepted a resolution on the armed struggle in Latin America, calling its supporters not only to “increase the number of rural guerrilla nuclei but also to engage in actions in the big cities aimed at striking at the nerve centres of the regimes.”25 Individual Trotskyite leaders have approved of the FLQ kidnappings in Canada, the Weathermen in the United States, the activities of the IRA and the Basque ETA and even the Munich massacre.26 While rejecting the BaaderMeinhof style of terrorism, Trotskyite spokesmen such as Livio Maitan (the movement’s main expert on Latin American affairs) and Daniel Bensaid justified “urban guerrilla” tactics as consistent with the struggle of the work ers’ movement.27 The Red Weekly (January n, 1974) announced that it gave total support to the assassination of Carrero Blanco, the Spanish prime minister, by Basque nationalists; Livio Maitan commented that “critical support” would have been a more appropriate term in this context. On two occasions, money from Latin American kidnap pings is said to have been transferred to Trotskyite groups abroad; $100,000 of the proceedings of the Beilinson kidnapping in May 1973 and an unspecified sum seized in a bank raid in Guatemala, which went to the Posadistas, a Trotskyite splinter group. The French sec tion of the Fourth International engineered some minor attacks in 1972 such as those against the Argentine embassy in Paris and the local offices of Honeywell-Bull. As a result, the French section of the Fourth International was outlawed by the French government. However, the majority faction inside the Fourth International some what modified its position at the Tenth World Congress which took place in Sweden in February 1974 and was mainly devoted to discus sions on Latin America. The pro-guerrilla, pro-terrorist resolution adopted five years earlier was criticized as abstract, vague and hasty.28 The new resolution made it clear that it applied only to Latin America; the activities of the Krivine group in France were de nounced. American Trotskyites, who in their majority had opposed the armed-struggle orientation all along, found the new resolution insufficient inasmuch as it was no real retreat from the position taken in 1969 but “simply an attempt to make it more palatable.” It still implied that “violent actions initiated and carried out by small groups could serve as examples for the masses.”29
Leaving aside Pabloites and Posadistas, the “International Com mittee,” the Lambertites and a dozen other small factions, and con centrating on mainstream Trotskyism, the following approximate picture emerges: at the one extreme there is the Argentinian PRT (Combatiente) which set up the ERP in 1970. Beginning with “expro priations” this group matured to straight urban terrorism and even tually left the Fourth International, partly under Cuban influence. Closest to them is the French Section of the Fourth International, the “Communist League,” which has been, however, by and large, stronger on the theory than the practice of terrorism. The Interna tional Executive Committee of the Fourth International (Mandel, Maitan, Tariq Ali et al.) have taken a “centrist” position. Between 1969 and 1973 they provided theoretical justification for guerrilla warfare and urban terrorism in certain conditions.30 Since then they have to a certain extent retreated from this position. The majority of the Socialist Workers Party in the United States has favored rural guerrilla warfare combined with political work, such as practiced by Hugo Blanco in Peru in 1965. But it has sharply denounced urban terrorism as both anti-Leninist and counterproductive and it has criticized Mandel, Maitan and Tariq AH for uncritically supporting such manifestations of the “armed struggle.”
The discussions on the desirability of urban terrorism continued for years in the Fourth International; while Pierre Frank of the French section argued (quoting Trotsky) that a bomb was an excel lent thing in certain circumstances, this was contested by Joseph Hansen and his friends in New York. Altogether these debates have scarcely more than academic interest, for, with the one exception of the Argentine ERP, Trotskyites did not engage in terrorist opera tions on a major scale.31 The ERP was both the pride of the Fourth International and the source of much worry from the very begin ning. Founded in July 1970 as the military wing of the Trotskyite PRT (Partido Revolucionario de los Trabajadores), it was subject to vari ous conflicting influences.32 From the outset, it had only a tenuous relationship with the Fourth International, whose leadership it criti cized as weak and lacking a military orientation. It regarded Che Guevara as its spiritual mentor and among its prominent members was Joe Baxter, who only a few years before had been a leader of the neo-Fascist Tacuara. Baxter, as well as other ERP leaders, had re ceived his military training in Cuba; when Mario Santucho, the head of the ERP escaped from an Argentine prison in August 1972, he found asylum in Cuba — not known for its sympathies for Trotsky ism. All this was a little suspect even considering the usual Latin American ideological confusion and it did not therefore come as a great surprise when in the spring of 1973 ERP broke off relations with the Fourth International altogether. The year before, the ERP had kidnapped Oberdan Sallustro, a Fiat executive, and killed him when the money for his release was not delivered in time. The Fourth International leadership had not condemned the action expressis verbis; this provoked a violent reaction on the part of the American Trotskyites, who accused the “United Secretariat” of justifying ter rorism under the euphemism “urban guerrilla war.” In the following year, the (European) Fourth International leadership broke its si lence and offered some friendly criticism to the ERP — suggesting that their operations were premature since a full-fledged revolution ary situation did not yet exist,33 But the ERP was in no mood to take advice from Paris and London; they, after all, knew best whether a revolutionary situation existed, and if it did not exist, why assume that it could not be created? Their interest in doctrinal discussions had always been limited: they believed in action and they were to provide much of it in the years to come.
Some Anarchist groups, too, have reverted in recent years to ter rorist practice. The leading spokesmen of the movement had dis sociated themselves from individual terror ever since Kropotkin pub lished his strictures about the mindless assassinations of the 1890s. This is still true with regard to the older leaders today; it is no longer correct with regard to some activist groups which came into being in the late 1960s on the fringes of the Anarchist movement. In 1968, a German Anarchist publisher reissued the text of Bakunin’s Words to the Young Generation, in which the use of the dagger and poison was recommended. The brochure had first been published a hun dred years earlier but the reissue was obviously no mere act of aca demic commemoration. Even earlier, in the early 1960s, the Spanish Anarchists had established a terrorist underground with the help of some British and French comrades. Toward the end of the decade, the Baader-Meinhof faction, the Valpreda group in Italy and the London “Angry Brigade” came into being, as well as some other groups elsewhere opting for “direct action.” “Direct action” did not necessarily mean terrorism; the decision of the German “Red Army” (Baader-Meinhof) to wage “urban guerrilla warfare” was widely criti cized in Anarchist circles — the very choice of the name showed that the group, whatever their original inspiration, had broken with libertarian socialism. Some of these terrorist groups remained faithful to their original Anarchist, anti-authoritarian principles, others moved on toward an ideological synthesis of all the revolutionary programs of our time, even if mutually exclusive, or joined the flying circus of multinational terrorism.
The motives which induced Libya, Algeria, Somalia, Iraq, South Yemen and other countries to sponsor and support terrorist groups had nothing to do, needless to say, with Anarchism or Marxism-Leninism. Colonel Khadafi may have genuinely cared about Muslim rebels in Israel, Chad and the Philippines; but whether Catholics or Protestants gained the upper hand in Ulster was neither a matter of doctrinal nor of vital national interest for Libya. However, giving support and shelter to terrorists enhanced the international status of otherwise not very important countries: it made their rulers feel influential and it seemed worth the expense of these foreign ven tures. True, beyond a certain stage vicarious support tended to be come embarrassing, and as a result Algerian assistance to terrorists, other than Arabs and their foreign aides, has become more selective in recent years.
The aid given by Communist and Arab countries was operationally invaluable, but the inspiration for the last upsurge of terrorism in the Western world came from a very different source. The late 1960s and early 1970s witnessed the rise and decline of the New Left, which became the leading force on the university campuses; since there were millions of students, and since they were among the politically most active members of society, their radicalization was bound to have political consequences. It was this force which helped to defeat an American president and almost overthrew the Gaullist regime in France. The New Left was of mixed parentage: on the one hand there was genuine idealism, anti-militarism, revulsion against the inequities of modern industrial society, of poverty, hunger and ex ploitation in the Third World. But there was also boredom, aggres sion and the free-floating extremism of every growing generation. Seen in retrospect, the New Left produced much interesting mate rial for the student of social and cultural trends. Politically it was not a very innovative movement; its gurus such as Marcuse were men of an older generation — some of them were no longer alive. The ideas they advocated had been floating around for many years: Gramsci, Lukacs, the unorthodox German Marxists of the 1920s, Reich — there was little that was not known to the student of left-wing ideol ogy, nor had it anything to do with terrorism. Perhaps the only significant new admixture was Frantz Fanon’s concept of the liberating influence of violence. Fanon had written for Africans, but it was precisely in Europe and in North America that his ideas found many admirers. He argued that violence not only unified the people, but that it was a cleansing force, freeing the native from his inferiority complex and from his despair and inaction: “It makes him fearless and restores his self respect. .. . When the people have taken violent part in the national liberation they will allow no one to set themselves up as ‘liberators.’ “34 It was, in a way, Morozov’s vision of systematic terror as a safeguard against would-be dictators after liberation. Fanon’s vision was overoptimistic, for the history of Africa after his death can be summarized, grosso modo, in a line from Yeats: The beggars have changed places but the lash goes on. True, it was now a native lash, but this hardly bears out the predictions about the curative properties of liberating violence.*
The New Left lasted for three or four years, after which some of its proponents converted to orthodox (Soviet-style) Communism while others continued to read the works of the Frankfurt School, of Korsch, Bloch and Benjamin; a few turned to Anarchism; others to Maoism, situationisme and a variety of small sects. In the United States the great majority opted out of politics while retaining a vaguely liberal (American-style) orientation. In Western Europe, on the other hand, the process of depolitization did not go so far.35 When the rapid decline in the fortunes of the New Left set in, a few of its members opted for terrorism. Thus, more or less simultane ously, the United Red Army developed in Japan out of Zengakuren, the extreme student organization; the American SDS gave birth to Weatherman; and some of the German students of the far left founded the Rote Armee Fraktion (BaaderMeinhof) and the Bewe-gung 2. Juni. There were smaller groups in Italy (Brigate Rosse) and in England (Angry Brigade).
There has been an unending stream of publications on these various groups and by their members, on their views, moods, beliefs, motives and aims; seldom in history has so much been written about so few and so little. Their doctrine has been minutely analyzed, although this did them a grave injustice, for they were not really an ideological movement but eclecticists borrowing certain concepts from Marxism-Leninism (such as the Leninist theory of imperialism), others from Anarchism; above all they believed in the “primacy of action.” As the German RAF put it, only the practice of terror would show whether an armed opposition could be built up and united. This voluntaristic concept had been taken from Mao, even though in other respects the life-style of the New Left terrorists was the nega tion of everything the Chinese and the Cubans stood for.
“Armed action” in West Germany began with an attempt to burn down a Frankfurt department store in 1968. It continued with vari ous bomb-laying activities against German institutions and United States army installations (1970), the assassination of the president of a Berlin court (von Drenkman in 1974) and of a “traitor” in their own ranks (Ulrich Schmücker), the attack on the West German embassy in Stockholm, as well as a few other operations — not an impressive balance sheet for eight years of activities. The two groups which engaged in terrorism were small and consisted almost exclusively of students, or ex-students, of impeccable middle-class backgrounds. As in the United States, there were apparently more women than men in their ranks and the women were the more fanatic. The parents of Ulrike Meinhof were art historians, and she was brought up by an other well-known historian; Gudrun Ensslin’s father was a Protestant clergyman, Baader’s father was an academic, Holger Meins’s father was a wealthy Hamburg merchant. The parents of others were uni versity professors, writers, professional people. But at this point any similarity with Narodnaya Volya ends. Their policy was not to fight for the “oppressed and exploited” in their own country but to “de stroy the islands of wealth in Europe,” to act as agents of the Third World. Hence their collaboration with Third World terrorists; Horst Mahler, one of their early leaders, later had second thoughts on whether this was the correct way to make friends and influence people. But his former comrades stuck to it notwithstanding. Their frequently invoked “concept of urban guerrilla” was, as they admit ted, of Latin American origin — “the revolutionary method to be used by weak revolutionary forces.”36 It was their firm belief that this method could be used at all times and in all places.37
The ideological antecedents of the Japanese United Red Army were similar to those of the Germans, but there were also native traditions at work.38 They derived from, on the one hand, the ideo logical disputations of the student left of the 1960s, on the other hand the traditional spirit of Bushido. It was perhaps no coincidence that in their very first major action, the hijacking of a Japanese aircraft in March 1970, the attackers used Samurai swords and daggers. Subse quently there were a few murders and acts of sabotage inside Japan, but on the whole it was, as in West Germany, a self-perpetuating cycle of arrests, of new attacks, of new arrests, and so on. Thus in January 1974 the United Red Army attacked a Shell refinery in Sin gapore; those involved were captured by the police. Ten days later, to effect the release of the prisoners in Singapore, the URA struck at the Japanese embassy in Kuwait. In September 1974 they attacked the French embassy in The Hague, demanding freedom for one of their comrades who had been arrested in France. The Japanese ter rorists, even more than the West Germans, took a prominent part in “transnational terrorism,” frequently in collaboration with Palestini ans, but also with the “Carlos” gang (Yutaka Furaya) and other such groups.
Organizationally, American terrorism developed out of radical white and black groups; on one hand there was SDS (Students for a Democratic Society), the extreme wing of which went underground after a “war council” in Flint, Michigan, in December 1969.39 Three years earlier the Black Panther party had been formed in California by Huey Newton (subsequently its “minister of defense”) and Bobby Seale. It was later joined by Eldridge Cleaver whose Soul on Ice had sold two million copies and who became its “minister of informa tion.” Black Panther thinking was inspired, in its own words, by Che Guevara, Malcolm X, Lumumba, Ho Chi Minh and Mao. But undue importance should not be attributed to such pronouncements; it was not as if the works of Mao had been carefully studied; all that their proponents knew of Mao was that power grew out of the barrel of a gun. They saw the Lumpenproletariat as the main revolutionary force, although they had little success in mobilizing it, and they rejected collaboration with the Weathermen, whose members came from a very different social milieu and whose preoccupations with ego trips, women’s lib and various manifestations of the counterculture were not to their liking. On the other hand, the Black Panthers put strong emphasis on cultural nationalism. It was not in the begin ning an openly terrorist group; urban terrorism was first advocated by Cleaver from his Algerian exile and by George Jackson, who was killed in August 1971 while trying to escape from San Quentin. Jack son thought of himself as a Communist, had widely read terrorist literature in prison (“I no longer adhere to all of Nechaev’s revolu tionary catechism”), and stated that the objective was the destruction of the city-based industrial establishment by creating perfect dis order and by disrupting the manufacture and distribution of goods.40 There were a few shoot-outs between members of the Black Pan thers and the police and some bomb attacks, but the Black Panthers succumbed to “perfect disorder” well before American society. Cleaver, who had been the first to advocate the armed struggle, became disillusioned following his painful experiences, first in Cuba and later in Algeria. Huey Newton and his friends opted for commu nity action from within the system, and Stokely Carmichael, who had retreated with his wife, a well-known singer, to a comfortable exis tence in Africa, advocated political struggle. There was no direct link between the Black Panthers and the Symbionese Liberation Army, which also originated in Berkeley. Consisting of a few students and criminals, it committed some murders of white and black people, robbed a few banks and, following the involvement of Patty Hearst, attained worldwide notoriety. Counting about a dozen members, it was one of the smallest and most bizarre terrorist groups. Like the Manson family it can perhaps be understood against that specific Californian background which has remained a riddle to most foreign ers. The name “Symbionese” was defined as meaning a “body of harmony of dissimilar bodies and organisms living in deep and loving harmony and partnership in the best interest of within the body.” Its emblem was a seven-headed cobra, a 170,000-year-old sign signifying God and life.
The motives that induced young blacks to join a terrorist group were, of course, altogether different from the motives which had driven white middle-class youngsters underground. On one side there was the despair of the black ghetto, unemployment, poverty and the misery of broken families — on the other, the crisis of identity, suburbian boredom, the desire for excitement and action, a certain romantic streak, in short terrorism as a cure for personality problems. All this was enmeshed in immense intellectual confusion, an absence of values, the conviction that everything was permitted; all the bitter things the Weathermen said and wrote about American society and American culture were a fortiori true with regard to themselves, for in their violent opposition to this society and culture they were still its offspring, embodying some of its negative features. It was not just their style which set them apart from previous genera tions of terrorists — the obscenity of their language and their cruelty — the style in this case was the man, or the woman: a very inferior species of revolutionary indeed.
While the black youngster could point to very real social problems, the white suffered mainly from personal hangups. Yet any attempt to engage in generalizations about the behavior of a handful of young men and women is of doubtful value, since the overwhelming major ity of their contemporaries, whether they perceived their surroundings in a similar light or not, did not turn to terrorism. And so the Weathermen, even more than the Black Panthers, remained a mar ginal phenomenon; whatever they did in the underground, it did not affect American life. The statistics still showed a great number of bombings and attacks during the years after 1970 and some of these were undoubtedly the work of the Weathermen, but most of them were perpetrated by lunatics or criminals — a few operations more or less by Bernardine Dohrn and her comrades made no difference.41
Manifestations of urban terrorism were reported during 1968-1975 from many parts of the globe, excepting always the Communist countries and other effective dictatorships. Italy and Turkey were beset by both left-wing and right-wing terror: the left was first off the mark, but the right retaliated with a vengeance. The semi-anarchist Brigate Rosse began their activities in the factories of Milan and Genoa, committing acts of sabotage, burning the cars of their political enemies, engaging in kidnapping and maturing to the point of killing judges (Genoa 1976). Neo-Fascist terrorists planted bombs at anti-Fascist meetings, killing eight in Brescia (1974); there were twelve victims when a bomb exploded the same year on an express train. If there was any thought behind this and similar actions (which cannot be taken for granted), its aim was to bring about a breakdown of public order, economic ruin and general dislocation. But since the Brigate Rosse were no more interested in a Communist victory than the neo-Fascists in Christian Democratic rule, the purpose of these actions remained obscure. Italian left-wing terrorism was initially predominantly working class with a heavy emphasis on sabotaging industrial machinery, but “radical chic” was not missing. Feltrinelli, the head of one of Italy’s most distinguished publishing houses and a multimillionaire, blew himself up while trying to destroy a pylon.
In Turkey, the TPLA (the Turkish People’s Liberation Army) was an offshoot of Dev Gene, the cover organization of left-wing students in the country; it killed a few American soldiers and an Israeli consul, kidnapped a young girl and engaged in a few more activities of this kind, helped by the left-wing Palestinian organizations which pro vided arms and trainings. Right-wing Turkish terrorism was al legedly inspired by a retired colonel, Alpaslan Türkes, who had founded the Nationalist Action Party; its more militant members were trained in Fatah camps. Its professed aim was Panturkism, the abolition of Kemalist laicism, the destruction of the democratic sys tem, and above all the liquidation of their enemies on the left. Assas sinations of left-wing students reached a peak in 1975, by which time right-wing terrorism was definitely more widespread than political violence sponsored by the left.
Terrorist groups, supported originally by Iraq and subsequently by Libya and the Palestinians, were active in Iran. They ranged from the far left to religious fanatics of the extreme right, united by their hate against the Shah and his autocratic rule. From time to time a few American officers would be assassinated; this would be followed by the destruction of a Siahkal unit (the most active of the terrorist groups) by Savak, the ruthless Iranian political police which, unlike their European colleagues, had no reason to fear public opinion if they overreacted in their fight against terrorism. Terrorists would seldom survive a shoot-out with the police; those who did faced a death sentence, or at best a long prison term. Most other Third World terrorist groups were to concentrate their activities in rural areas, although like the Maoist Naxalites in India or various Mexican terror ist groups they would from time to time transfer the scene of their operations to the cities.42
The achievements of the small terrorist groups which had evolved from the much broader New Left movement in Europe, Japan and the U.S.A. were few and far between. True, it was easy to burn down a department store or a factory, to kidnap a diplomat or to hijack a plane. Robbing a bank was child’s play and leaving a time bomb in a crowded place was a task that could safely be left to a half-wit — as in Joseph Conrad’s novel. The forces of law and order, preoc cupied with combatting different sorts of crime, seemed altogether incapable of tracing and arresting young people with no previous criminal record. Nor was it difficult to get money and arms through connections with likeminded friends in other countries or the good offices of one of the pro-terrorist governments. It was easy to get publicity for almost any action or threat of action, for manifestoes and appeals. But all this activity, however often repeated, had no political impact, nor was there any support beyond a small fringe of intellec tual sympathizers. Meanwhile the police improved their methods and leading terrorists were captured from time to time. Urban terror became self-perpetuating: a major operation would be staged to seize hostages so as to assure the liberation from prison of some leading comrades. Meanwhile there would be fresh arrests and new operations would have to be planned to effect their release. Neither workers, nor peasants, nor even the intellectuals would show any sympathy, and after hundreds of bombs and thousands of lead stories in the media, the surviving terrorists, sadder and wiser men and women, would have to face a balance sheet that was almost entirely negative. If it was their intention to undermine the system and bring about its downfall, there were obviously more effective ways to do so. Normally, this should have been the end of the terrorist wave. If it nevertheless continued on a small scale, this was partly because of foreign power support, partly because there would always be a few dozen people in favor of terrorist action, quite irrespective of whether or not it served any useful purpose.
The small New Left groups withered away or were absorbed in the new multinational terrorism. The other two main strands of terrorism, the Latin American and the nationalist-separatist, were, on balance, more successful, but not very much so. It is of course true that, as an American study has maintained, quite a few governments have been embarrassed by terrorist activities forcing them to release captured terrorists, for instance. In a few cases governments were even overthrown because they proved incapable of coping with terrorism.43 But democratic governments can survive a great deal of embarrassment, and the new rulers in Uruguay and Argentina were hardly to the terrorists’ liking. Terrorism certainly contributed to the growing international status of the PLO, but much less than Arab oil. Democratic societies were compelled to divert some resources to defense against terrorist attacks but these were minute measured by any standards. There has been a tendency to exaggerate out of all proportion the cost in manpower and resources needed to combat terrorism.44 The human toll of terrorism, domestic and international, however tragic, was relatively small; from 1966 to 1976, between 6,000 and 8,000 men and women were killed, more than half of them in Argentina and Ulster. This is far less than the number of those killed in one year of the Lebanese Civil War or in one month in Cambodia. If terrorism nevertheless attracted so much attention it was, of course, mainly owing to its dramatic character. It fascinated millions of people, but it directly affected the life of only a handful. If one disregards events in Ulster and Argentina, there has been a substantial decrease in terrorist operations since 1973; many of the groups of the late 1960s and early 1970s ceased to exist, or were reduced to impotence. This refers to Venezuela, Brazil, Uruguay, the United States, Canada and Japan, as well as other countries. The decrease has been most striking with regard to hijacking; between July 1974 and the end of 1975 there were no more than half a dozen such cases. Political terrorism did not, of course, come to a sudden halt in 1973 and it was only to be expected that the exploits of the small groups of remotely controlled international terrorists would continue. Nor were the activities of gangsters and the lunatic fringe affected by the downward trend. And yet, with all these reservations, the wave of political terrorism was unmistakably receding.
*The PFLP, according to its own accounts, progressed from Fascism via Nasserism to an extreme left-wing ideology. See, for instance, Harakat al quawmiyyin al arab min alfashiyya ila al nasiriyya (Beirut, 1970), passim. The ideological emphasis has undoubtedly changed; to what extent the substance has is open to doubt.
*Fanon’s basic concept was not all that original. Patrick Pearse, leader of the Dublin Easter Rising in 1916, had written: “Bloodshed is a cleansing and sanctifying thing, and the nation which regards it as the final horror has lost its manhood.” Similar motifs can be found in Mazzini’s writings and elsewhere. A generation lacking interest in history had to rediscover some well-trodden paths in the history of radical ideas.