The Euromed summit ended yesterday in Barcelona without agreement between EU states, Mediterranean Arab states and Israel, on a clear statement deploring international terrorism. The Arab delegations were not prepared to endorse a document that did not admit the right of a people to fight against occupation by a foreign power.
By seeking to push through a politically loaded deal, the joint hosts, Spain and Britain, missed the opportunity to agree on the far more important statement that what makes modern terrorists such reprehensible criminals is that they target innocent civilians. The problem is that European governments in particular seem incapable of talking about the inhumanity of the latest terrorist depravity, without then relating the crime to their own political agenda.
This is nothing new. What is lost in this debate is the fact that whatever insurgents call themselves or are called, the majority of their victims are civilians. The calculation is as simple as it is sordid. If the populace can be terrified by bombs and murder, civil society will break down, the authorities will collapse and the insurgents will triumph. Therefore the more innocent blood that is shed and the more grotesque the butchery, the greater the impact for the terrorists’ cause.
The real definition of terror is the indiscriminate taking of the lives of people whose only guilt is to be living in the society that is under attack. And it is not just Al-Qaeda and its murderous offshoots that have committed terror crimes. In the closing days of World War II, when Germany was all but beaten, British and American bombers obliterated the city of Dresden, slaying maybe 100,000 civilians. That was an act of terrorism. The Germans were already broken and just seven weeks away from collapse.
And if killing civilians to terrify them into submission is accepted as the definition of terrorism, then some of those most passionate warriors against it may have reasons to scale down their rhetoric. That definition fits Al-Qaeda attacks. It also fits “shock and awe” that the Pentagon spelled out as the strategy of the Iraq offensive. It was repeated in Fallujah and many other cities with a concentration of civilian population. Any effort to outlaw terrorism, no matter how few the victims and how crude the weapons or delivery systems is welcome. But when the definition comes along with a caveat that if the number of the dead runs into thousands and if the weapons used are bunker busters and the delivery weapons missiles and Stealths, it is not terrorism, it will not be easy to get that viewpoint endorsed by those who have suffered terrorism of both kinds.
It does not matter whether the man who gives the order for the murder of innocents wears a uniform or not; killing people who have nothing to do with a conflict is “terrorism”, plain and simple. Any attempt to shave this or that meaning off the word is nonsense.
