PARIS, 19 June 2004 — In the first part of this article that appeared yesterday we mentioned four lessons from nations that successfully fought terrorism. We also described how Egypt managed to infiltrate virtually all terror groups, at times right to the highest levels of their leadership.
The fifth lesson is that a terrorist organization is subject to the same rules as any business enterprise. It needs an income to secure what it needs. It also decides its operations on the basis of cost efficiency, not only in terms of men lost but also of the actual financial expenses involved.
Modern terrorists need big money and cannot run on the basis of amateurish fund-raising methods such as collecting a few coins outside the mosque. In Peru, as already noted, a terror tax on coca leaves provided the cash needed. In Algeria, almost all terror groups were involved in contraband trade, known as trebendisme. Extortion, racketeering and bank robberies are other sources of terrorist income. In most cases a good chunk of the terror money comes from foreign powers interested in destabilizing this or that rival regime.
To deprive the terrorists of their source of income, the Peruvian government concluded a widely criticized pact with drug barons and their death-squads. In Algeria, the government decided to drop the socialist system and allow the legal import of consumer goods thus killing the contraband trade. Both Egypt and Turkey used diplomacy to persuade several countries, including Iran, Libya and Syria, to stop or at least reduce their funding of terror groups.
The sixth lesson to learn from the experiences of the nations that have won the war on terror concerns information. The normal instinct of the state, especially where there is no democracy, is to suppress bad news, especially terrorist attacks. But, in the medium and longer-run this is a counterproductive policy. The absence of reliable information creates a vacuum that is quickly filled by rumors and propaganda from the many different opponents of the government. In these days of satellite television it will also provide an opportunity for sensationalists to overdramatize every incident in the hope of improving their viewer-ratings.
The Algerians tried a Stalinist censorship system at first. This immediately produced a cottage industry of rumormongers, including many out-of-job politicians who gathered at the capital’s main hotels to sell their lies to visiting foreign reporters. The Stalinist method also enabled foreign journalists to invent. One British reporter invented an exclusive interview with one Abu-Muhammad who had supposedly dropped in for tea at the Algiers Hotel one afternoon. A Scandinavian television crew paid a number of unemployed youth in the Casbah to play the roles of former militants tortured by the security forces.
That policy was changed in 1995 when the authorities started to regain their self-confidence.
Neither Peru nor Algeria ever allowed any normal coverage of the terrorist wars they faced. But both learned to allow greater space for professional journalistic work. They ended up by depriving the terrorists of propaganda victories.
The seventh lesson to learn is to treat terrorism in immediate terms as a form of crime that needs to be stopped and rooted out. Excessive preoccupation with the causes of terrorism could destroy a state’s will to defeat terrorism. Under President Alain Garcia, Peru tried hard to “understand” the grievances of the terrorists and to offer “amends”. The result was a massive increase in support for the terrorists and a significant boost to their self-confidence and audacity. That policy was changed by President Alberto Fujimori who described the terrorists as “killers who ought to be killed before they can kill.”
Algeria also played with the idea of meeting “the legitimate grievances” of the terrorists in 1992 to 1994. Muhammad Boudiaf said he “understood the anger of those who take up arms.” The result was that he himself was gunned down. By 1996, however, Prime Minister Ahmed Ouyahya had adopted the Fujimori approach, enabling the state to move onto full offensive against the terrorists.
The eighth, and possibly the most important lesson, is not to become fixated with the terrorist threat. Terrorism, like the fabled cobra, has the ability to paralyze the state with a mixture of fear and fascination. Peru, Algeria, Egypt and Turkey, among others, experienced this to varying degrees. They all learned to break the spell and deny the terrorists the possibility of fixing the national agenda.
Both Peru and Algeria introduced radical economic reforms designed to move them toward a market system. In Peru an unprecedented economic boom created hundreds of thousands of new jobs and changed the nation’s gloomy mood. There was no corresponding boom in Algeria. But even there the Ouyahya reforms helped create new economic opportunities that strengthened the state’s legitimacy.
In both countries reasonably free elections were held as part of a broader policy of political change. The idea was to show that political power should be sought through the polling stations, not terrorist hide-outs.
In time all societies affected by terrorism manage to factor it in, to consider it as an ugly fact of life like occasional bad weather. It is then that terrorism, like all other human activities, become subject to the iron law of diminishing returns: The more that is invested the less that is gained by terrorists.
Terrorism can make a lot of noise and inflict great damage. But the state always wins.
