Ask any Arab leader what is the most urgent threat the Arab states face, and you are likely to hear one word: Terrorism. While many in the West see Arabs as exporters of terrorism, they forget that Arabs are also its biggest victims.
Saudi Arabia is hosting the largest-ever international conference on counterterrorism beginning today. The organizers hope that the delegates would see the Arabs not only as the principal perpetrators of terror but also as its prime victims.
A quick calculation would show that almost a quarter of a million Arabs have died as a result of various acts of terrorism over the past quarter of a century. (The figure does not include those killed as a result of state terrorism and civil war, especially in Sudan where hundreds of thousands have died since 1989. Nor does it include the number of deaths in Somalia, a Black African country that is a nominal member of the Arab League.)
Of the 21 Arab states only two have been largely spared. The Sultanate of Oman has not been struck by terrorism since the 1970s when it crushed a terrorist insurgency in the province of Dhofar, while the United Arab Emirates has managed to nip several terrorist operations in the bud.
The worst affected of the Arab states has been Algeria where some 150,000 people have died in the violence triggered by terrorists. Terrorism has also claimed at least 25,000 lives in Egypt since 1980. The current wave of terrorism in Iraq, which started almost 18 months ago, has already claimed over 11,000 lives according to best estimates. There are few estimates for the number of victims in other Arab states most affected, especially Libya where the insurgency in the Jabal Akhdhar (Green Mountain) area has gone largely unreported.
The fact that terrorism has struck against all Arab regimes, regardless of ideological and political colorings, shows that none is immune against the threat. Even a long history of support for terrorist organizations, as was the case in Algeria until the mid-1980s and in Libya until last year, did not translate into an insurance against terror.
Against such a background it is more than surprising that Arab states have done little to develop a common strategy against terrorism. Instead they have tried a variety of tactics that have proved counterproductive, to say the least. Some have supported terrorist groups operating against others, especially the Western democracies, in the hope of buying insurance for themselves. Others have plunged into a state of denial by minimizing the danger or keeping it under wraps as an ugly family secret.
Now, however, there are indications that at least some Arab states are prepared to bite the bullet and admit, as a first step toward developing a strategy, that terrorism is threatening their very existence as organized societies. That understanding is the driving force behind the Riyadh conference.
It is important that this conference succeeds in laying the foundations for a common strategy against terror. Its success or failure could send a powerful signal to dozens of terrorist groups operating across the region. The first step that the conference must take is to achieve consensus on a definition of terrorism.
In March 2002, the Organization of the Islamic Conference (OIC) met in Kuala-Lumpur, the Malaysian capital, with the aim of defining terrorism and detaching it from Islam in the aftermath of the Sept. 11 attacks against the United States. The conference collapsed when participants failed to decide whether terrorist acts against civilians were legitimate if carried out under the flag of “resistance against occupation.” The message was that terrorism could be both good and evil, and that the Arab states were not prepared to condemn acts of terror committed against real or imagined enemies.
Could the Riyadh conference repeat the failure of the exercise in Kuala-Lumpur? Only time will tell. But the Arab ministers would do well to at least acknowledge the progress made by the international community to achieve a definition of terrorism that can win almost universal consensus.
Last December a panel appointed by the United Nations underscored the need for an international definition of terrorism. At present, the UN has different mechanisms under which it designates groups and individuals as terrorists. At the same time at least 41 members of the UN have their own national definitions of terrorism. At times there are different definitions even within a single country. For example, the US Treasury Department’s definition is more stringent than the one used by the Sate Department in Washington.
The situation is further complicated thanks to a maze of international conventions covering specific acts that could be described as terrorism. Examples include the taking of hostages (1979) passed after a dramatic hostage drama in which terrorists captured OPEC ministers, terrorist bombings (1997), signed after the first attack on the World Trade Center in New York, and terrorist financing (1999) which was adopted in the aftermath of the attacks against two US embassies in East Africa.
On Oct. 8, 2004, UN Security Council unanimously passed Resolution 1566, which many saw as a major step toward codifying international law concerning terrorism. This resolution incorporates many of the conventions by defining “terrorism” to include: “acts, including (those) against civilians, committed with the intent to cause death or serious bodily injury, or taking of hostages, with the purpose to provoke a state of terror in the general public or in a group of persons or particular persons, intimidate a population or compel a government or an international organization to do or to abstain from doing any acts, which constitute offenses within the scope of and as defined in the international conventions and protocols relating to terrorism, are under no circumstances justifiable by considerations of a political, philosophical, ideological, racial, ethnic, religious or other similar nature. . .”
The chief weakness of the proposed definition is that it is too wordy, opening the path for legalistic maneuvers and dilatory tactics by states that might wish to condone one form of terror while condemning others.
The chief Arab dilemma is how to condemn terrorism all over the world while exempting acts of violence by the Palestinian groups and the Lebanese section of the Hezbollah, against Israeli occupation. The UN panel, which included Amr Moussa, the secretary-general of the Arab League, noted that, “The right to resistance is contested by some.” But it also rejected the claim that resistance against occupation was a justification for acts of terror. It said: “The central point is that there is nothing in the fact of occupation that justifies the targeting and killing of civilians.”
This is important because many terrorist groups including those operating in several Arab countries today claim that they are fighting against real or imagined “occupation”.
To take such claims seriously would require the creation of an international agency to issue licenses for violence. This would mean sanctioning acts of terrorism by some groups while making it illegal for others. In a sense such an agency already exists in the form of UN Committee 1267 which must approve demands made by individual states to include a group or an individual on its international list of terrorists.
The committee’s approval is necessary for imposing UN sanctions on groups and individuals concerned.
The problem with 1267 is that while it compels the UN to impose sanctions it allows individual states the possibility of wiggling out of specific international measures.
As the Arab states are the principal victims of terrorism today it is in their interest to obtain international consensus on its definition. The Riyadh conference must come up with a proposed definition which could then be submitted to a special session of the UN General Assembly, hopefully this year, to be used as the basis for international consensus.
The conference must send a powerful message that the Arab states, regardless of what they did in the past, are now genuinely committed to combating terrorism if only because they have become its principal victims.
