03-05-2013, 04:27 PM
A TERM PAPER WRITTEN IN PARTIAL FULFILLMENT OF THE COURSE PEACE AND CONFLICT (GSS 212)
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INTRODUCTION
"Terrorists" and "terrorism" have become Washington's monomania since 9/11, guiding the foreign/military policies of the American superstate and holding its population in thrall.
“The single biggest threat to U.S. security, both short-term, medium-term and long-term,” President Barack Obama said April 11, is the possibility that terrorists might obtain a nuclear weapon. The second biggest threat to world history's mightiest military state, it goes without saying, are terrorists without nuclear weapons but armed with box-cutters, rifles or homemade explosives.
It's "terrorism" 24/7 in the United States — the product of a conscious effort by the Bush Administration to keep the American people in the constant clutches of existential fear, in large part to justify launching endless aggressive wars. Anything goes if the target is said to be "terrorism," as long as the Pentagon's violence takes place in smaller, weaker countries usually populated by non-Europeans
OBJECTIVES
Today terrorism has become one of the major problems the world is facing now. The issue of global terrorism has assumed a frightening and dangerous dimension across the globe. It has gone to the extent that an individual’s safety in a nation cannot be absolutely guaranteed. Cases of terrorism are taking place daily in different countries of the world, many of which are reported in the newspapers, television and radio. Ranging from suicide bombing like the case of ‘World Trade Centre’ in United States of America (USA) few years ago, kidnapping of individuals to bombing of aircrafts and others, terrorists attacks are taking place daily. The naval ship of USSR which was bombed by the American CIA at the high sea, the London tunnel which was bombed also by some secret agent, the September 11 bomb blast in the American Trade centre and many more.
Impact of Terrorism
Although most terrorist groups have failed to achieve their long-term, strategic aims through terrorism, terrorism has on occasion brought about significant political changes that might otherwise have been impossible. Moreover, despite the claims of governments to the contrary, terrorism has sometimes also proven successful on a short-term, tactical level: winning the release of prisoners, wresting political concessions from otherwise resistant governments, or ensuring that causes and grievances that might otherwise have been ignored or neglected were addressed.
Planning and Organization
All terrorists share one characteristic: They never commit actions randomly or senselessly. Every terrorist wants an attack to generate maximum publicity because media attention helps achieve the intimidation needed for terrorism’s success. Accordingly, terrorist acts are carefully planned. Testimony by a terrorist convicted in the 1998 bombing of the U.S. embassy in Kenya revealed that al-Qaeda spent nearly five years planning the attack.
Several essential elements go into planning a major terrorist attack. Planning begins with gathering detailed reconnaissance and intelligence about a target: its defenses, vulnerabilities, and patterns of daily activity. They take time to plan and draw the map of their program before they execute it. Finally, after all the preparations have been completed, the operation is handed off to the team that carries out the attack. For security reasons separate teams that do not know one another execute each step, from planning to logistics, attack, and escape.
All terrorist groups share another basic characteristic: secrecy about their operations. Terrorism operates underground, concealed from the eyes of the authorities and from potential informants among the populace. To maintain secrecy, terrorist groups are often organized into cells, with each cell separate from other cells in the organization but working in harmony with them.
Targets of Terrorism
Terrorism often targets innocent civilians in order to create an atmosphere of fear, intimidation, and insecurity. Some terrorists deliberately direct attacks against large numbers of ordinary citizens who simply happen to be in the wrong place at the wrong time.
More selective terrorist attacks target diplomats and diplomatic facilities such as embassies and consulates; military personnel and military bases; business executives and corporate offices; and transportation vehicles and facilities, such as airlines and airports, trains and train stations, buses and bus terminals, and subways. Terrorist attacks on buildings or other inanimate targets often serve a symbolic purpose: They are intended more to draw attention to the terrorists and their cause than to destroy property or kill and injure persons, although death and destruction nonetheless often result.
Demands of Terrorism
The demands of terrorist groups have ranged from such grand schemes as the total remaking of society along ideological lines to far narrower goals such as the release of hostages for money or the publication of a tract stating the terrorists’ goals. During the 1970s and 1980s Marxist-Leninist groups such as the Baader-Meinhof Gang (later renamed the Red Army Faction) in West Germany and the Red Brigades in Italy waged campaigns to remake society along communist lines (see Communism). Radical Islamic groups have pursued the creation of devoutly religious theocracies (governments under divine guidance). These groups include Osama bin Laden’s al-Qaeda organization, the Abu Sayyaf group in the Philippines, and the Armed Islamic Group in Algeria. Other groups seek narrower goals, such as the reestablishment of a national homeland within an existing country, as does the Basque separatist movement active in Spain, or the unification of a divided nation, as do Irish nationalists in Northern Ireland.
Impact of Terrorism
Although most terrorist groups have failed to achieve their long-term, strategic aims through terrorism, terrorism has on occasion brought about significant political changes that might otherwise have been impossible. Moreover, despite the claims of governments to the contrary, terrorism has sometimes also proven successful on a short-term, tactical level: winning the release of prisoners, wresting political concessions from otherwise resistant governments, or ensuring that causes and grievances that might otherwise have been ignored or neglected were addressed.
Terrorism was used by some nationalist movements in the anticolonial era just after World War II, when British and French empires in Africa, Asia, and the Middle East dissolved. Countries as diverse as Israel, Cyprus, Kenya, and Algeria owe their independence to these movements.
Evidence of terrorist success has come more recently in the examples of Gerry Adams and Martin McGuinness in Northern Ireland and Yasir Arafat in the Middle East. Adams, president of the political wing of the Irish Republican Army (IRA) in Northern Ireland, and his deputy McGuinness both won election to the British Parliament in 1997. Arafat, as leader of the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO), won international recognition for the PLO. Through tactical victories and political achievements, each of their organizations demonstrated how a series of terrorist acts can propel to world attention long-standing causes and grievances.
At the same time, for every terrorist success, there are the countless failures. Most terrorist groups never achieve any of their aims—either short-term or long-term. The life span of most modern terrorist groups underscores this failure. According to one estimate, the life expectancy of at least 90 percent of terrorist organizations is less than a year, and nearly half of the organizations that make it that far cease to exist within a decade of their founding.
Terrorism is designed to threaten the personal safety of its target audience. It can tear apart the social fabric of a country by destroying business and cultural life and the mutual trust upon which society is based. Uncertainty about where and when the next terrorist attack will occur generates a fear that terrorism experts call “vicarious victimization.” A common response to this fear is the refusal to visit shopping malls; attend sporting events; go to the theater, movies, or concerts; or travel, either abroad or within one’s own country.
The public's perception of personal risk, however, often does not dovetail with the observable dimensions of the terrorist threat. Even though the United States was the country most frequently targeted by terrorists from 1968 to 2000, fewer than 1,000 Americans were killed by terrorists, either in the United States or abroad, during that 32-year period, according to figures tabulated by the U.S. State Department and the Federal Bureau of Investigation. Although more than three times that number were killed on September 11, 2001, the fact remains that the perception of the terrorist threat far outweighs the likelihood of being the victim of a terrorist attack. Nonetheless, terrorism’s ability to engender so acute a sense of fear and unease is a measure of its impact on our daily life.
According to official Canadian government sources, no reliable list of terrorist incidents in Canada exists. An unofficial estimate, however, puts the number of Canadians killed by terrorists both in Canada and overseas since 1968 at roughly 294 persons. This figure includes 279 Canadian citizens among a total of 329 persons killed in 1985 when a bomb exploded aboard an Air India flight en route from Montréal, Québec, to London, England.
CAUSES OF TERRORISM
If one pause to ask why the several cases of terrorism in the world? Are there solution(s) in sight? It is pertinent to note that the issue of global terrorism is as old as the history of life itself. It is thus not a new phenomenon. Even in the Holy Bible of the Christians, cases of terrorisms abound in those days, which were reported.
i. One of the factors that are causing terrorism today is the increasing rate of science and technology development in the world. While one cannot dispute the fact that science and technology has brought lots of development to the world, many hardships are also associating with it. Hiroshima and Nagasaki in Japan were bombed during the second world war by atomic bomb, which was then newly produced and had to be tested.. There is no doubt that many courtiers of the world had developed greatly in the area of science and technology. Many dangerous chemical weapons, war equipment and machines had been produced.
ii. The issue of religious intolerance in the world is a cause of great concern. In most nations of the world, there is rivalry between the followers of Islamic and Christian faiths. Followers of each faith have not been tolerant of the other as they are easily provoked by the actions / activities of the other. Some of the past cases of terrorism in the world were therefore premeditated on religious issue. Example being the case of the bombing of World Trade Centre by Osama Bin Laden and his followers.
iii. Conflicts at international level further promote terrorism. When there is dispute between or among countries of the world, citizens of one will try to attack the other to claim superiority of power. Personal conflict among leaders of countries further promotes terrorism. Leaders of a country can decide to sponsor terrorists to attack another country in dispute with.
iv. The desire to harness wealth further promotes terrorism. There are situations where leaders of nations would try to terrorize citizens of another to gain access to land containing mineral resources like ‘Oil’. The case of attack on the citizens of Iran and Kuwait in 1990 by Iraq and on citizens of bakassi peninsula by soldiers of Cameroon is a reference points. Another factor of interest is boundary dispute. Today, many countries terrorize one another due to boundary encouragement.
SCOPE AND LIMITATIONS
The act of Terrorism, has created a lot of fear which in turn has brought about political change. All terrorist acts involve violence or equally important the threat of violence. These violent acts are committed by nongovernmental groups or individuals that is, by those who are neither part of nor officially serving in the military forces, law enforcement agencies, intelligence services, or other governmental agencies of an established nation-state.
Terrorists attempt not only to sow panic but also to undermine confidence in the government and political leadership of their target country. Terrorism is therefore designed to have psychological effects that reach far beyond its impact on the immediate victims or object of an attack. Terrorists mean to frighten and thereby intimidate a wider audience, such as a rival ethnic or religious group, an entire country and its political leadership, or the international community as a whole.
Terrorist groups generally have few members, limited firepower, and comparatively few organizational resources. For this reason they rely on dramatic, often spectacular, bloody and destructive acts of hit-and-run violence to attract attention to themselves and their cause. Through the publicity generated by their violence, terrorists seek to obtain the leverage, influence, and power they otherwise lack.
CONCLUSION
Global terrorism is a serious threat to many countries even to the world at large. the increasing rate of this as a result of greed, quest for power and even deprivative theorem has led to several lost. Global terrorism which is now seen as the current threat to the world economy is rapidly increasing. The public's perception of personal risk, however, often does not dovetail with the observable dimensions of the terrorist threat. Even though the United States was the country most frequently targeted by terrorists from 1968 to 2000, fewer than 1,000 Americans were killed by terrorists, either in the United States or abroad, during that 32-year period, according to figures tabulated by the U.S. State Department and the Federal Bureau of Investigation. Although more than three times that number were killed on September 11, 2001, the fact remains that the perception of the terrorist threat far outweighs the likelihood of being the victim of a terrorist attack. Nonetheless, terrorism’s ability to engender so acute a sense of fear and unease is a measure of its impact on our daily life.