There is still no universal definition of barbarism. It is politics that defines what is or is not a terrorist act. The recent negotiation of the amnesty law for those convicted by the “procs” reactivates the debate
The case of Canadian Nathaniel Veltman is exemplary, of book. At the age of 20, on June 6, 2020, he claimed the lives of four members of the Afzaal family, Muslims of Pakistani origin, rammed them with their van in the Canadian province of Ontario. After committing the multiple murder, he went to a mall, called the police, confessed and surrendered. Veltman was part of a disstructured family, of divorced parents, but a fundamentalist Christian. In the interrogation, the boy stated that he killed the Afzaal after months of planning to attack Muslims simply because they were; that he wanted to send a message to other young white people to do the same: to kill with their cars citizens who professed Islam, including children, with their cars, with the aim of making the impact, terror, greater. I wanted to generate a sense of insecurity in that community to leave the country. On 22 February, Judge Renee Pomerance sentenced him to life imprisonment. The judge did not want to pronounce her name, but she left one thing clear: she is a terrorist, and what she did, a case of a book of terrorism.
The Veltman attack is one of the last tragic examples that allow, through the description of the facts, to build an almost universal definition of terrorism. In this sense, Judge Pomerance’s ruling has brought about a novelty: it is the first sentence in Canada that qualifies as a terrorist an attack carried out by white supremacists. And that massacres of this nature have been others in the American country, such as the one that killed six people in a Quebec mosque in January 2017.
Terrorism is perhaps the most serious crime committed in a non-war context. The qualification of an act as a terrorist is also one of the most debated, both on the national and international stage. And in contexts away sometimes in a sidereal way. If in Canada the description of Veltman’s crime in Spain caused surprise, the term terrorism is also today a matter of debate. The Supreme Court has opened a case against former Catalan government president Carles Puigdemont, among others, for possible crime of terrorism in the 2019 independence protests and riots. Some of the defendants fled to Switzerland. The Federal Office of Justice of the Swiss country, after receiving a rogatory commission from Spanish courts, has described those acts of political character, questioning, therefore, their terrorist nature.
The different national and historical experiences of States not only shape their understanding of what terrorism is and what is not terrorism, says Simon Copeland, researcher at the British analysis centre RUSI, in a post office exchange, but also his legislative frameworks for dealing with politically motivated violence, which further complicates the requirements of a universal definition. The Spanish case gives a lot, in line with Copeland’s pointing out about the influence of national experience. ETA, first, and jihadism, then, have forced action in the political and legal fields: in 2000, and after several attacks, the PSOE and the People’s Party sealed the so-called Anti-Terrorist Pact in order, precisely, to prevent the struggle against the armed gang of Basque origin from being politically instrumentalized. Fifteen years later it was the growth of the Islamic State (ISIS) that motivated the reform of the Criminal Code to adapt the law to the fight against jihadist terrorism.
More recently, the amnesty law agreed between the government and Catalan independence has recovered the debate on what terrorism is. A first drafting of the rule excluded from amnesty the terrorist offences collected by the Spanish Criminal Code. Negotiations between groups have replaced the reference to this rule with the terrorism directive adopted in the European Union in March 2017. Although very similar, Spanish and European law differ slightly on what a terrorist offence.
The term is used as an insult to describe the violence we disagree with.
- Brian J. Phillips, terrorism expertNearly 80 years of history have not served the United Nations to agree on a single and unique definition. Attempts have been made on many occasions in the General Assembly and the Security Council, but still unresulted, as confirmed to questions from EL PAs, a spokesman for the organization’s Counterterrorism Office from New York. A simple reason to explain this dissent would be the one Brian J brings. Phillips, an expert on terrorism at the University of Essex: “The term “terrorism” is not often used as an objective description, but as an insult. To describe the violence we disagree with. Experts share that no individual or armed group in their right mind would be described as a terrorist, a pejorative term that disqualifies.
The history of terrorism as a form of action plunges its roots in the revolutionary France of the 1790s, in the period called the Kingdom of Terror, during which the State endorsed the use of brutal violence (public actions and mass murders) to annihilate the counter-revolutionaries. A century later, at the Rome Conference of 1898, terrorism began to sound in the fight against anarchist groups in the thread of the assassination of the Empress of Austria. Back in 1960, the UN began working on it. Swiss investigator Alex P. Schmid, of the Hague-based International Counter-Terrorism Centre, counting in a report published last year about twenty treaties with the United Nations seal through which a definition of the terrorist act (against an aircraft, a ship, a nuclear power plant…), but not a single and universal, can be drawn from here and there.
In the same report, by the way, Schmid pointed to another interesting point of consensus among academics that makes it possible to identify the terrorist attack: direct victims are not the ultimate target (unlike the common murder in which victim and target coincide). Here the death of three people at the hands of Jerad and Amanda Miller in June 2014 in Las Vegas could fit. The first two died in a pizzeria, and the third, in a mall. At first glance it might seem the crime committed by two common killers with a vulgar motivation. But the two had shown in a writing and on their networks their rejection of the Barack Obama administration, the ultimate target of their bullets. The FBI called it a national terrorism.
Israel refuses to consider the acts of settlers terrorism even if they are directed against civilians.
Olivier Roy, essayistNantes University expert Jenny Raflik, in an exchange of messages, dares with this definition of terrorism: “Dignified, disproportionate and illegal violence aimed at exerting pressure, through terror, on a country, a society or a group of people.” But he warns: It is part of a broader, more political, social or religious project and therefore coexists with other modes of action. Motion is important, and a lot. It is an example that the abduction of an apparatus, directing a vehicle against a crowd or killing a person constitutes per se offences established in any criminal code. They may or may not be terrorism. The key is why the action is. The border between the terrorist act and the simple violence is thin: in June 2015, at the height of the ISIS phenomenon in Europe, a man beheaded his boss and attacked a gas company near Lyon. There was clearly the imitation effect of the Syrian-Iraqi terrorist group, but the individual stated that he had no links to him and that there was a professional dispute. He was charged with a murder offence for terrorist purposes, but killed himself before more could be known.
Lack of agreement
The analysis of criminal codes such as Spanish, French and American, as well as academic texts and international treaties, makes it possible to recognize several common points to describe a terrorist act similar to what Raflik said: violence, threat, terror, coercion, public order… The lack of agreement, as agreed by the experts consulted, is precisely in the political use that each State or subject can make of the seal of terrorism, because precisely political – political motivation – is an essential component in academic and legal definitions. A political actor judges a violent act with a possible political cause; a cocktail that easily opens to the instrumentalization and torthist use of the term terrorism.
According to French essayist Olivier Roy, one of the most read experts on this matter inside and outside France, the lack of a universal definition – it reinforces that everyone has their own list of terrorists and, therefore, that the label of terrorism is more political than objective. And it exemplifies it: “Israel rejects the term “terrorist” to describe the actions of the settlers in occupied territories [of Palestine], when the latter practice violence against a civilian population. Egypt and the United Arab Emirates are trying to get Europe to describe the Muslim Brotherhood as terrorists, although none of them have participated in attacks outside internal conflicts.
The Israeli example of Roy is speaking is very timely. After the attacks of 7 October, Benjamin Netanyahu’s executive began to describe the perpetrator of the massacre, Hamas – on the list of terrorist groups of the European Union and the United States, as a group in the image of ISIS itself (also known for its Arabic acronym Arab pejorative Daesh). Washington, its ally, delved into this and collaborated, even in the mouth of Joe Biden himself, in the campaign that has tried to place the Palestinian militia and the Syrian-Iraqi terrorist organization in the same league. While Hamas, considered by many States a liberation movement, used terrorist tactics during the October 7 massacre, the nature and objectives of both groups are very different.
The French professor states that it is not possible to reach a “purely legal” definition of terrorism because there are many actors who can terrorize through violence: a declared ward state (Dresde’s allied bombing in 1944), a national liberation movement where terrorism is a means of action among others (the Algerian FLN or Hamas) or an organization in which it is its essential form of action (Al Qaeda, Daesh). Distinguish between these cases, Roy continues in his argument, is a political and not a moral or legal issue.
Needless to say, what Brussels and Washington consider terrorism do not house much with what Moscow judges. Hamas is again a good example. While the Kremanlin has condemned the October attacks, the Palestinian militia leading the Gaza Government does not have the Russian seal of a terrorist organization. Moscow has relations at least with the political branch of the liberation movement. Stephanie Foggett, a researcher at the analysis center The Soufan Group, abounds in Roy’s reflection: “Given the inherently political nature of terrorism,” she explains, there is a lot of power to decide what is included and excluded in such a definition of political violence. As such, the process is not neutral and a unique definition is unlikely to satisfy the changing and divergent national interests of States.
For divergences those maintained by the EU and the US around the designation of Russia as a sponsor country of terrorism, again a political rather than a legal matter. The European Parliament has taken that step; Washington, despite internal pressure and Ukraine’s requests, has not.
Apart from arbitrariness and ambiguities, the absence of a universal definition of terrorism has negative consequences. At first glance and different typifications, it suffers from cooperation between countries to pursue transnational groups. But there’s more. Richard Barret, a former member of the British intelligence services and former head of the UN monitoring team on Al Qaeda, points out: The lack of a definition blurring the division between insurgency and terrorism, he says, a permitties governments to gain international support (or avoid international criticism) for the repression of the opposition. It also leads to excessive strengthening of government security and the militarization of civilian agencies such as the police and the abuse of power that leads to the erosion of human rights and civil liberties.
A scenario, described by Barret, reminiscent of the one who drew the war on terror coined after the September 11, 2001 attacks in the US. It was then that Western governments at the forefront of this campaign of punishment in the Middle East against Al Qaeda removed from the terrorist equation the cause, that is, the motivation, to prevent attacks from having some kind of justification. There were only killers who killed for no reason. The label “terrorist” began to spread unchecked to, in the process, lose meaning. A current that has been nuanced over the past decade through national and international laws, but has not reached consensus for a universal definition.