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INTERNATIONAL TERRORISM
ON THE CIVILIZATIONAL AND ISLAMIC NATURE OF INTERNATIONAL TERRORISM
Ramiz SEVDIMALIEV
Deputy Director, Human Rights Institute, Academy of Sciences of Azerbaijan (Baku, Azerbaijan)
Today, two trends are dominating ethnic and interstate relations. First, local conflicts that use limited troop contingents (smaller wars) are becoming more frequent; there is a clear realization that mass armed clashes lead nowhere. Second, contemporary wars and armed conflicts are gradually becoming longer and, therefore, require more material and human resources. Indeed, the world wars of the 20th century lasted for no more than six years each, while armed conflicts take decades and frequently end in the “neither war nor peace” stalemate (Vietnam, Afghanistan, the Middle East, Nagorny Karabakh of Azerbaijan, Abkhazia of Georgia, the Trans-Dniester region of Moldova, etc.).
The forms of contemporary irregular or smaller armed conflicts are varied. Specialists identify several of them as guerilla, or national-liberation wars, terrorist acts, which are actually acts of violence carried out by the minority against the majority, and irregular secret armed actions by special military units (special forces) carried out before regular military operations are launched, at the initial stage of such operations or parallel with them.
In real life contemporary smaller wars are not waged in their pure form; depending on the economic, social, political, ideological, and military context, they intertwine and complement each other. Acts of terror, for example, have an important, though not dominating, role to play in the secret armed struggle of the special services.
As a form of contemporary armed confrontation, international terrorism has several specific features which set it apart from other forms of smaller wars.
■ First, terrorists employ tactics which contradict the norms of international military law; they consistently use force against non-combatants. In peacetime, they kill or wound civilians, making them the main target against which force is used.
■ Second, destabilization has an indirect impact, and in the final analysis, this is more important than the direct impact of the terrorist acts. Terrorism is intimately connected with the media, which augment the indirect impact many times over. As a result, contemporary terrorism is not
limited by geographical boundaries—there are only political and psychological limits. The media offer terrorists a virtual space, in which they can exert political and psychological pressure and, from time to time, achieve the desired results. Terrorist acts negatively affect the victims and those closest to them, and their effect is carried even further, to larger groups of people. The media can be used to breed uncertainty at the national or even international level, as well as lack of confidence in the continued stability of public life. This forces the political leaders of the countries that have experienced terrorism to respond to the destabilizing effect (more often than not the responses are slack and smack of connivance).
Third, because of its nature (its inhuman cruelty) terrorism will never become popular. Even if the state and the media fail to respond in a
clear and energetic manner, the people spontaneously and consistently reject terrorism and those behind it; acts of terror inevitably discredit violence and those who generate it. In fact, as a means of securing political support of at least part of the nation (to say nothing of the entire nation), terrorism is absolutely useless: it discredits its leaders and the violence they promote.
Fourth, since terrorism is a war against the state and since it recognizes no rules and refuses to distinguish between the civilian population and the professional army, it is waged against the entire population. As the scale of terrorist acts increases, together with the number of victims, terror develops into a war against all people irrespective of their race, nationality, age, and gender. This makes terrorism a crime against humanity.
International Terrorism is not a Clash of Civilizations
The end of the Cold War gave rise to a widespread discussion in the academic community, mainly in the West, about the nature of future wars and conflicts. Works by Samuel Huntington, director of the John M. Olin Institute for Strategic Research at Harvard University, caused quite a stir. The summer 1993 issue of Foreign Affairs carried his article, “The Clash of Civilizations?”, in which he wrote that, while the 20th century was an age of ideological clashes, in the 21st century the main conflicts would occur between civilizations or confessions. He developed this idea in his book, The Clash of Civilizations and the Remaking of World Order, published in 1996.1 He said that it was the cultural, rather than ideological, political, or economic differences that had emerged as the most important ones in the post-Cold War period. People all over the world begin to identify themselves with civilizations, rather than states or nations, because these differences between civilizations are the product of centuries. They will not soon disappear. “They are far more fundamental than differences among political ideologies and political regimes.”2 Huntington singles out Western, Confucian, Japanese, Islamic, Hindu, Slavic-Orthodox, Latin American, and possibly African civilizations and insists that in the 21st century they will develop into the dominating factor of world politics. The fault lines between civilizations will be the battle lines of the future, he writes. Because of the demographic explosion, cultural revival, and absence of a state able to rally the Muslim countries, Islam is the West’s most dangerous opponent. Samuel Huntington is convinced that the Western and Islamic civilizations have been involved in a war raging for 1,300 years and showing no signs of abating.
Huntington is obviously concerned with the West’s safety; the second serious threat to the West comes from Asia, China, in the first place. He associates it with the state of affairs in Asia and discipline as the key factor behind its economic success.
1 S. Huntington, The Clash of Civilizations and the Remaking of World Order, Simon & Schuster, New York, 1996.
2 S. Huntington, “The Clash of Civilizations?” Foreign Affairs, Summer 1993.
To illustrate his idea about the clash along the “fault lines separating civilizations,” Huntington points to the Caucasian and Balkan conflicts, that is, to the regions that at all times have been conflict-prone. In the past the conflicts were territorial and ethnic rather than civilizational: for centuries these regions have been populated by numerous ethnic groups living side by side on the same territory, interacting and intermingling. The conflicts were either smoothed over or smothered during the time the local nations belonged to rivaling empires. In fact, all local conflicts were not so much civilizational or religious—they were geopolitical conflicts. For example, after the Crusades the area knew no direct clashes between Christianity and Islam, while World Wars I and II, the Civil War in Russia, the wars between Iran and Iraq and between Iraq and Kuwait, the genocide in Cambodia and Ruanda, that is, the most appalling and bloody tragedies of the 20th century, occurred within the same civilization. Olivier Roi, a French expert in Islam, has written that “there is no war of civilizations.” He believes that “we are living in a period of transition with its specific problems and are witnessing a crisis of Islamic identity.” He added that “nearly all those involved in the terrorist acts in the United States spent some time in the West.” Therefore, he concludes, “we are not dealing with a clash of regions similar to the classical wars of the past. This is, rather, an internal crisis of the West.”3
It can be noted that, contrary to what Huntington says, the wars and conflicts within the same civilization, or even the same country, the same nation or between neighbors, not “along the fault lines separating civilizations,” proved to be the most devastating. We should add that “out of the 278 wars that occurred between 1480 and 1941, 78, or 28 percent, were civil wars. Between 1800 and 1941, there were three-fold more wars between states than civil wars. According to German academics, between 1945 and 1985, there were 160 armed conflicts in the world, 151 of which took place in the Third World. There were only 26 days of complete peace during these forty years. Between 25 and 35 million lives were lost.”4
On the other hand, today disturbances and violence are mostly associated with ethnic and ethnocon-fessional conflicts, the number and intensity of which are on the rise. These conflicts are not necessarily of a civilizational nature. Indeed, “the majority of 34 conflicts that took place in 1993 were caused by power struggles and territorial disputes. Obviously, in the near future local and regional conflicts of varying scope and violence will become the most likely form of settling territorial, ethnonational, religious, economic, and other disputes.”5 For example, the conflicts between the Georgians and Abkhazians, Georgians and Ossets, as well as between the Tamils and Singhalese or between the Hutu and Tutsi in Ruanda, cannot be described as civilizational.
From this it follows that “in the post-Cold War period and amid disintegration of the bipolar world we are often confronted with non-traditional conflicts, in which an aggressor is not necessarily the strongest and the largest side: disintegration processes are often started by an aggressive minority. The ‘strength of the weak’ is manifested in their ability to blackmail larger states and international organizations and impose on them their own ‘rules of the game.’ The international criminal cartels of drug dealers and arms traders are spreading to countries and regions; they criminalize politics and politicize the criminal world.”6
It should be said that many of the post-9/11 publications try to present international terrorism as a product of the division of the world into rich and poor countries, “the fault lines between which” run along civilization borders. These authors are convinced that this division makes “the clash of civilizations” inevitable: the North vs. the South; Christianity vs. Islam; the poor vs. the rich. This interpretation, which follows Huntington’s ideas, is based on the figures illustrating the wide gap that separates the developed post-industrial countries of the West and the Third World as far as their economies and standards of living are concerned. Until the gap is closed, and until the post-industrial states start doing their best to liquidate poverty in the Third World, the struggle of the destitute and the despairing against the rich and the
3 Quoted from: S. Shermatova, “Zapad pered vyborom,”Moskovskie novosti, No. 39, 25 September-1 October, 2001.
4 K.S. Gadjiev, Vvedenie v geopolitiku, Logos Publishers, Moscow, 2002, p. 408.
5 Ibid., p. 409.
6 Ibid., pp. 411-412.
privileged will go on and will develop into terror. Regrettably, the authors agreed that the struggle would go on under the green banner of Islam.
These predictions are far removed from reality. For over 50 years now the majority of the population of Central Africa and elsewhere has been living in appalling conditions, on the brink of extinction. Yet they have produced no terrorists, religious fanatics, or militants. The ETA and IRA terrorists were born in prospering and fairly developed European countries. “Money and a set of ideological postulates can attract recruits from among the poor and the rich; from among those who hate and those prepared to go to any lengths. Terrorism starts not where there is ‘real’ poverty, but where a feeling of poverty, injustice, and despondency is created deliberately. People must be told that they are poor and must be taught to hate. There is no absolute poverty; there is any number of countries where people live in much worse conditions than in the Arab world. Nobody came to them to explain or show them on TV that ‘you are exploited by the golden billion, you are poor and you deserve a better life.’ In this way people are given to understand that they are poor and oppressed. Terrorism stems from this understanding rather than from real poverty.”7
There is another example. It is common knowledge that over one million Azerbaijanians were driven from their homes by ethnic cleansing in Armenia and its military aggression supported by the Armenian separatists of Nagorny Karabakh of Azerbaijan, international terrorist groups and mercenary units to become refugees and internally displaced persons (forced migrants).8 Today they are living in the so-called tent camps. Despite the efforts of the Azerbaijani officials and international humanitarian organizations, the situation in the camps is awful; every year old people, women, and children whom Armenia’s aggression deprived of their homes and property die by hundreds. A new generation which has never known better conditions, proper homes, and property and is deprived of an adequate education is growing up there. Still, so far there has been not a single act of terror committed by these people; there is not a single terrorist among them.
Terrorism is an illness caused, to a certain extent, by uneven and disharmonious development of all spheres of social life, which creates conditions conducive to terrorism. It is people, groups, political circles that turn it into ideology and practice. “Those who cause specific conditions conducive to violence or offer moral justification and doctrines do not fight themselves as a rule. Those who translate ideology into violence are recruited from different circles... This is what happens in Sri Lanka and Ulster, and among the Latin American guerillas and other rank-and-file participants in all sorts of ‘movements,’ ‘revolutions’ and other forms of collective violence.”9
Those who believe that international terrorism is a product of despair of the poorest regions or poorest people are wrong. Indeed, in no state, be it authoritarian or democratic, can poor people shape politics; at best they are involved in the process of change, while struggling for survival.
On the other hand, if we do want to know who is fighting whom, we should bear in mind that those several scores of people who prepared and carried out the terrorist acts of 9/11 spent a considerable part of their lives in Western Europe and the United States. It was there that they learned how to organize and carry out terrorist acts and bought their instruments of terror. From this it follows that the struggle is unfolding within one and the same world; it is this world that breeds cruelty, fanaticism, and the willingness to carry out terrorist acts. This is true of the acts of terror in Moscow, Volgodonsk, Buynaksk, and other Russian cities; they were generated by the Russian environment, rather than by poverty and violence. Terrorism is neither a clash of civilizations, nor a war of the worlds. It is a phenomenon that “knows no boundaries and can exist everywhere. Global (large-scale) terrorism, which requires knowledge, skills, and resources, cannot exist without the rich world.”10
7 V.A. Tishkov, “Sotsial’no-kul’turniy aspect terrorizma,” Sotsial’nye ipsikhologicheskieproblemy bor’by s mezhdunar-odnym terrorizmom, Nauka Publishers, Moscow, 2002, pp. 22-31.
8 See: “Human Rights Questions.” Letter dated 25 October, 1996 from the Permanent Representative of Azerbaijan to the United Nations addressed to the Secretary-General [http://www.un.org/documents/ga/docs/51/c3/ac351-9.htm].
9 L.M. Drobizheva, E.A. Pain, “Sotsial’nye predposylki rasprostranenia ekstremizma i terrorizma,” Sotsial’nye ipsikhologicheskie problemy bor’by s mezhdunarodnym terrorizmom, pp. 39-59.
10 V.A. Tishkov, op. cit.
This proves that all civilizations can live side by side, that any theories about a “clash of civilizations” or about terrorism of the poor against the rich are groundless, that civilizational differences, as well as poverty and despair are merely fertile soil, not the eternal source of international terrorism. It is driven by the evil force of people (the number of whom is not large, after all) who exploit the sincere religious feelings and religious fanaticism of the youth, whom they push along the wrong path.11
Is There “Islamic Terrorism”?
Researchers are fond of using terms that make it much harder to produce a universal definition of terrorism. I have in mind such coinages as “superterrorism,”12 “special terror,” “special terrorism,” “special terrorist milieu,” and “special terrorist ideology.” By “special terrorism” these authors mean “cooperation between special services and terrorism,”13 which makes it much harder to clarify the problem: international documents interpret the fact of cooperation between special services and terrorists as “state terrorism.”
An article by Russian political scientist Gleb Pavlovskiy, which appeared in Nezavisimaia gaze-ta,14 is especially illustrative in this respect. While pointing out that the international organizations have officially recognized “attacks of suicide terrorists on the civilian population” a military crime and a crime against humanity, he writes: “New terrorism has been experimenting for a fairly long time with contemporary armaments by combining all types of impact on the contemporary technological structure to inflict maximum damage on the civilized countries.” Describing the suicide terrorists as “shakhids,” the author concludes: “The shakhid is a highly manageable and serially produced weapon.” In the Muslim world, however, the word “shakhid” is used in a positive and elevated meaning and is applied to a person who sacrificed his life for the sake of his country, his nation, or for any other lofty goal. Pavlovskiy’s identification of shakhids with suicide terrorists is, first, unethical and betrays his lack of respect for the Muslim world, and second, may create the impression that Islam is a religion of terror. This contradicts the meaning and philosophy of Islam, which is a religion of peace and has nothing in common with international terrorism.
I should say that the frequently used combination of the two words—Islamic terrorism—is fraught with opposition between religions and civilizations. Islam is one of the traditional world religions, which has shaped a specific civilization and culture with a spiritual, moral, political and legal system of its own. Throughout its history, Islam has acquired definite ideas about the relations between power and the individual based on tolerance, moderation, compromise, gradualness, and stability.15 The terms mentioned above cannot be applied to terrorists, who have neither religion, nor ethnic affiliation. The majority of the expert community shares this conviction: when writing about terrorists and their organizations operating under the banner of Islam they prefer to use the terms “Islamists” and “Islamist terrorist groups” to stress the difference between the followers of traditional Islam and radical or extremist groups. Many of the prominent Muslim figures share this conviction: “The phenomenon of these radical or extremist groups does not represent true Islam, but stems from a misinterpretation of the religion, and even heresy. ...Islam cannot be used for terrorist activity because of its peaceful elements.”16 V. Ustinov has written in this connection: “When assessing the nature of social conflicts, from which terrorism stems and on which it
11 See: G. Mirskiy, “Terakt na Manhattane—voyna tsivilizatsiy?” Nezavisimaia gazeta, No. 175, 20 September, 2001.
12 V. Orlov, A. Khlopkov, “Na povestke dnia—‘superterrorizm’,” Nezavisimoe voennoe obozrenie, 21 September, 2001.
13 M.M. Markov, Terrorizm kakglobal’naia ugroza i kak instrument mirovoypolitiki [http://www.politic.donetsk.ua/cgi-bin/politic/info/list.cgi?gr=terror&pg=0001 /2004.06.29/].
14 See: G. Pavlovskiy, “Ugroza, ot kotoroy ne zastrakhovan nikto,” Nezavisimaia gazeta, No. 215 (27б9), 9 October, 2002.
15 See: L.R. Sjukijainen, “O printsipakh i tseliakh gosudarstvennoy politiki v otnoshenii Islama,” Sotsial’nye ipsikholog-icheskieproblemy bor’by s mezhdunarodnym terrorizmom, pp. 32-38.
16 R. Paz, Is There an “Islamic Terrorism?” [http://www.ict.org.il/articles/isl_terr.htm /2004-06-29/].
develops (this is especially true of terrorism based on various interpretations of Islam or, as it is often incorrectly called, Islamic terrorism), it is wise to probe deeper into the religious factor, an important determinant of sociopolitical processes in Islamic societies.”17
The philosophy of Islam puts this in a nutshell as follows: “Help one another in kindness and charity, but do not cooperate in evil and enmity.” However, “the central notion, common to most of the Islamic movements and groups—those that carry out terrorism and political violence, and those that justify it and feed the atmosphere that promotes such activity—is that of being in a state of siege which calls for self defense. To the believers in this concept, the confrontation justifies the use of all means—particularly when these means are given religious legitimacy.”18 This explains why terrorists usurp fundamental Islamic concepts (jihad, taqfir, shakhid, etc.) to justify their acts of terror. This, however, can justify neither the terrorists allegedly acting under the banner of Islam, nor those experts, politicians, journalists, and academics who use Islamic terms to describe terrorists. I should say that while the former do this deliberately, the latter do this because of their ignorance of Islamic philosophy and the problems of terrorism (I regret to say that there are cases of deliberate misuse of such terms aimed at opposing Islam to the rest of the world).
It is wrong to apply Islamic terms to terrorists, first, because such usage is anti-Islamic; second, because it fans religious intolerance and hatred and, finally, because it sets civilizations against each other and confuses the public. As a result people start looking at Islam as a threat to the civilized world. This is a dangerous trend fraught with negative consequences.
Prof. Jansen of Netherlands, one of the leading experts in the problems of fundamentalism and radicalism has the following to say: “In a fiercely competitive society the dominant religion may preach that the greatest virtue is to love one’s neighbor. The religion of a group, which over the centuries has become marginalized, may, on the other hand, preach that God (Allah.—R.S.) has exclusively and explicitly chosen those who follow his commandments. This group may come to believe that it plays a central role in the history of God and his creation.”19 When writing about the nature of Islamic fundamentalism he says: “Islamic fundamentalism is both politics and religion. It has a dual nature. When it is analyzed as if it were a movement that has a political nature only, mistakes are made because fundamentalism is fully religion at the same time.”20
I should say that any religion has its share of extremism and radicalism. The conflict in Northern Ireland, which raged there in the latter half of the 20th century, was considered an exception for Western Europe: “It was a classical case of terrorism by an ethnic minority, whereby a provisional organization, the IRA, a tiny part of the Catholic minority, tried to ‘liberate’ the territory, the population of which did not want to be liberated,”21 wrote P. Wilkinson in his Terrorism & the Liberal State. This longest and bloodiest campaign organized in a contemporary liberal-democratic society revealed the problems provoked by terrorism. P. Wilkinson goes on to say: “Terrorism pushes the country closer to a civil war and complete anarchy.”22
According to V. Ustinov, during this period of violence in Northern Ireland one out of one hundred people living in Ulster was either killed or wounded (this means that one out of six families lost one of its members, either killed or wounded). During 30 years of terror, the IRA fighters killed or wounded over 38,000; between 1969 and 1984, the peak years, 2,400 people were killed.23 V. Ustinov wrote: “The years of violence divided society; this considerably reduced the possibility of negotiations and a compromise. The effect of hatred in society was as dangerous as the violence itself. Several generations were raised
17 V.V. Ustinov,Mezhdunarodniy opyt bor’by s terrorizmom: standarty ipraktika, Iurlitinform Publishers, Moscow, 2002,
p. 337.
18 R. Paz, Targeting Terrorist Financing in the Middle East [http://www.ict.org.il/articles/articledet.cfm?articleid=137 / 2004-06-29/].
19 Johannes JG Jansen, The Dual Nature of Islamic Fundamentalism, Cornell University Press, New York, 1977, pp. ix-xi.
20 Ibidem.
21 See: P. Wilkinson, Terrorism & the Liberal State, Second edition, MacMillan, Basingstoke and London, 1986, p. 164 (quoted from: V.V. Ustinov, op. cit., p. 326).
22 See: Ibid., pp. 90-91 (quoted from: V.V. Ustinov, op. cit.).
23 See: V.V. Ustinov, op. cit., p. 327.
during the years of conflict; all of them were poisoned by the atmosphere of intolerance and suspicion. The younger generations divided at an early age by their confessions became militarized. Even the dwelling quarters were divided into Protestant and Catholic by invisible borders.”24 The conflict in Northern Ireland had both political and obviously religious overtones: religious extremism and intolerance were the logical results. Despite this, none of the politicians, experts, or journalists applied religious terms to the IRA terrorists and never called the conflict “Christian terrorism,” “Catholic extremism,” “Christian fundamentalism,” etc.
It seems that in this case, as in the case of “Islamic terrorism,” we should not talk about terrorism of any specific confession (be it Islam, Christianity, or any other world religion). It should be described as the criminal activity of terrorist organizations or terrorist activity under the guise of one of the world religions.
I have already written that the media add to the efficiency of international terrorism. TV news about acts of violence, commentaries, and quotes from terrorists arouse fear in the common people. The same people, however, become convinced that society should answer these challenges, stem international terrorism, and prevent its victory over civilization. An analysis of the 9/11 events says that these terrorist acts, which claimed a multitude of lives and inflicted huge material and moral losses, were spearheaded not only against the United States. One of the authors wrote: “The terrorists wanted to provoke an American strike at the Islamic world so as to cause an unprecedentedly mighty wave of indignation at and hatred of America, not only in the Muslim countries, but also throughout the Third World.”25 This shows that the terrorist, allegedly Islamic, organizations are acting, to a great extent, against Islam.
A series of terrorist acts carried out in 2003 in Riyadh and Istanbul, which produced scores of killed and hundreds of wounded, showed beyond a doubt that the terrorists and their masterminds were indifferent to their victims’ confessions. It should be added that the monstrous crimes in Istanbul were carried out during the month of Ramadan, one of the holy Islamic periods when the faithful are expected to be charitable. In other words, terrorists acting allegedly under the banner of Islam attack not only other religions, but also their own Muslim religion, making Islam and the Muslim world their main victims.
Terrorist organizations started mushrooming in the mid-1980s, but this phenomenon has not yet been adequately studied. According to certain experts it was caused by a “confrontation of civilizations and deepening contradictions between the Islamic world and the West.” I think that there were other global factors behind this, one of them being the sending of Soviet troops to Afghanistan, an event that started many negative trends in mankind’s development. This is confirmed by the fact that many of the active terrorist groups, the notorious al-Qa‘eda in particular, were set up at that time.
History knows many examples of state terrorism. Terror and the methods it employed during the Cold War period acquired a new quality and new meaning. Many of the terrorist organizations were either supported by communist regimes or Western states, or took commands from them. The terrorist structures acting under the banner and in the name of Islam are rooted in the Afghan war. It is common knowledge that the West, the U.S., and the U.K. in the first place, regarded it as an instrument for destabilizing the Soviet Union. Radically minded people from the Muslim countries, as well as from America and Britain, who looked at socialism as a threat to Islam, were conscripted to the detachments of armed resistance (called “dushmans” by the Soviet press), which were about 30,000-strong. They were trained and armed by the American and British special services using drug money, among other sources.26 As a result, professional militants appeared in Afghanistan, while the war veterans became a force for carrying out acts of subversion and terror all over the world, including in the Muslim world.
When the Soviet Union withdrew its troops from Afghanistan, the dushmans (later known as mo-jahedin) moved into illegal international trade in drugs and weapons; they joined terrorist organiza-
24 See: V.V. Ustinov, op. cit., p. 327.
25 G. Mirskiy, op. cit.
26 See: M. Liebig, Strategicheskiy kontekst sovremennogo irreguliarnogo vedenia voyn [http://www.df.ru/~metuniv/con-sor/LIEBIG.html /2004-04-29/].
tions in the Middle East and fought in local wars all over the world. In 1988, Osama bin Laden set up al-Qa‘eda, an international terrorist organization, the backbone of which was made up of Afghan veterans, with the aim of deposing secular regimes in the Islamic countries in order to “restore a worldwide Muslim state.”27
Obviously, the upsurge of terrorist violence, appearance of new terrorist structures (religious-fundamentalist allegedly acting under the banner of Islam), and spread of international terrorism at the turn of the 21st century were mainly initiated by the special services of many countries under the conditions of bipolar rivalry. The Soviet military intervention speeded up proliferation of religious-fundamentalist ideas and radicalized the fundamentalist movements in many regions of the world.
In the post-Cold War period when the socialist bloc had fallen apart, international terrorism continued spreading, spurred on by the global changes all over the world:
■ Geopolitical and geostrategic rivalry among many countries;
■ The growth and strengthening of radical-national, religious-fundamentalist, and separatist movements and the emergence of several conflict-ridden regions;
■ The escape of a considerable number of terrorist organizations from under the control of their sponsor states; the emergence of uncontrolled armed detachments formed by unemployed professional fighters who used to carry out special state missions during the Cold War;
■ The emergence of new states with unfounded territorial claims against their neighbors, prepared to realize them by force, etc.
27 Iu. Gavrilin, L. Smirnov, Sovremenniy terrorizm: sushchnost, tipologia, problemy protivodeystvia, Knizhniy mir Publishers, Moscow, 2003, p. 26.
TERRORISM IN CHECHNIA: DEFINITION OF THE PHENOMENON AND ITS EXPLANATION
Sergey MARKEDONOV
Ph.D. (Hist.), head, Department of Ethnic Relations, Institute of Political and Military Analysis (Moscow, Russian Federation)
UA yf uch has been written about terrorism;
albeit a phenomenon that seems to have been studied in detail, it remains sinister, enigmatic, irrational, and defying complete understanding.”1 It is hard to deny this opinion of
1 G.I. Mirskiy, “Drakon vstaet na dyby,” Posev, No. 7, 2003, p. 14.
prominent Russian Orientalist Georgy Mirskiy: it can be applied both to the theoretical-methodological side of the phenomenon and to a case study of terrorism in Chechnia. In the past ten years the concept of terrorism has been closely associated with Chechnia; this definition, as well as the much more recent coinage, counter-terrorist operation, have been accepted by the Russian expert community
