Current opinion

The trouble with words

by Bernard KENNEDY

“Turkey always cooperates against all kinds of terrorism because Turkey is top of the list of the countries which suffer from terrorism. In the past, when we tried to explain what a big threat terrorism was, the world did not show the proper interest. But after the September 11 incident, the world understood how dangerous terrorism was. Now there is major cooperation… For as long as you go on making distinctions between ‘my terrorist’ and ‘other people’s terrorist’, you cannot succeed in defeating terrorism. So everybody should cooperate in the fight against terrorism without making any distinction... Our government comes out against all forms of terrorism. We vigorously condemn these acts, regardless of their aim or who they are carried out by.”

These were the comments made by Foreign Minister Abdullah Gül in his home town of Kayseri on July 7, as news of the latest London bombings came in. Similar remarks have been made over the years by many commentators and politicians, and there is little doubt that the majority of Turkish citizens would subscribe to them. The message is: Ankara is equally opposed to all varieties of terrorism, but does not feel this is always true of other states. A week later Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdoğan made very similar remarks, and went on to complain that the British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC) and the British news agency Reuters “describe the PKK terrorist organisation as a ‘militia’”. He called on the world media to be “objective”.

What is terrorism?

Avoiding the words “terrorism” and “terrorist” is not getting any easier, but it probably remains less difficult than defining them satisfactorily. One academic definition contains no less than 22 elements. Key issues which may require clarification are the perpetrator (an independent group, an individual, a state, a state-affiliated group?), the nature of the action (violence against people? against property?), objectives and motives (to frighten a population, or part of a population? to discredit a government? to draw attention to an otherwise unheard cause? to exacerbate ideological divisions? to provoke a war?), the target (innocent victims? non-combatants, however defined? a state, as indicated in a proposed 1937 League of Nations definition? the status quo?) and the legitimacy of the action (What is the difference between a campaign of terrorism and a war - international or internal - in which civilian casualties are inevitable or deliberately inflicted? What makes a “War on terrorism” a war and terrorism just terrorism?).

In November 2004 a UN panel defined terrorism, rather unconvincingly, as: "Any action intended to cause death or serious bodily harm to civilians, non-combatants when the purpose of such act, by its nature or context, is to intimidate a population or compel a government or an international organization to do or to abstain from doing any act."

A long-standing and ingenious proposal made many years ago is to define terrorism as the “peacetime equivalent of a war crime”. However, war crimes are generally committed by the powerful or temporarily powerful against their captives or against the people of the countries they have invaded. So for obvious reasons this definition is unlikely to become mainstream. Should all violence against prisoners, for example, be classed as terrorism?

Linguistic shifts

The debate on the use of the terms among journalists dates back at least as far as the campaigns of Palestinians and some West European extremist movements which began around 1970. Given the lack of a satisfactory agreed definition, many journalists prefer to speak of assassinations, massacres, (suicide, car) bomb attacks, armed raids, hi-jacks, hostage-takings, gunmen, militia and so on. They are inclined to conclude that “terrorist” is just another word for “enemy” and “terrorism” a word for whatever the enemy does. They do not wish to become part of the politician’s battle for linguistic territory.

The flexibility or manipulability of the words becomes all the more apparent when it is recalled that they were first widely employed, at least in English, to refer (a) to the policies of Robespierre during the French revolution (and hence arguably to what is today referred to as “state terrorism”), and (b) to Israelis fighting against the British in Palestine in 1947. In retrospect, Zealots, Assassins, Russian anarchists and Fenians have also been labelled terrorists in Western popular writing and academic syllabi – not, perhaps, without some ulterior motive of rooting present-day political violence in the Middle East, Russian leftism and Irish nationalism.

Turkish thinking

Turkey legally defines terrorism as any act making use of pressure, force, violence, intimidation, duress, coercion or threat carried out by a person or persons who are members of an organisation which has the purpose of changing the characteristics of the Republic as stated in the Constitution or its political legal social, secular and economic order, of spoiling the indivisible unity of state, country and nation, of endangering the existence of the Turkish state and Republic, of weakening, destroying or seizing state authority, of doing away with basic rights and freedoms or of upsetting the internal and external security of the state, public order or public health.

This definition highlights a wide range of motives, while insisting that the perpetrator must be a member of an organisation. “Membership of an illegal organisation” has been the basic catch-all terrorist offence, requiring prosecutors to offer only minimal proof either of the existence of an organisation or of membership. To be convicted under the Anti-Terrorism Act (introduced in 1991 to replace Cold War era anti-communist provisions of the Penal Code), it was not necessary to commit a violent act, or to commit any offence at all, and propaganda was also outlawed. All this changed only in 2003.

The PKK phenomenon

Turkey has witnessed a wide variety of non-state ideological violence from the intensive assassinations, bombings and massacres of the “pre-1980” era to the long list of diplomatic assassinations and airport attacks involving extremist Armenian and Greek organisations between the 1970s and the 1990s, from the killing of 22 by gunmen at the Neve Shalom synagogue in Istanbul in 1986 to the Sivas hotel massacre of 37 in 1993, from the multiple assassinations of secularist writers and academics between 1990 and 2002 to the al Qaeda-linked Istanbul bombings of November 2003, from hostage-taking by pro-Chechnyan militants to the hundreds of killings carried out by the Hizbullah organisation in Southeast Turkey mostly in the early 1990s, the same organisation’s later orgy of torture and killing and its assassination of Diyarbakır police chief Gaffar Okan in 2001.

In political, media and public parlance in Turkey, the word “terrorist” has nevertheless come to be used primarily to denote Kurdish nationalist PKK militants or assumed militants, whether or not they are actually guilty of any offence, violent or non-violent, against a civilian or non-civilian target. The PKK has, and to some extent continues to fight, a guerrilla war against Turkish forces in Southeast Turkey. According to official sources, the war caused 30,000 deaths between 1984 and 2001, of which 6,000 were those of soldiers, police and village guards, 5,000 those of civilians and 19,000 those of militants themselves. The PKK has from time to time been or been held responsible for acts of violence in urban and tourist areas as well – such as the Istanbul Tuzla train station bomb attack of 1994 which killed five military cadets, and the Istanbul Mavi Çarşı molotoff cocktail attack of 1999 in which 13 people including shoppers died.

Clash of definitions

Aside from the PKK, its alleged alter egos and related organisations, Ankara has made efforts to have the DHKP/C, successor to the former Dev-Sol, listed as a terrorist organisation on the international plane. The DHKP/C has been held responsible for several fatal incidents in major cities including suicide bombings and other surprise attacks on members of the security forces, police stations and similar targets. The suspects in the 1996 Sabancı Center shootings are also linked to the DHKP/C. But there is no doubt that Foreign Minister Gül’s comments earlier this month, like Erdoğan’s, were pronounced with the PKK in mind.

The government and Turkish public opinion regard the failure of the US to act against the PKK in northern Iraq as a direct contradiction of its declared policy of opposing international terrorism. This sense of contradictions stems from the fact that Ankara and Washington are using the same word with implicitly different definitions - or at least different connotations. In addition, the international denouncement of the PKK (and its recent alter ego KADEK) as a terrorist organisation may mean more to Turkey – with its organisation-based approach to defining terrorism - than it does to other parties.

Beyond strategy

In less emotive language, it is natural for governments to wish to collaborate with other states against those whom they perceive or declare to be their enemies - particularly where those concerned have a multinational character. But it is also natural that other governments may or may not regard the enemy in question as an equal threat to themselves. If these governments do share the same enemy, one would expect them to agree to cooperate, unless some major disagreement emerges over the form of the proposed collaboration. Otherwise, however, cooperation is likely to depend on whether the foreign government finds the source of the threat in question conducive to its own interests, whether it believes that its cooperation will be reciprocated when it faces a different threat of its own, and/or whether it wishes to use its cooperation as a bargaining chip in connection with some other goal or goals.

Against this background, aside from the general inequality in power between Ankara and the West, an asymmetric situation appears to exist in which Turkey feels more threatened by al-Qaeda than the US or Europe feels threatened by the PKK. Strategists can decide how to play their cards according to such considerations. But once the word “terrorism” has been used, moral outrage sets in on all sides, and the next move becomes less predictable.

(DIPLOMAT  -  July 2005  -  Ankara)