When Terrorists Become Respectable

By Gerald Clarke

Many of you who are here in this Assembly hall were [once]considered terrorists.

In his speech to the U.N. General Assembly last week, P.L.O. Leader Yasser Arafat was trying to make a propaganda point, seeking to remind many Third World delegates that they too were once considered outlaws by much of the world. His statement was not merely rhetorical. Like Arafat, many of his listeners had in fact once been hunted men--and had hunted other men themselves. Terrorism is universally repugnant to standards of human decency, but in the past 25 years, sadly enough, it has been essential to the birth of many of the world's now sovereign nations.

By definition, terrorists are people who use indiscriminate violence as a means of achieving a political goal. To the victims of the violence--most recently the Israelis, who have suffered through years of wanton attacks by Palestinian bombers and gunmen--terrorists are callous, cowardly murderers preying on innocent women and children. For their part, terrorists usually present themselves as revolutionaries, guerrillas and freedom fighters. They defend the use of violence as the necessary tactic of downtrodden peoples seeking to combat oppressive or colonial governments. In the eyes of their followers, the terrorists' successful use of violence often adds to, rather than detracts from their claim to respectability. Thus it is quite possible, if an independent Palestinian state is ever established, that statues of Arafat will some day be erected in the plazas of Nablus, like the plaques and statues of Eamon de Valera in Ireland and Emiliano Zapata in Mexico. The fact that the leader of the P.L.O. appeared at the U.N. showed that it is already becoming respectable in the eyes of much of the world. "Respectability depends on whose side you're on," says Oxford Historian Alastair Buchan. "To the Turks, Lawrence of Arabia was a terrorist."

Oppressed peoples have often turned to violence as the first step in their fight for nationhood. If it were not for the guerrilla war carried out by the Irish Republican Army, for example, the Republic of Ireland might never have gained its independence. The unsavory reputation of the I.R.A. did not prevent its onetime leader, Sean MacBride, from receiving the Nobel Peace Prize last month for his subsequent crusade for human justice in Amnesty International.

In one of the bloodiest campaigns of terror in a bloody century, the Algerians forced the French to withdraw from North Africa in 1962. "My brothers, do not kill only, but mutilate your adversaries on the public highway," said one terrorist paper in 1956. "Pierce their eyes. Cut off their arms and hang them." F.L.N. militants took the words to heart, striking at the French, both in Algeria and in France itself, and at Algerian Moslems who refused to cooperate. In 1957 the F.L.N. murdered 300 residents of the Kabylia region whom they suspected of cooperating with a rival group. The French vowed never to talk with such murderers, but both sides eventually sat across a negotiating table at Evian-les-Bains.

A leader of the Mau Mau terrorist campaign against the British in Kenya now sits in the Cabinet of President Jomo Kenyatta, and the Mau Mau is officially regarded as a heroic freedom movement.

Ironically, Israel itself might not exist today had it not been for terrorists. The Irgun Zvai Leumi and the Stern Gang, two militant Jewish groups of the '30s and '40s, pressured the British to give up their mandate over Palestine through bombs and assassinations and tried to force the Arabs out through simple murder. Lord Moyne, the British administrator for the Middle East, was killed in 1944 in Cairo by the Stern Gang, which also assassinated Swedish Count Folke Bernadotte, the U.N. mediator in Palestine, in 1948. The most infamous act of all was the murder by the Irgun and Stern Gang of 254 Arabs in the village of Deir Yassin in 1948. David Ben-Gurion's Haganah, the largest of the Jewish fighting groups at the time, was never guilty of such acts, but it did cooperate for long periods with both the Irgun and the Stern Gang.

"Our enemies called us terrorists, our friends patriots," wrote Menachem Begin, head of the Irgun, in words that could be used by any terrorist at any time. Begin has found his past associations no handicap in Israel; he now sits in the Knesset as leader of the opposition Likud bloc. Another Irgun member, Arie Ben-Eliezer, served as deputy speaker of the Knesset, and Nathan Yellin-Mor, a leader of the Stern Gang, won a seat in the Israeli parliament only a few months after the murder of Count Bernadotte.

What makes terrorism respectable? The main criterion is success. Algeria's Foreign Minister Abdelaziz Bouteflika is currently president of the U.N. General Assembly partly because terrorism got its way in Algeria. If the French had been able to crush the F.L.N., he would probably be either dead or in prison. None of this should be cited in defense, let alone in praise of terror--only in deference to a terrible reality.

To be truly successful, terrorist groups, which usually start as a small number of dedicated zealots, must, in any case, eventually choose between keeping to their strategy of violence or modifying it to expand their base of political support. "A [revolutionary] group cannot achieve legitimacy until it gives up terrorism," argues Harvard Government Professor Michael Walzer. "Conversion is always possible, but it requires a formal or informal renunciation of the tactics of terrorism."

Thus, because it was felt that he had not given up the murderous bent that helped Cyprus gain independence from the British in the '50s, the world was appalled by the naming of Nikos Sampson, a gunman for the notorious EOKA movement, as Cyprus' President earlier this year. When the now ousted Greek military junta installed Sampson in place of Archbishop Makarios, it took the first step on its path to ruin. Sad though it may seem, the world appears willing to forget--if not forgive--most crimes of terrorism and to eventually honor those it once called criminal. It must first, however, have some assurance that the terrorist has, to quote French Historian Philippe Vigier, "sheathed his knife" and washed the blood off his hands. .Gerald Clarke

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