Europe Don't Count Them Out

By Frederick Painton

In a swiftly changing Europe, the decline of terrorism from its bloody peaks of more than a decade ago would seem inevitable. Extremist ideologies are fading, after all, so recruiting militants to fight for anachronistic or lost causes ought to be growing more and more difficult. Besides, notes Paul Wilkinson, director of the Research Institute for the Study of Conflict and Terrorism in London, "it is no longer fashionable for young people on the left to see terrorism as glamorous and romantic. It's regarded as a futile gesture." Yet the virus is proving surprisingly resistant.

In Britain last week the outlawed Irish Republican Army, as part of its stepped-up campaign beyond the borders of Northern Ireland, assassinated Ian Gow, a friend of Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher and a Conservative Member of Parliament, with a bomb that wrecked his Montego car in the driveway of his home. Three days earlier in West Germany, the Red Army Faction almost succeeded in killing Hans Neusel, State Secretary of the Interior Ministry and Bonn's top antiterrorist expert, in a similar attempt. The actions demonstrated that while their numbers may be dwindling, both the I.R.A. and the R.A.F. do not need popular support, or even broadly based groups of sympathizers, to remain murderously effective.

Across Europe no terrorist group matches the I.R.A. in its ability to sustain a campaign of deadly violence. Although the level of I.R.A. attacks today is only 20% of that of the 1970s, some 200 to 300 I.R.A. Provisionals are still striking at targets in Ulster, Britain and beyond in an effort to sway public opinion. Backed by 2,000 supporters who furnish hideouts and surveillance, the Provisionals are using a wide variety of weapons -- automatic rifles, pistols, letter bombs and mortars, as well as the terrorist's special, the Czechoslovak-made plastic explosive Semtex.

Two weeks ago, a Roman Catholic nun was killed along with three Ulster / policemen in a land mine explosion in County Armagh. Four days earlier a bomb exploded at the London Stock Exchange, causing considerable damage. In June eight people were wounded when a similar device went off in the Carlton Club, a Conservative Party bastion near London's St. James's Palace. In May two Australian lawyers were gunned down in the town square in Roermond, in the Netherlands, apparently mistaken for off-duty British soldiers.

The I.R.A.'s biggest score, though, was Gow, 53, Thatcher's parliamentary private secretary during her first four years in office and a passionate defender of Britain's constitutional ties to Northern Ireland. Although Gow's name was on a hit list of some 100 persons, the M.P. continued to give his address and number in the phone book. Under the cover of darkness, police deduced, a 4 1/2-lb. Semtex charge was attached to the bottom of Gow's auto while it was parked outside his 16th century home in the village of Hankham, in Sussex, 60 miles from London. The bomb exploded seconds after Gow got behind the wheel to drive to call on a constituent.

By comparison with the I.R.A., which thanks to Libya's Muammar Gaddafi remains well armed, West Germany's Red Army Faction is modestly equipped. The group's ranks are divided, and it is demoralized by the loss of the sanctuary that was offered to terrorists until a year ago by the Communist regimes of Eastern Europe. Still, the R.A.F.'s hard-core leadership of 15 to 20 people retains considerable destructive force. Over the past five years the R.A.F., a successor to the feared Baader-Meinhof gang, has attempted to assassinate six leading West German figures -- and succeeded four times. Eight months ago, the group killed Deutsche Bank chief executive Alfred Herrhausen, a personal adviser to Chancellor Helmut Kohl, by exploding a bomb along a street as Herrhausen's armored Mercedes-Benz 500SE limousine passed by. Antiterrorist expert Neusel escaped that fate only because his chauffeur was on holiday: Neusel was driving and the blast ripped through the passenger side of his BMW.

The prospect of a united Germany may be fueling the R.A.F.'s latest violence. A five-page letter to the press following the attack on Neusel decried the emergence of a "greater Germany pursuing the same goals and imperial plans as Nazi Fascism." The apparent anti-unification campaign follows the arrests of 10 R.A.F. operatives in East Germany in June. Three were released on legal technicalities, but six have been handed over to West German authorities, and one is in an East German prison. At a press conference in East Berlin, Interior Minister Peter-Michael Diestel confirmed that well- known terrorists like the notorious Carlos (real name: Ilyich Ramirez Sanchez) and Abu Daoud, a leader of the Palestinian terrorist group Black September, were frequent visitors to East Germany under the ousted regime of Erich Honecker.

Despite the flare-ups in Britain and West Germany, experts believe the threat of homegrown terrorism in Western Europe is receding. In Italy the Red Brigades, once a veritable scourge, have not mounted an attack in more than two years. In France, Action Directe, a far-left extremist movement, appears to have been crushed. Experts warn, however, that a new menace may be looming: the ethnic and religious conflicts springing out of the dissolution of the Soviet empire could give rise to a new strain of the terrorist virus. The Soviets appear to be so worried about that possibility that they are sending two retired KGB generals to London this autumn to attend a conference on terrorism.

With reporting by Anne Constable/London and Rhea Schoenthal/Bonn (Article does not appear in all issues)