Short Listing Terrorism

by John Thompson

July 5, 2002

There is nothing like slamming the barn door shut after the horses have disappeared over the horizon. It is unfair to complain that a government has failed to be prescient, but there are no grounds to accept an absence of common sense -- or courage.

Over ten months after the attacks of September 11^th, and eight months after introducing tough new regulations aimed at fighting domestic support for terrorism, Solicitor General Lawrence MacAulay finally listed seven groups on which the full weight of the law would descend… a mere seven groups out of the dozens that are here.

The seven groups include Al Qaeda, and six of the groups that are a part of its confederacy, all of which come from North Africa. The Egyptian group Al Gama’a al-Islamiyya was listed -- the Sikh Babbar Khalsa, group which killed over 150 Canadians was not. The Group islamique armé from Algeria was listed, but there was no mention of the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam, who used funds raised in Canada to kill tens of thousands of people. Al-Ittihad Al-Islam (another group with a minor Canadian presence) was listed — but there was no mention of Hamas or Hisbollah. There was no mention of any of the dozens of other groups that have appeared in Canada.

Ottawa’s new regulations to counter terrorism were largely sensible. Actual terrorists are usually rare — people who are willing to murder other people are not all that common in any population. Most people associated with terrorist groups are fervent supporters who, while unwilling to become murderers themselves, will happily support them. These supporters provide the murderers with money and documents, talent spot likely prospects and start to woo them, expound the radical ideologies that the terrorists use for their tedious self-justifications, and may even gather intelligence and materials for them.

Only a very few terrorist groups operate without front organizations in which their supporters congregate. Some fronts are simple loose networks of sympathetic individuals that are integral to a terrorist group itself; others are large complex international bodies that can control political fronts (to expound on the terrorist’s ideology while sometimes going through sham exercises in hand-wringing about ‘the violence on both sides’), charities, corporations and businesses, and so on. Ottawa’s new regulations were intended to hit the supporters and front organizations and thus hobble the terrorists’ abilities to operate.

The new regulations would use fines, confiscation and imprisonment to shut down the support groups that back terrorism, and contained a number of long overdue measures. Alas, there was a fatal flaw in the plan from the very start.

With the exception of a handful of minor ideological leftovers from the old Radical Left and the even more anachronistic Radical Right, contemporary terrorist groups draw most of their support from particular ethno-cultural groups. Terrorists and their supporters also tend to seek control of such groups and will claim to represent everyone in it. To underscore that claim, they may even seek to dominate cultural life in that community by controlling temples and Mosques, creating scores of associations, floating their own newspapers, etc. Also, those institutions and individuals who oppose them may be attacked.

There is a long list of Canadian Sikhs who have been intimidated, tortured and killed for their opposition to the militants of the Babbar Khalsa and its related groups. The failure to list the Sikh militants is a fundamental betrayal of some of our bravest citizens. Tamils who have taken a contrary line to the LTTE’s fronts have likewise suffered for doing so and the majority of Tamils were intimidated a long time ago.

So why did Ottawa chicken out, and not name all the terrorist groups whose fronts deserve to be curtailed? The answer is an easy one in a country that likes to think of itself as a multicultural nation. Sometimes, the militants can deliver votes (especially if one doesn’t look too closely at the voters’ list); they can also raise a squawk which might mean that a politician could be accused of — gasp! — ‘Racism’. And the supporters of terrorist groups are always ready to throw that charge.

Thus it is best to play it safe and not list groups that could summon up the usual suspects in a show of indignity, and hope that nobody notices the quiet voices pleading for help for once.

The war against terrorism demands that governments get some backbone. Sometimes, Canada’s political spine seems to be made out of custard sauce-- soft, yellow and runny.

John Thompson is President of the Mackenzie Institute which studies political instability and terrorism. He can be reached at: mackenzieinstitute@bellnet.ca