Overseas Terrorism in Canada, Sikh, Tamil, Islamic terrorists

Normally, terrorism and insurgency are small group forms of warfare, undertaken for political objectives, and usually initiated by leaders who use violence to seek influence, or to express themselves. They know no limitations to the violence they intend to commit — except through the normal limitations of their means and opportunities. Terrorist groups tend to be covert, as long as they are small, and rely heavily on the normal protections for individuals within the law, while operating inside democratic nations.

The relationship between terrorists and the societies they attack is normally described as "asymmetrical", in that the terrorists might lack the resources and power of a nation-state, but they have a wealth of targets and opportunities at their disposal. By contrast, the frustrated agents of the nation-states are hemmed in by regulations, laws, individual rights, jurisdictions and procedures, and thus have difficulty in applying their power, even when they manage to identify their targets. While the terrorist’s desire to appear heroic is partly filled by the enormous difference in latent power between him and a nation-state, in terms of useable power, the advantage normally lies with the terrorist — until he is identified and cornered. In short, the terrorist is no hero, rather he is a bully who can only operate because of the inability of his target to fight him effectively.

In the early 1970s, dozens of terrorist groups appeared around the world. Most of them were pitted against a single government, and drew most of their support from inside a single country -- although many of them did draw support from the Soviet Union or its proxies and did cooperate with each other at times. Still, by the early 1990s, groups like the Red Brigades in Italy or Action Direct in France had virtually vanished. The survivors, and the groups that have developed in the 1990s, have assumed additional characteristics. These include:

• Flexible organizations and networking: The rigid cell structure of classical insurgency is too vulnerable to modern police and intelligence agencies. Instead, the most survivable structure consists of a loose "network" style of tenuously connected cells, where individuals with a common background (usually derived from ethnic identity) and some shared experiences can form and reform as required. The al Qaeda network is an example of this, although it rather foolishly developed a central node and a semi-rigid planning structure in Afghanistan under the presumption that the Taliban control of the region guaranteed its safety. Elsewhere in the Middle East, these trends are demonstrated by the rise of groups such as Hamas and Islamic Jihad which supplanted rigid older groups like the Abu Nidal Organization. These networks use a mélange of semi-independent cells, fronts and sympathetic organizations that communicate with each other and exchange resources. Instead of a rigid pyramidal structure, hierarchies tend to be flatter, or shallower, which results in quicker response time to threats and opportunities. Also, without a definitive leadership structure, gathering intelligence on them becomes much more difficult.

• Redundancy in fundraising and political arms: The strength of any international terrorist group depends on its funding and political fronts, and they must be protected by forming loose networks rather than a single organization. For example, the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam has one main international front organization — the World Tamil Movement — but it spins off dozens of satellite groups in every host country, and some groups will use names that betray no hint of their origin at all. This allows the illusion of a broad-band of community activism when dozens of social, student, human-rights, religious, and business groups start campaigning for a particular purpose without any overt reference to the main organization. Fundraising is equally dispersed, with dozens of independent legitimate, quasi-legitimate and illegal operations all being used to raise money, rather than one big single entity that might be vulnerable to legal and civil action.

• International fundraising techniques: The terrorist groups of the late 1960s and early 1970s depended heavily on a combination of bank-robbery, hostage taking for ransom, and foreign sponsorship to pay for their activities. However, the first two activities became increasingly risky for the perpetrators (especially given the huge improvements in handling hostage situations that developed in the 1970s). Surviving groups are those that diversified their fundraising activities by taking advantage of their exile/immigrant communities in the Western world, and who turned to organized crime. The larger communities could be used as a base and a protective shield for a plethora of enterprises ranging from human trafficking, narcotics, extortion and "war taxes", business and immigration fraud, counterfeiting, money laundering, and so on. Terrorist groups also utilize these communities to manipulate host governments in the West to provide them with tax dollars to support "cultural" and "social" activities carried out by front organizations. Moreover, by hiding behind cultural, social, and human rights organizations, a terrorist network can deter or delay unwelcome attention from the authorities in a host country.

• A claim to exclusive representation: As the terrorist normally craves leadership and influence, it is almost inevitable that he will try to eliminate (literally or otherwise) all rival sources of influence within the community he claims to lead. First to go are usually those who represent more moderate perspectives (and who thus deny the ‘legitimacy’ of the terrorists’ emotional preference for violence); second are potential rival terrorists who refuse to be subordinated. It should be pointed out that this trait existed earlier among ‘national liberation’ movements; largely as the terrorists were competing for a chance to form a government after winning their struggle. For example, much of the violence attendant in the struggle against Apartheid came out of the rivalry between the African National Congress and the Pan African Congress; and between the ANC and the Zulus — who refused to follow a political movement that they did not lead.

• An attraction to organized crime: As the main purpose of a terrorist group is to confront political authority, raising money is usually — in the early stages — a secondary activity for all its necessity. However, as the terrorist group is already engaged in illegal activities anyway, generating revenues through organized criminal activities means no real additional weight of punishment (the old British expression about how one may as well be hung for stealing a sheep as a lamb comes to mind). Moreover, activities such as trafficking in narcotics and contraband represent an additional means of undermining the authorities. For their part, organized criminals find that insurgents can, in the latter’s quest for authority of their own, sometimes shelter their activities. The relationship between terrorism and organized crime can become blurred, and many insurgent groups have slowly evolved into criminal societies with the passage of years.

• Geographical dispersion: The leading terrorist groups in the world today, the Tamil Tigers and the Islamic Fundamentalists, have extensive global networks built up not just in their respective homelands, but also dispersed among immigrant communities throughout the Western World. Whereas the groups of the 1970s usually restricted themselves to one or two countries, the modern terrorist who is fleeing from an outraged authority in one country can hide himself among people with an identical ethno-cultural background in a dozen other nations — a result of new immigration patterns in the aftermath of the Second World War.

• Global communications: The computer age has allowed a revolution in communications, with international direct dialing, e-mail and the web, electronic banking and much more. While shared experience, occasional face to face meetings, and traditional social interactions are still vital, they are no longer essential for the running of a terrorist network. Indeed, given the billions of messages fired around the world every day, it may be that electronic meetings are sometimes safer from the attention of the authorities than physical ones.

• Increasingly violent ideologies: The terrorist groups of the 1970s tended to view undecided populations as a group from which support could be drawn as the inevitable revolution (according to the Marxist theory) approached. In a lesser sense, they often looked for public sympathy, and understood that frightening everyone was at least counter-productive. Contemporary groups tend to be much more bloody-minded, with mindsets that divide the world into the enlightened/destined-for-salvation "us," and the unenlightened/disposable "them". Aum Shinri Kyo, Timothy McVeigh, and al Qaeda respectively saw the general population of the Western world as doomed, hopelessly compromised or as the enemy itself.

• Expanded target lists: The essence of terrorism includes its seeming randomness and talent for searching out weakness. The Provisional Wing of the IRA considered "legitimate military targets" to include soldiers on leave in Europe; the wives and children of soldiers; ceremonial parades where tourists are present; a Remembrance Day Ceremony; and recruiting booths at trade fairs. Latin American death squads in countries that had been bedeviled by guerrillas have seldom bothered to hunt armed insurgents in the jungle when there were — for example — unarmed union organizers, schoolteachers, nuns, peasants, or irritating journalists to murder. The Islamic Fundamentalists tend to be even less discriminating.

• Assured Indentity: Modern terrorist groups tend to establish a clear modus operandi that precludes the need to send communiqués. Older groups used to send letters to the media to describe why they had committed their actions, placing their deeds in an ideological framework while usually blaming the authorities or the target for the terrorists’ actions, and to seek publicity. Modern groups often do not bother because the manner of their actions and selection of targets speaks for itself. Moreover, many of them have no wish to communicate with their target at all. However, in some cases, an insurgent group may be competing for influence and prestige in another audience altogether. For example, sundry Palestinian groups might not bother to send a communiqué to the Israelis after committing an attack, except that status and influence inside much of the Palestinian community depends on a demonstrated ability to harm the Israelis, and it is vitally important to claim credit for an attack to this audience.

Except for a few highly specialized single interest groups (such as the Animal Liberation Front and related "ecotage" groups) virtually all modern terrorists have become international in scope and far more dangerous than the progenitor groups of the late 1960s and ‘70s. They are tougher, more resilient, less likely to be easily confronted, and far more likely to push roots deep into the broader community of their cultural compatriots. There is no easy way to deal with them.

The Marxist and quasi-Marxist mindsets that dominated the terrorists of the 1960s and ‘70s involved a revolutionary endgame in which the terrorists could both provoke a civil war, and then win it. They saw the authorities of their own nations as the government they sought to supplant, and — wherever they grew large enough — sought to create alternate institutions to rival those of the government — e.g. people’s courts and schools.

While most contemporary groups are usually (but not always) much less interested in the annoyances of providing responsible government, they still must sometimes provide institutions of their own within the community they wish to lead. Hizbollah and Hamas, for example, provide schools, orphanages, and hospitals in Lebanon and the Palestinian community. Other groups claim to provide such benefits — refugee relief and resettlement is a favorite cover for fundraising activities of the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam, while refugee/immigrant services is a major income earner for their front organizations inside Canada. While fundraising for these seemingly innocuous charitable organizations seems innocent enough in the credulous West, it should be remembered that — for a terrorist group — building a nursery or medical clinic is still a political act whose ultimate purpose is to further a terrorist’s cause and cement his hold on a community.

The threat posed by modern groups is also complex and can be difficult to anticipate. There are several levels of activity all of which can be used to develop an attack of some kind, including ones of a purely psychological nature. However, given the different styles of organization and size in modern terrorism, some broad assumptions can be safely made.

Level of Activity	Threats	Examples and Effects
Meta-Network	Well coordinated well planned attacks; with major loss of life and/or destruction; as networks of groups interact.	Al Qaeda: Attacks like those of September 11^th 2001. High risk of attacks with weapons of mass destruction.
Network	Extended campaigns of activity — often involving well trained cadres, suicide attackers, and/or sophisticated weaponry.	West Bank Palestinian Groups or the LTTE: Recruitment of suicide bombers, highly specialized cadres of expert bombers, etc.
Coordinated Cells	Shared resources and greater risk of significant events.	Groups like the IRA or ETA. Campaigns of attacks with car bombs, military style assaults on key sites, etc.
Autonomous Cells	Numerous episodes of low-level activity, such as arson and vandalism, some significant events are possible.	Animal Liberation Front: Typical activities from most terrorists groups around the world.
Autonomous Individuals	Lone attacks	Timothy McVeigh: Threats range from minor vandalism to truck bombs.
Political Arm	Influence Operations Propaganda Lobbying Lawsuits	Recruitment of supporters, alliances, and new members; Intimidation of politicians and media (especially in multicultural societies); creation of dissonance for neutral audiences.
Financial Arm	Criminal activities	Costs and social pathologies associated with narcotics, people smuggling and human trafficking, kidnapping for ransom, extortion rackets, etc.

The threat posed by the larger groups are even more considerable when one considers that individual cells, and members within them, are still capable of acting independently, but they have the advantage of the increased training offered by the resources of a larger group. Timothy McVeigh was an anomaly in that his one-man attack in Oklahoma City was the most destructive ever achieved by a lone bomber, but he was a trained (and decorated) soldier who also had access to the literature and experience of the American radical right; most solitary or small group terrorists are far more amateurish. The al Qaeda network has sought to generate hundreds of potential McVeighs with comparable levels of training and more focused motivation. Even if the al Qaeda meta-network is reduced, these autonomous cells and individuals will remain.

In considering the capabilities of terrorist groups, it is hard to consider their political and fundraising arms as being able to present threats in their own right. However, even in the mid-19^th Century, Chinese Triads supported the Taiping Rebels against the Manchu Dynasty by becoming involved in the opium trade. They recognized that the trade was both profitable to their cause, and destabilizing to the government: Mao and the Viet Cong copied the tactic with the added refinement that they could point to the social pathologies caused by narcotics and use them for propaganda value (drugs, naturally, were strictly forbidden in territories controlled by Mao’s Communists or the VC). Other criminal enterprises can be almost as lucrative as narcotics, but tend not to provide the same propaganda advantage.

The political arm of a terrorist group is vital for a number of purposes, but the development of a multicultural ethos in Western nations has let this element become capable of mounting attacks of its own. Throughout much of the Western World, political leaders and public commentators shy away from appearing to be critical of minority issues; and insurgent/terrorist groups press this advantage as far as they can. Supporters and front organizations for (by way of example) Hezbollah tell Western audiences that they must tolerate the Islamic organization’s intolerance. Supporters of the LTTE cling to the skirts of human rights organizations and insist that, in the Western spirit of multiculturalism, they are automatically entitled to our acceptance of their use of violence to create a separate ethnic state in Sri Lanka.

Politicians, journalists, and commentators who persist in their refusal to have flexible standards of toleration and morality can find themselves described as "Racists," get their offices and homes picketed by screaming mobs, and may even be sued for libel. Others find it easy to be flexible, and may then find themselves being rewarded for doing so by being given photo-opportunities, pride of place at cultural events, and campaign volunteers at election time. This might seem like a harmless threat, but it is easy to guess at the effects of a couple of more decades of such conditioning in Western political circles -- we shall be led by nothing but jellyfish if this sort of evolutionary shaping of the political process continues.

As a last point on the ideological side of a terrorist organization — if their message becomes pervasive enough, it may be that they inspire actions by unconnected individuals. In the late 19^th Century, lone assassins were often unconnected with the Anarchist movement, but took their message to heart as they went out to shoot political leaders and captains of industry. The Patriot Militias and other elements of the extreme American Right have, after decades of infiltration by police and private actors, adopted what they call "leaderless resistance," and expect individuals attracted by their ideological statements to act autonomously when the time comes. Likewise, Islamic Fundamentalism (like the Anarchists or various extreme nationalist groups have done in the past) is capable of getting disturbed individuals to act on their own too — as can be illustrated by Hesham Mohamed Modayet’s attack on people at an El Al ticket lineup in Los Angeles International Airport on July 4^th, 2002.

Remolding Culture

The best-selling British fantasy novelist Terry Pratchett, in a co-operative series of essays with Ian Stewart (Professor of Mathematics at the University of Warwick) and Jack Cohen (a science writer and reproductive biologist), defined mankind not so much as Homo Sapiens Sapiens, but as Pan Narrans — the story-telling ape. Stories shape us, educate us, and define us. Subconsciously or consciously, we tend to think in plotlines and consider people along the lines of archetypes. The stories we tell each other and ourselves define who we are.

If we all tell standard stories, the plot device that terrorists use is quite simple: Heroic band of visionaries take action to redress great wrongs done by monstrous evil power and promises a brave new world for all who follow them. In telling this story, the terrorist is playing to three audiences: Himself first; the audience whom he wishes to woo with his daring prowess and epic vision second; and everyone else (who should be properly terrified and awed by the hero’s audacity) third.

One of the daily problems that Pans Narrans must endure is that all the pieces of the plot device do not necessarily fit in their proper places. Some terrorists will go to enormous lengths — both in the internal realm of their own thoughts and world-view, and to the greater audience — to hammer the script into place.

The internal struggle can take years of informal internal conditioning to develop, but most terrorists do begin their campaigns with an intact set of internal beliefs about the world and their role in it. The literature on cognitive dissonance and cognitive theory is also extensive and rich, but the basic theories outlined by pioneering psychologists Leon Festinger and George Kelly in the 1950s have much application here. Essentially, people construct meanings to support interpretations and outcomes in a framework that gives support to their own preferences. While we all do this to a limited extent, those who want to see a different interpretation of the world from the mainstream will interpret all events and developments differently from the rest of us. The conspiracy-myth addict will cheerfully extrapolate all facts to support his construct of hidden meanings behind events; the ideologue (and revisionist historians) will subordinate everything to his belief system; and the terrorist will do both.

For the terrorist, the construction of a vile de-humanized enemy makes it easier both to convince him or herself of the rightness of the cause, and to commit violence against the demonized authority. Even then, it is perhaps significant to note that the terrorists of 30 years ago sometimes needed to work themselves up to the level where they could commit lethal violence by staging a series of "learning" attacks with simple Molotov cocktails and pipe-bombs hurled at empty offices, and then progressing to time bombs, and finally to becoming psychologically ready to personally deal death to another human being. Today’s terrorist, with his lethal suicide attack, is often the product of a much more sophisticated conditioning system.

It must also be said that suicide bombers are not born; they are manufactured — usually by isolating the impressionable from all outside influences and ceaselessly conditioning them. The LTTE had been the world’s leading group for suicide attacks until recently, but evidently the Palestinian Authority’s education system is equal to the challenge of convincing large numbers of youngsters to immolate themselves.

The terrorist, even as he completes his internal conditioning, will also start working on the second audience of potential supporters, and will try to persuade them to see the world his way. Sometimes, this is fairly easy; but often, some very elaborate mental constructions are required.

Jacques Ellul, in his masterwork on propaganda, essentially described it as a process designed to get people to take a particular action (or inaction) and convince them to get to a condition of self-reinforcement to sustain their new belief system. Propaganda tends to fall into three general categories based on the approach that is used: Freudian, Pavlovian, or using a system based on Dewey’s educational theories. For the first two approaches, it is necessary to have a degree of preconditioning to associate people with the symbols and concepts that the propagandist intends to use and manipulate.

Sometimes, the preconditioning phase is very easy. For example, both the Irish Republicans and the Protestant militants in Ulster needed to do very little to familiarize their intended audiences with their symbols and concepts — both sides already had very well developed mythologies and versions of Anglo-Irish history that most of their audiences already knew very well. It is also significant that Sikh militants fell back on the garb of 16-17^th Century warriors — who had to defend the emerging Sikh religion against ferocious persecution by Muslim invaders. The inference was that the Punjabi insurgents were again defending the faith. Marxism is a well-defined political philosophy (even if it has been discredited) that can be easily grabbed by any malcontent and pressed into service with only some local refinements.

Other ideologies can be much stranger. Sometimes, as was the case with the Soviets, the collision between reality and their ideological gestalt left people with bifurcated belief systems where it was possible — even necessary — to hold rival sets of views at the same time. This seems to be the case with the Colombian Guerrilla group FARC, where the daily reality of their existence revolves around narcotics and a brutal war, but the justification for the struggle requires the leadership to earnestly mouth Marxist theory to outside visitors and other Colombians, even though FARC leaders don’t appear to accept the ideology in any real sense.

An even stranger ideology appears among the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE), where the outside appearances to the world and many supporters is that of a conventional national liberation movement striving for the independence of an oppressed minority (or so the Tigers claim). Within the movement, only occasionally revealed to outsiders, there appears to be a "superman" myth in that some leaders have described the Tamils as a "… race which has achieved perfection much ahead of any country in the world". Pro-Tiger websites also allege that the Tamils (who are mostly Hindus and therefore sometimes defined by the caste system) were really a race of warriors whose true history was suppressed by the jealous British. Even stranger is one suggestive photograph of the LTTE’s leader that shows him in his usual fatigues and patented far-off-look-of-destiny expression on his face and his finger on a map, with the caption reading "Wherever the Sun God points with his finger, surely rays of light will rush to illuminate all of Tamil Eelam."

The world has experienced such things as the 11^th Century Old Man of the Mountains sending out assassins on suicide missions, after they had a hashish addled experience of paradise with a bevy of beauties in his garden, and the bizarre but deadly Kingdom of Heavenly Peace Rebellion in 19^th Century China (whose revolt led to the deaths of between 30 and 60 million people). A construct like that of a fanatic cult with a deified leader concealed within the cloak of a national liberation movement should not seem all that unusual: Human beings have killed for stranger things than this.

In the modern world, sustaining belief is difficult, and terrorist groups and their supporters have had to go to extraordinary lengths to ensure their messages remain uninterrupted. The political arms of various terrorist groups will run their own media sources, although the unchallenged perspective that Ellul maintains is necessary for effective propaganda is often difficult to maintain. Still, Hizbollah has its own television stations, al Qaeda releases a lot of videocassettes for its supporters, and just about every group around the world has a website of one kind or another. Even for some domestic groups, like the Animal Liberation Front, websites and the ALF-SOG newspaper are where bragging rights for various actions are exercised and new techniques are proposed.

The ideal situation for an insurgent group has nearly been achieved by the LTTE, where their supporters ensure that no rival Tamil perspectives can be presented to overseas Tamil communities. In Toronto, the largest Sri-Lankan Tamil City in the world, four 24-hour radio stations, 10 weekly newspapers and Tamil Language television shows are pro-Tiger, or else receive no advertising from within the community and risk intimidating violence. There are also controls over Tamil language DVDs and VHS tapes, to limit the effects of films produced in India’s Tamil Nadu State. These allow the Tamil leadership to quickly mobilize large numbers of members of the community for protests, and ensure a high degree of solidarity.

However, the successful transmission of the insurgent’s messages still depends upon the voluntary selection of pro-insurgent media by members of the population they hope to lead. Fortunately for the terrorists, Western authorities are usually uninterested in monitoring domestic media in foreign languages, and even more disinterested in sponsoring alternative viewpoints in Arabic, Punjabi, Spanish, or Tamil to compete with the messages that support the insurgents. This reluctance to contest insurgent propaganda on the airwaves may be a profound weakness.

When it comes to conditioning, few slates are so blank as those of children; and many insurgent and ideological groups have eagerly turned to using them.

The Islamist Sudanese government has been waging a brutal civil war against the Nuba, who want a secular and democratic state within that country’s borders. Sudan had hosted bin Laden until the late 1990s, only gently expelling them when pressured and bribed to do so. The cruel irony of this type of brutality being unleashed by a radical Islamist regime cannot be overlooked, especially when Islamic fundamentalists around world whine to the media about Western "crusades," and describe themselves as "victims" of the United States and the West. The Sudanese government’s fundamentalist military have tried to systematically starve out the Nuba, raped women to "thin their blood line," and destroyed homes and crops. Nuba children are routinely rounded up by the military, with males forced to take up arms against their own people and females forced into sexual slavery.

The situation for children in Sierra Leone is also horrific. There, UNICEF estimates that as many as 5,000 have served in combat and another 5,400 have been conscripted into support roles. Young people were forced into participating in acts such as hacking off the limbs of civilians. Both the rebels and government are guilty of this heinous practice.

One of the world’s worst violators when it comes to using children in combat and terrorist operations is the LTTE. It has repeatedly been cited by international organizations for this practice, yet because it is itself an illegitimate organization, no true form of sanction can be applied to it. The LTTE’s dirty secret is that the majority of its combat soldiers are children. The Tigers have become very skilled at manipulating Tamil youth into joining its ranks, and begins recruiting them as young as eight years of age. Older children, already serving in its ranks have been known to attend grade schools and show off their assault rifles and talk about the LTTE’s "glory".

Other methods include psychological pressures and threats to family members. Loss of loved ones, and the desperate poverty which exists in LTTE-controlled areas also contribute to the pressures to join. As a former Canadian Ambassador, William Bauer points out, these children are given cyanide capsules to swallow in the event of capture and the Tigers are especially fond of employing young girls in suicide bomb attacks. An Amnesty International report described how a 15-year-old Tiger took an infant and beat its head against a wall while holding it by its legs. He got extreme satisfaction from this, especially while hearing its mother scream in horror as the grey matter splattered out. This type of action was not at all uncommon when the LTTE tried to ethnically cleanse what it claims as a Tamil homeland.

While the practice of employing children as terrorists and soldiers is common in Asia and Africa, it is not totally unheard of in the Middle East and Latin America. The worst offender in Europe is the Kurdish Worker’s Party (PKK), who in 1994 began this revolting endeavor. Special children’s regiments were created and by 1998, it was estimated that as many as 3,000 were recruited, including 300 girls, and a child as young as seven years.

Here is the ultimate tragedy of terrorism.

Can we stand?

Terrorism has a long history and has been seen in most societies, especially in those that can be characterized as having republican or democratic governments. For the most part, terrorism can be ‘tolerated’ and handled as a criminal matter by the authorities, as long as the actions of the terrorists are more of a vexation than a serious challenge to an entire society. For example, Britain has easily withstood the attentions of sundry Irish nationalist terrorists for almost 150 years, without serious harm to its institutions and freedoms. Despite the presence of the Basque ETA, Spain has progressed from being an economic backwater under the rule of Francisco Franco, to becoming one of the world’s most vital economies and a fully liberal democratic state.

However, unchecked terrorism can be dangerously corrosive, and many of the new international networks and meta-networks are extremely threatening to the stability of whole nations. This is especially true when the terrorists make full use of their political and fundraising arms to add new dimensions to the threat they pose. Such groups are present in Canada, and few Canadians really understand the peril to which we have become exposed.

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

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