Overseas Terrorism in Canada, warriors, street gangs, suicide bombers

Police Intelligence officers concerned with the Tamil Tigers believe that 8,000 veteran LTTE guerrillas now live in Toronto. Other estimates believe that there are as many as 10,000 ex Tigers in the country. Some of the al Qaeda members living in Montreal in the 1990s were members of the vicious Fundamentalist insurgency in Algeria — a conflict where over 120,000 people have been murdered in the last decade. Others had taken a part in the fighting in Bosnia, and in the Taliban’s takeover of Afghanistan. Members of the Sikh Fundamentalist insurgency inside the Punjab have made it to Canada and taken up residence. Nor are such people alone. Former combatants from the catastrophic clan wars in Somalia; ex-government soldiers from the Sudan, from along both sides of the Green Line in Beirut, and from numerous other squalid conflicts have made it to Canada.

Could an ex-guerrilla who lined up surrendered Sri Lankan soldiers, machine-gunned them and hoisted their heads on stakes be working as a computer salesman in Toronto? Did the clerk at a Montreal convenience store enter into an Algerian village and rape a 13 year-old girl in front of their dying disemboweled father? Did the owner of a popular Punjabi restaurant in Surrey rip the children of an Indian police officer to shred with shrapnel from a command-detonated mine?

It is entirely possible.

Some former combatants present a danger to Canadians. Some of the guerrillas from the LTTE insurgency in Sri Lanka have gravitated into the Tamil street gangs in Toronto. The ex-GIA insurgents from Algeria were contemplating actions in Montreal, and one of the ideas they mulled over was the detonation of propane tankers in the middle of a downtown neighborhood. Ex-PKK guerrillas were evidently among the rioters who injured policemen in Ottawa in February 1999 — engulfing one police officer with the flames from a Molotov cocktail.

It is just as true that hundreds (if not thousands) of other former terrorists and guerrillas have settled in Canada, with every intention of living here quietly. There are a number of factors to consider in determining the danger that former insurgent combatants present to Canadian society.

Soldiers versus Warriors

Homicide is the central act in warfare of any kind, but it is not necessarily a natural act for most people. Those for whom killing is easy are seldom welcome in any society, and it usually takes some conditioning to turn ordinary men into killers. There are two such approaches that usually work. One is the way of the Warrior (which may be how people fight naturally), the other is the way of the Soldier. Terrorists, like most guerrillas and organized criminals, tend to be warriors.

An attempt to detail all the distinctions between the Warrior and the Soldier would be a book in itself. Moreover, that book has already been written in sections by many others — including Victor Davis Hanson in The Western Way of Warfare and more recently in Carnage and Culture; by Martin van Crevald in The Transformation of War; and by John Keegan in A History of Warfare.

Essentially, a soldier is someone who has placed himself under discipline, often voluntarily, and — as Hanson frequently describes — as much or more for the benefit of his civil society as his own personal gain. The soldier is fundamentally a tool of a state and only really appeared in history with the arrival of the Greek city-states of Classical Times. Even a mercenary-soldier works for a state employer; and when he is not, he is under a great risk of devolving into a bandit or pirate.

Additionally, the soldier is expected to inflict violence only under directions and — the most critical distinction of them all — is also expected to receive violence. The soldier’s assumption of risk is one of the main reasons why his homicide is tolerable, and this distinction separates the soldier from all other forms of combatant.

A terrorist, or some other insurgent, may believe that he is working for the benefit of a society (which he hopes to amend or re-design to his own notions), and may accept discipline — as indeed many terrorists are disciplined. However, the assumption of risk, and the willingness to place oneself in real danger, does not belong to the vast majority of terrorists or guerrillas. Essentially, the terrorist will not climb out of a trench and advance in the open under the lash of concentrated machinegun fire, and will not live for months under shellfire in a muddy hole. The distinctions outlined earlier between the sheep dog and the coyote (in Chapter One) still stand.

Additionally, the soldier also belongs to an environment with a much more sophisticated and robust psychological infrastructure than the terrorist or guerrilla ever experiences. He has been trained, learned about internal and external discipline, is subject to a code of military laws, is linked in a fundamental manner to his fellows through an organization that innately recognizes the value of small group dynamics in a stressful environment, and belongs to a sub-society that operates with a unique ethos which emphasizes ties of loyalty and respect, both horizontally between peers, and vertically between leaders and subordinates.

Furthermore, if the soldier belongs to a real elite unit, or is a combat veteran (or is both,) there is a sense of élan and common experience that usually strengthens his sense of self-worth and self-respect. The usual ideological/ethnic motivations that inspire insurgents and terrorists are present in the soldier, but are usually of less importance — particularly after being exposed to battle.

The terrorist has his own internal motives that attract him to an ideology that will allow him to attempt to meet them. The many factors that strengthen a soldier’s ability to withstand violence and which constrain his behavior might be present, but not all of them, and are never as focused and powerful.

In dealing with the aftermath of a conflict, the soldier is far more likely to return to a stable and productive life than the terrorist.

During the course of the Vietnam War, American psychiatrists who were opposed to American involvement in the conflict began to piece together an idea that any American veteran of the conflict would be a ticking time bomb on his return. The theory took on a life of its own, sustained in large part by movies such as First Blood (the first of the idiotic Rambo series), and once Veteran’s Administration funding became available for those who were supposedly stressed out by the war, sure enough, patients began to appear — many of whom were never in the US military, let alone Vietnam.

One can compare First Blood with the much more realistic appraisal of returning servicemen offered by Hollywood in the 1946 film The Best Years of Our Lives. This is not to say that veteran soldiers can seamlessly cope with the effects that combat has had on them — many do have considerable problems. But the vast majority of veterans from Western societies settled back into civilian life quietly, without exploding into violence. However, things can be very different under other circumstances.

Soldiers whose cause has been decisively beaten may opt to become involved in violent ideological movements — such as the original KKK in the Post-Civil War American South, or the Freikorps and their left-wing opponents in Germany in the years immediately after the First World War. In both cases, their home society had also bankrupted itself during the conflict, and there was little to hold returning soldiers to their former lives.

Things are even worse for former insurgents.

The Unending War

According to Victor Davis Hanson, one of the reasons why the Western World’s inclination for violent battle had developed in the first place was to ensure that wars were short and decisive — with a clear winner and a clear loser. His original thesis in The Western Way of War pointed out that the Greeks had no real liking for extended and purposeless conflict with unending years of petty raiding and vandalism — their agricultural resources were too slender to support this.

Ever since the Hoplites of Classical Greece, the idea of war in the Western World has been to seek a decision about the issue through rapid and intense violence. For insurgents and terrorism, their resources and conditioning mitigate against rapid resolution. A minor war, like the 1982 Falklands war between Argentina and Great Britain, took about 10 weeks to conclude; the 1991 Gulf War was over in six weeks; and Israel’s pre-emptive 1967 assault on its looming neighbors has been known in history as the Six Day War. Major wars such as the First and Second World Wars, or the American Civil War took four to six years to conclude, but in each of these wars, weeks (or months) sped by without any notable fighting as the combatants were confining themselves to assembling resources for the next decisive clash.

In comparison to this, a terrorist group might strive for years without any real results at all. The current sectarian violence in Ulster has dragged on for 35 years, the Basque ETA has been active for even longer. Even a minor group, like the Red Army Faction in Germany, managed to stay active for about 16 years. Canada’s FLQ (a very minor group by the standards of other terrorist groups) was active for over eight years. This is a long time to ‘fight’, especially without achieving any concrete results.

Eric Hoffer understood terrorists and revolutionaries (and thought of them as ‘fanatics’). He wrote of the deepest, most concealed, impulse that drove them — "Chaos is his element. When the old order begins to crack, he wades in with all his might and recklessness to blow the whole hated present to high heaven. To hell with reforms! All that exists is rubbish and there is sense in reforming rubbish." But the urge to dramatic destruction, the vision of leading the army that storms the gates of heaven, slips away and year by year, the petty struggle goes on without result.

Socrates is said (by Plato) to have said that the unexamined life is not worth living: Yet most human beings find it difficult to examine their lives and assess what they have done with it. It is worse for Hoffer’s and Koestler’s true believer, and stark reality is his most terrible enemy. To look back at twenty years in the Provos, or as a White Supremacist, or Tiger, and realize that every self deception and every atrocity meant nothing — or less than nothing — is too much for them to bear. So the examination remains undone, only the struggle remains and excuses are found to explain its failure.

Yet there are many terrorists who turn their backs on their cause — particularly if they feel that the original needs that motivated them have not been met. The gunman who joined to achieve peer-respect, and found that a life of disciplined solitude awaited him may have drifted off and gone elsewhere before being drawn too deeply into the organization. There are leaders who have found that with the maturity of their organization, they have gained wealth and status they craved and can move on to other things. For the rest, there is no way to peacefully settle down.

A number of former Afghan guerrillas (from the war against the Soviet occupation) have settled in Canada, as have many militiamen from various factions in the Lebanese civil war, former Eritrean insurgents, and Somali clan fighters. However, these were guerrillas rather than terrorists per se, and they can point to the conflicts they were engaged in and claim a victory of sorts: The Soviets did leave Afghanistan, the Lebanese largely fought each other to a standstill, Eritrea is independent, and no clan was wiped out in Somalia’s agonies. These wars appear to be closed.

A clear, unequivocal defeat is also a way of declaring a war to be closed. The American South never rose again, and there is no sign of a renaissance for Nazi Germany or Imperial Japan. But these were wars fought by soldiers, and defeat was clear. Insurgencies can go on seemingly forever, but even the guerrillas of the Malaysian Communist Party came in out of the damp in 1989 — thirty years after most of their combatant cells had been destroyed. But, for these one-time Marxist guerrillas, it was also clear in 1989 that Communism was a failing force; without that failure of the ideology, there was no reason to accept ‘military’ defeat in their struggle.

At the core of al Qaeda and its constituent organizations are the "Arab Afghans," the ideologically motivated Sunni-Wahhabi Fundamentalists who joined together in the late 1980s on Pakistan’s Afghan frontier — 15 to 20 years later, there is little sign of any of them giving up their struggle. The tiny Spanish Maoist group GRAPO (and who else could be so lost to reality as a Maoist in a Western industrialized democracy?) and the newly rekindled cell of Italy’s Red Brigades show how many Leftist groups simply cannot abandon their cause and face the facts.

Because so many terrorists define themselves by the conflicts they have created, peace becomes a real threat to their self-identity. In Israel and the West Bank, any progress towards a Palestinian-Israeli rapprochement (however limited and fragile such might be) sees a rush by groups like Hamas and Palestinian Islamic Jihad — and even by members of the Palestinian Authority’s own militia — to immediately derail it through violence designed to provoke a response.

Without a clear victory, a well-established defeat, or success of any kind, there has been (and probably never will be) ‘closure’ for those who fought for an independent Khalistan, to create a new Caliphate of the faithful, or to build a new Tamil homeland. The hazards of this lack of closure are best illustrated by the IRA. Driven underground in 1922-3 by the very government they put into power, the IRA still managed to periodically resurface in the 1930s and 1950s, and many of the old men of the 1920s were ready to embrace the re-birth of the ‘troubles’ at the end of the 1960s.

Manufacturing Suicide Attackers

It is not easy to become a killer, and it is not easy for many people to live with having become one. Because killing is so difficult, it makes it more difficult for those who have done so as terrorists to ever question their actions. What is even more unnatural is becoming a suicide attacker.

Nobody is born to be a suicide attacker, and while there are some people who can be talked into throwing their lives away for a cause, where numbers of suicide attackers have appeared, it is because somebody has manufactured them. The complete militarization of Japanese society in the 1930s made it possible to imbue a whole generation of school children with the Imperial Rescript and its resolution to die rather than accept defeat or surrender.

The result was a military where hundreds of thousands of starving and ragged soldiers preferred to die fighting rather than surrender, where drowning sailors would refuse rescue, and where thousands of newly minted aviators deliberately sought immolation as Kamikaze pilots. Despite these measures, Japan was decisively defeated — although hundreds more (if not thousands) of its most dedicated warriors committed suicide on being told of the surrender. The legacy of this conditioning, and of the atrocities committed by its brutal — and brutalized — warriors are probably why Japan still refuses to fully acknowledge much of its guilt for the war years.

It is difficult to create suicide attackers without creating the conditions where complete propaganda becomes possible. As Jacques Ellul points out in Propaganda: The Formation of Men’s Attitudes, propaganda is only really truly effective if its targets are preconditioned to accept the message, remain isolated from dissenting influences, and become repeatedly saturated with the message from every possible source of information and comment.

Palestinian Media Watch, the Middle East Children’s Association (a joint project of some Israeli and Palestinian Educators,) L’Arche, and other organizations have been watching the educational material provided to Palestinian children in the West Bank and Gaza with considerable dismay. What is one to think when an exercise for 8-year-old children tells them to incorporate " … dies as a Martyr" into a sentence, or when 11-year-old Palestinian children are told by their teacher: "Jesus called the Israelites to embrace the religion of Allah, and they replied by calling him a lair, by attacking him. What does their behavior indicate?"

The indoctrination of Palestinian Children for Shahada (Martyrdom for Allah) includes television spots, textbooks, lectures from their political and religious leaders, and music videos and songs celebrating Shahids (suicide attackers). Excerpts in Palestinian media include interviews with proud parents of Shahids — "Praise to Allah, I gave birth to heroes". Even children’s games are pressed into service. Here is a textbook case to watch how the manufacture of suicide attackers can be accomplished.

As an aside, one of the more baffling aspects of human behavior is the willingness of so many people to ignore the fact that those yelling "Die for the revolution! Forward brave comrades!" usually do so from behind the best cover they can find.

Nor are the Palestinians alone in conditioning children to kill and die. Numerous African warlords have kidnapped children to turn them into killers. Tamil educators in Sri Lanka have bitterly complained about Tiger attempts to turn their schoolrooms into propaganda centres for the LTTE, and the group is notorious for using children as terrorists. Children are easier to isolate from other influences, and lack the experience, self-confidence, and maturity that provide most people with their defences against psychological conditioning — it is also easier to turn them into killers. LTTE "ethnic cleansing" activities in northeastern Sri Lanka often involved using machetes and hand weapons to butcher people, and a particular touch was to deliberately inflict a powerful slash into the skull of massacred children. West African child-soldiers have also been known to be especially brutal.

Such conditioning at a young age will probably never be completely overcome — even if full psychological support was available. Otherwise, one is left with someone who has been indoctrinated to believe that killing an "enemy" really means nothing, or an aspirant suicide attacker who believes that their life will be unfulfilled.

Many of the Left-Wing terrorists of the 1970s were mature adults, usually in their late twenties and early thirties. It had taken most of them some years to reach the point where they were ready to attempt to take human life, and most of them contented themselves with indirect attacks — time bombs particularly — which demand much less of the killer than shooting another human being at point blank range. Terrorists like "Carlos" (who seems to have exhibited some sociopathic traits), who could shoot people with a pistol without any sign of remorse or hesitation, were very rare.

The conditioning such terrorists undertook largely seems to be internal or from within a small, politically and psychologically isolated group of peers; though many did undertake some paramilitary training inside Yemen, Libya, or elsewhere among the USSR’s circle of friends in the 1970s and ‘80s. Once away from this background, the ability to commit terrorism seems to have dwindled quite quickly. There were hundreds, if not thousands, of Westerners who passed through these camps, and very few ever became active.

It would appear that the mental conditioning to kill is easier for terrorists from outside of Western societies. Although the Tamil Tigers arose out of a criminal subclass and recruited many children, the Babbar Khalsa militants arose out of a society with a strong martial tradition and a religion with a robust attitude towards self-defence, and had the outrage posed by the attack on the Golden Temple to motivate them towards violence.

With al Qaeda, however, it appears there is a rapid and comprehensive ability to make killers out of young Muslim -- or even Western — adult males. Richard Reid was a troubled criminal who made a rapid conversion to Islam before attempting the "shoe bombing" attack. Zacarias Moussaoui and Ziad Jarrah came from well-off secular families yet seem to have been converted within months into would-be suicide attackers. This ability to recruit and rapidly indoctrinate its new members has yet to be explained, although one can hope that the al Qaeda and Taliban combatants who have been interned by the US might be able to provide insights into this soon.

Street Gangs as a Legacy of Violence

One un-remarked phenomenon of political violence and unrest comes can be seen with the third generation to follow a particular catastrophe or event. The generation of Irish nationalists that finally achieved independence were the grandchildren to those who survived the famines and related catastrophes of the 1840s. It appears as if the third generation of Palestinians born after the creation of Israel is the most violent yet. The grandchildren of the survivors and exiles of the Armenian massacres during the First World War generated the Justice Commandos of the Armenian Genocide. The grandchildren of those who lived through the complex Yugoslavian civil war that attended the German occupation in 1941-44 were the combatants who did so much to tear Yugoslavia apart fifty years later.

Perhaps if the first generation experiences a catastrophic political event, both it and their children are directly shaped by it. They witnessed the event, survived it, and constructed new lives afterwards. However, the third generation cannot directly share in the event that so closely affected their grandparents and parents; so they become the ones who seek to settle the old scores, right the wrongs, and somehow become involved after all. If this phenomenon is generally true, then any resolved conflict or outrage may never truly end.

There is another legacy of terrorism to consider, and perhaps sometimes we need not even wait for the third generation.

Immigration has always brought an increased risk of criminal activity among the young — especially when societal dislocation is combined with poverty, unfamiliarity with the conventions of the new society, and when one (or both) parents are missing from the family. Cities that attract a lot of immigration can often point to new elements in organized crime whenever the pattern of immigration shifts — as the history of crime in New York City can amply demonstrate. Despite this, the vast majority of even the most demoralized new immigrants go on to build peaceful lives for themselves and — more importantly — for their children.

When the homeland society from which immigrants arrive has been convulsed in violence (or some other catastrophe), the risks are even higher. The Germans and other Europeans who arrived in the United States in the 1840s and ‘50s were largely quiet. The Irish who emerged from the aftermath of the Potato Famine soon created some of the most violent and corrupt criminal societies New York City and Boston had ever seen — with consequences that endure to the present day. While traditional criminal societies always had existed among immigrants from Asia, many of the isolated young men from Southeast Asia who had survived the war, and a terrifying refugee experience, became far more violent and much wilder than any who had come before them.

Accordingly, many of the young immigrants to Canada who have come out of Sri Lanka have become dangerous street criminals, and seem almost uncontrollable. Added to the normal risk factors that have allowed the VVT and AK Kanon gangs to become dangerous are some new considerations that the Tamil community does not dare to closely analyze.

The recruitment of children for its fighting arm may be coming back to haunt the LTTE. Those who survive their "tour" are often allowed to go on to other things, and make their way into the dispersed Tamil communities in Western Europe and North America — as restless and unfulfilled young adults. Worse still, the many young Tamils who were not brought into the LTTE’s forces have been repeatedly told that violent guerrillas and suicide attackers are "heroes" and worthy role models.

Also, the LTTE, like so many insurgent organizations, has violently split its home culture by trying to subordinate everything to their war, their leadership, and cause. Previous ties of caste and community have been eclipsed, and the Tigers attempted politicization of traditional Tamil community institutions has weakened them. This has further exacerbated the risk factors for their young and the results were inevitable.

Of the two major Tamil youth gangs, the VVT is more traditionally oriented towards the Tigers and their cause, while members of AK-Kanon have tended to be opposed to the group (often for caste and local reasons stemming from differences within the Tamil community inside Sri Lanka). The gang members contain a mix of older members, many of whom are veterans who fought with the Tigers in Sri Lanka, and younger kids who tend to be caught up in the exciting violent lore and images of the LTTE’s war. By not being able to go fight themselves, they have found a surrogate outlet. VVT has somewhere between 350-500 members while AK-Kanon has about 300.

The two groups have fought with each other inside Toronto on a number of occasions — often in violent melees between dozens of supporters with machetes and handguns, and automatic weaponry has sometimes been used in drive-by shootings. In contrast to, for example, the Biker War in Quebec, the body count has been low but several young Tamils have been killed and dozens have been injured. One of the main points of contention between the VVT and AK-Kanon has concerned drug distribution areas.

It should also be noted that the gangs have branched into other activities and will fight with lethal intent over girls, soccer games, access to donut shops (a favorite hang-out) and a variety of other causes. Gang members can still be seen hanging around in the early afternoons in some Tamil neighborhoods — a source of discomfort and anxiety to many older Tamils -- and cruising around in white Cherokees and Toyotas in the evenings.

Leaders from the WTM and FACT have been acutely embarrassed by the notoriety the gangs have generated, and have striven to reduce gang fighting. However, it was perhaps predictable that they attempted to capitalize on cooperative efforts with Toronto police as ‘evidence’ of the overall lawfulness and civic spirit of the community. According to members of the appropriate police task forces, the Tiger Front group leaders were told that cooperative efforts would be curtailed if Tiger Flags and symbols were displayed at community meetings on the problem.

The Tamil community isn’t the only one to have created violent street gangs among their youth. The same process is at work among young Sikhs, particularly in British Columbia. Again, gangs of youngsters now fight over girls, perceived insults, and over sundry criminal enterprises with an eagerness that dismays their community. Yet it is the older generation — particularly the Pro-Khalsa militants — who are the most to blame for creating the situation.

Thus the young have become involved in, and become the direct legacy of, the conflicts their parents created and pursued.

While the great majority of ex-insurgents who come to Canada will live here peacefully; many have been conditioned to kill without the controls placed on soldiers; have fought in wars that will not or cannot end; have no "closure" for their own actions; and may have infected their own children with the passions of their homeland conflicts.

There is no easy to ensure that such people will be safe, but allowing the front groups that supported these conflicts to continue to openly function in Canada is not a healthy practice. Citizenship and multicultural grants agencies should exercise much more caution than they currently do. Failure to do this will make it easier for supporters of terrorist groups to pass on their misshapen passions to a younger generation.

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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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