Deadly escalation
Terrorism not only grew in the 1980s but evolved into a new threat
By Bruce Kennedy
CNN Interactive
It
was just after dawn on October 23, 1983. A building at Beirut's
International Airport was filled with U.S. Marines, many of them
sleeping -- all of them part of the Multi-National Force sent to
Lebanon, as President Reagan said, to "bring peace and stability to the
Middle East."
In
that early morning light, a truck filled with explosives drove up to
the front of the Marines' compound. The driver then detonated his bomb,
killing himself and 241 U.S. military personnel.
Several days later, in a speech to a stunned and mourning nation, Reagan described what had happened:
"The
truck carried some 2,000 pounds of explosives, but there was no way our
Marine guards could know this. Their first warning that something was
wrong came when the truck crashed through a series of barriers,
including a chain-link fence and barbed-wire entanglements. The guards
opened fire, but it was too late. The truck smashed through the doors
of the headquarters building in which our Marines were sleeping and
instantly exploded. The four-story concrete building collapsed in a
pile of rubble."
At
the same time the U.S. Marine barracks were attacked, 56 French
paratroopers were killed in a similar assault on their military
compound several miles away. Within four months, the U.S. military
presence in Lebanon was withdrawn.
Terrorism
is hardly a new crisis in the West in the late 20th century. But it
evolved radically in the 1960s and '70s and reached a notorious
milestone in the 1980s, as terrorist incidents appeared to become more
frequent -- and more lethal. A brief chronology gives an overview:
-
October 1985: Palestinian terrorists take over the Italian passenger
liner Achille Lauro. Leon Klinghoffer, an elderly, wheelchair-bound
American Jew, is executed and thrown overboard.
-
November 1985: Hijackers take over an Egyptair jet, killing a U.S.
passenger. Sixty more people die after Egyptian commandos storm the
plane in Malta.
-
December 1985: Terrorists attack Israeli and U.S. check-in gates at the
Rome and Vienna airports, killing 16. Four guerrillas also die.
-
December 1988: Pan Am Flight 103 is blown out of the sky over
Lockerbie, Scotland, killing 259 people on the plane and 11 on the
ground.
- September 1989: A French UTA jet, flying from Paris to the Republic of Congo, explodes over Niger -- killing all 170 on board.
Some
of those events are still making headlines. Libyan and U.S. officials
met recently to discuss the lifting of U.N. sanctions imposed on
Tripoli in the wake of the Lockerbie and UTA bombings.
For
the sanctions to end, the United Nations wants Libya to end and
renounce all forms of terrorism, pay compensation to the families of
the Lockerbie victims and cooperate with the investigation and trial of
two suspects in the Lockerbie bombing. The two were turned over by
Libya in April.
Libya
also is tacitly acknowledging its involvement in the 1989 bombing of
the UTA jet. The London-based Arabic newspaper Al-Wasat says Libya will
pay $40 million in compensation to the families of the UTA victims.
The
news from Libya comes amid new concerns over Osama bin Laden, the Saudi
native who is accused of masterminding the August 1998 bomb attacks on
U.S. embassies in Kenya and Tanzania. Those attacks killed 224 people.
U.S.
officials say they believe bin Laden "may be in the final stages" of
another planned attack against American targets. The new threats also
underscore the transformation in terrorism -- a change that began more
than a decade ago.
"Terrorism
certainly [escalated] in the 1980s and reached a high plateau in the
late 1980s," says Brian Jenkins, an adviser to corporations and
governments on terrorism and international crime issues.
"There
were a stream of extreme acts that kept our attention -- the
kidnappings in Lebanon that went on for years, the shootout at the
Vienna and Rome airports. There were also some spectacular events: Pan
Am 103, the 1985 destruction of an Air India flight with 329 killed,
the UTA flight in Africa."
While
terrorist incidents became more sophisticated and better planned in the
1980s, they also became more lethal. Frank Cilluffo, director of the
terrorism task force at the Center for Strategic and International
Studies, points to two incidents in particular -- the 1983 suicide bomb
attack on the U.S. Marine barracks in Lebanon and the downing of Pan Am
103.
"The
Marine barracks was the biggest eye-opener," he says. "That was a
direct discriminate target. ... Pan Am 103 showed the change from
traditional left-wing terrorism that would go after individuals. While
clearly an attack on the U.S, it was also more indiscriminate in its
nature. That was probably the biggest lightning rod of the 1980s."
Despite
the official rhetoric of the time from the United States and other
Western nations that there would be no deals with terrorists, there is
strong evidence that violent pressure inflicted on several governments
during the 1980s actually bore fruit in the following decade.
"One
could argue that IRA's use of terrorist tactics over the years, and the
threat of continued terrorist violence in both Northern Ireland and
England itself, ultimately persuaded the British and Irish governments
to sit down and negotiate with them," Jenkins says.
"Similarly
it can be argued that the Palestinians, through the use of terrorist
tactics, were not only able to win worldwide attention for their cause
but also used the violence to galvanize and create a sense of
nationhood amongst the Palestinians -- which made the government of
Israel seek a political resolution with them."
But any successes gained by the Irish Republican Army or Palestinian militants are seen to be the exception, not the rule.
"The PLOs and Sinn Feins of the world are [now] recognizing it's not easy to be a legitimate organization," Cilluffo says.
The
end of the 1980s and the start of the 1990s also brought an end to the
Cold War -- which brought a sea change to terrorism. The collapse of
the Soviet Union and the superpower rivalry eliminated the East
European sanctuaries and safe travel routes used by some terrorist
organizations for operations in the West.
Along
with this evolution came more profound changes. A U.S. State Department
report on terrorism in 1996 showed fewer terrorist incidents but a
higher death toll than the previous year -- or, as the report put it,
"... the trend continued toward more ruthless attacks on mass civilian
targets and the use of more powerful bombs."
"In
the 1970s and '80s much of terrorism was motivated by ideological
content, or in some cases by separatists and nationalists," Jenkins
says.
"In
the 1990s increasingly the engines that drive conflicts are ethnic
hatreds or religious fanaticism. That changes the nature of struggle
and the quality of terrorist tactics. So long as a group is pursuing a
political agenda, then somehow the violence is related to the
achievement of those political objectives. ... There's a notion of
constituency, of public attitudes."
But
Jenkins notes that current terrorists appear to care little about
national or international opinion -- blurring the lines between
terrorism, human rights abuses and even acts of war.
"Rather than concern about the constituency," he notes, "the concern becomes more about how much damage can you do to them
... Hutus, Tutsis, Bosnians, Kosovars. ... That lends itself to
atrocities, massacres, less of an agenda and more to elimination of an
ethnic enemy."
When
terror comes from religious fanaticism, Jenkins says, "then one is not
concerned about a constituency. The constituency is God. God tells you
to do it, God rewards you for doing it."
"Most
conventional terrorism was politically motivated, a way to get to the
negotiating table," says Cilluffo. "But today many groups want to blow
up that table and build a new one in its place."
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