What It Is
Perhaps the most convenient way to define terrorism would be to break it up into its various attributes. First of all, terrorism is a mindset or outlook as well as a strategy. As the term suggests, the aim of terrorism is to instill fear and terror into the minds and hearts of people with a view to forcing them to accept and support a cause, right or wrong, propounded and advanced by the terrorists in question.
Terrorism is also an ideology of violence against a far superior force which cannot possibly be defeated through conventional or unconventional warfare including guerrilla tactics. It is therefore an ultra-normal strategy of war and violence including killing or destroying the real or imagined enemy by committing suicide.
Terrorism conjures up an all powerful person committing all sorts of crimes and wrongs on another hopelessly weak person who then mentally and morally condemns to death not only the powerful person but also himself for not being at least powerful enough to protect his own rights.
The Putative Genesis of Global Terrorism
Global terrorism is often attributed to a sibling rivalry run amok. An ordinary quarrel between the children of Abraham over land treasure history and lineage grew into a horrendous global conflagration.
The biblical narrative of the weak David and the powerful Goliath turned into its opposite. Then David the Jew defeated the Palestinian Goliath with the help of God, so the narrative goes. Now, David is destroying Goliath with the help of the all-powerful America. Today, the sibling rivalry has escalated into a terrible fratricide, Goliath is so weak before the US-supported David and so humiliated before the eyes of the world he has become suicidally angry, and is ready to take out the enemy along with himself.
This indeed looks like the genesis of terrorism. Goliath’s weakness has hardened into an unbreakable resolve, gaining its sustenance from the indomitable human spirit. Goliath has also got smarter. He has contrived two fighting weapons: one is in the form of using Islam as a global organizing force, taking advantage of the nearly 1.6 billion Muslims around the world; and the other is inserting the Palestinian and Islamic cause, so to speak, into the global and regional superpower rivalry. Hence, terrorism is both global and local. Its underlying causes are typically real or imagined injustices alleged to have been perpetrated on identity groups of one kind or another.
Objectives and Strategies of Terrorism
The major objectives of terrorism may be summarized as a) forcing an equitable resolution of the IsraeliPalestinian conflict; b) strengthening and expanding Islam as a global political force; c) enhancing the destructive capabilities of terrorism, including through building the so-called “dirty bomb”; and d) in its extreme form obliterating human civilization as we know it and committing suicide-cumhomicide against non-Muslims and infidels to go to heaven and live happily ever after! On the other hand, tactics and strategies include mass murder with heavy assault rifles at the risk of being shot dead; suicide bombings, airplane hijackings, kidnappings, etc. As hinted above, the ultimate prize would be being able to build some sort of a nuclear device, even in its crude form of a “dirty bomb”, in order to be able to annihilate swathes of humanity in one go.
In this connection, mention should be made of the non-nuclear IED’s (Improvised Explosive Devices) which have been used by terrorists to stunning effect in Afghanistan and elsewhere. However, the objectives of terrorism are of necessity limited as the capacity even of its extreme version cannot conceivably come anywhere near achieving its aim of obliterating human civilization however long it may carry on its violent and morbid iconoclastic carnage and destruction. Hence, spectacular acts of terrorism like the dramatic 9/11 terrorist use of planes as lethal missiles of mass destruction could only at best draw global attention to the causes and plights terrorists espouse and harbor.
Global publicity is therefore a major objective of terrorism in general. Global attention and concern of this sort is likely to lead to a realistic review and assessment of terrorists’ real and imagined plights and sufferings. In general, one may cautiously conclude that the real objective of terrorism is to brandish its extreme version of an apocalyptic end of human civilization in pursuit of a glorious after-life in order to force earthly global and regional superpowers to the middle ground of mutual respect and tolerance between and among the major protagonists.
In this vein, the realistic goals of terrorism may be assumed to be to pressure the de facto sole global superpower, the USA, to play the role of an honest broker in the chronic IsraeliPalestinian conflict and to force it to recognize that Islam is being used as a global organizing force only because it has flouted international law adduced in the form of U.N. resolutions. America’s strategic rivals, Russia and China, appear to be on the side of terrorism, although they have themselves been victims of terrorism, particularly Russia, because they feel that doing so is in their strategic interest and because they apparently have the moral upper hand.
At any rate, terrorism is real and has caused indescribable damage and suffering around the world. Terrorist “spectaculars” such as those carried out on 9/11 and others in London, Paris, Bali and Nairobi by global and regional terrorist operators such as Al-Qaida, ISIS, Al-Shebab and Boko Haram are still of grave global concern. On the other hand, Ethiopia has fortunately so far escaped the worst manifestations of domestic terrorism, but her citizens have been victims of ISIS’s brutal slaughter and massacre!
The Likelihood of Terrorism Taking Root in Ethiopia
In Ethiopia the two likely fertile grounds for terrorism are radical political ethnicism and religion. Radical political ethnicism has led to the constitutional right of self-determination up to and including secession. This in turn has given rise to ethnic conflicts over land and other natural resources shared over hundreds of years. As far as religion is concerned, Orthodox Christianity and Islam have lived together in relative and mutual tolerance for centuries, but there are danger signs that political leaders in the Ethiopian Somali Region may radicalize the regional population to resort to terrorist tactics to achieve political ends including secession from Ethiopia. In this regard, the influence of the terrorist group Al-Shebab cannot be ignored.
The pre-reform TPLF/EPRDF government had wrongly labeled OLF, Arbegnoch Gibot 7 and OBNEG as terrorist organizations. They are actually more in the mould of freedom fighters rather than terrorists and the reform-minded Abiy government has therefore co-opted them into the fledgling democratic process he has begun. So, there is no officially known terrorist group in Ethiopia at present. However, the danger of blowing up real or imagined ethnic and religious resentments into an unjustified demand for secession with the help of external adversaries may well create a fertile ground for the emergence of terrorist groups in the country.
Secessionist elements in the Oromia and Somali regions of Ethiopia are likely to be vulnerable to ethnicist sectarian and religious instigations and incitements that may well spawn terrorist tendencies and instincts.
Any Remedies in Sight?
Terrorism is a reaction to a deeply felt sense of injustice (real or imagined) that aims to destroy the perpetrator as well as the victim of the injustice, the former for being too powerful to vanquish and the latter for being too weak to deserve to live. On the face of it, the putative remedy for such asymmetry of force and power would be to create some sort of balance of power.
David is now the all-powerful guy on the block. So I would wager my last buck that if the de facto sole superpower, who else but the U.S., shows a change of heart and engineers a just and fair twostate solution to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, global terrorism and its sources of finance and arms would be reduced by at least 70 percent! When this happens, the chance of Islam being used as a global organizing force would diminish drastically. Strategic rivalry among the global and regional superpowers would of course continue but this is likely to be in sport, scientific and technical achievement, and expenditure on research and development rather than in violent behavior.
Combating incipient terrorist activity in Ethiopia should begin by forming a transitional government, dissolving parliament, writing a new constitution and building a fully democratic system. It is more than surprising that there are still Ethiopian intellectuals who deny the glaring and monumental fact that the present constitution is the major source of social conflict in Ethiopia. Let us defeat terrorism before it has a chance to defeat us!
The Ethiopian Herald, February 10/2019
BY TEKLEBIRHAN GEBREMICAEL
