Evolution and Debates about the Concept of Terrorism
By #Remi_Brulin
▻http://www.jadaliyya.com/pages/index/20574/evolution-and-debates-about-the-concept-of-terrori
The Unresolved Issue of State Terrorism
On 4 October 1985, by a vote of fourteen yeses and with the United States abstaining, the Security Council adopted Resolution 573, which “condemned vigorously the act of armed aggression perpetrated by Israel against Tunisian territory.” That time, Washington did not use its veto but, as Vernon Walters explained, it continued to “recognize and strongly supported the principle that a State subjected to continuing terrorist attacks may respond with appropriate use of force to defend itself against further attacks.” As the outcome of that vote makes clear, Israel and the United States continued to stand squarely outside the international consensus on the illegality of the use of force against third-party states to avenge acts of terrorism. But international disagreements ran deeper: to non-Western countries, Israel’s raid amounted to “state terrorism” and should be condemned just as strongly as acts of “terrorism” by non-state actors.
Thus, after noting that his country had “often unequivocally condemned terrorism of every kind and from whatever source,” the Tunisian representative insisted that “nothing can justify this act of terrorism committed by and duly acknowledged by the Government of a Member State against another Member State.”
Over the next couple days, all non-Western members of the Security Council similarly argued that Israel’s raid was criminal, contrary to international law and an act of “state terrorism.” Indeed, the initial draft of the October 1985 resolution contained an explicit condemnation of Israel’s raid as a form of “state terrorism.” It was only under the threat of a US veto that these words were removed from the final text, as were the call for sanctions and, remarkably, an explicit reference to “Tunisian and Palestinian civilian casualties.”
When the question of “international terrorism” was first put on the agenda of the General Assembly in late 1972, discussions focused on the absence of a clear, agreed-upon definition of “terrorism.” Non-western countries expressed worry that, if the term was left undefined, it would be used by Israel, the United States, apartheid South Africa, Portugal (which still retained colonial possessions in Africa), and others as a way to de-legitimize any and all uses of force by “national liberation movements” while justifying their own uses of military force. They insisted that efforts to fight terrorism required that the concept be defined, and that such definition should apply to all political actors, covering violence against civilians by states as well as non-state actors. This would remain their position for the following decades.
#histoire #terrorisme #terrorisme_d'etat #Etats-Unis #victimes_civiles
