State terrorism

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State terrorism refers to acts of violence against a political order below the threshold of war , which are assessed as terrorist and in which a (another) sovereign state is involved. Whether a state-sponsored act of violence is viewed as terrorist depends heavily on the political context as well as on the political perspective, so that the term is ultimately not clearly defined and can designate different situations. Thus guerrillas , who are freedom fighters from the perspective of a country that represent from another perspective terrorists and their support are thus regarded as state terrorism.

Some countries have long been unsuccessful in calling for the concept of state terrorism to be included in international law . The United Nations has not yet been able to reach an agreement. Former Secretary General Kofi Annan said that terrorism was already sufficiently defined and sanctioned as a criminal offense in international law, and that the additional offense of state terrorism was unnecessary.

As with the root term terrorism itself, there is no generally accepted scientific, political or legal definition of the term for the reasons given above.

State terrorism should not be confused with the philosophical term state terror .

Definition of State Terrorism by Noam Chomsky

Noam Chomsky published on this topic, adopting the state-official definitions of terrorism and applying them reflective to his own state action in order to avoid the related double standards or double concepts ("counter terror", " low intensity conflicts ", " counterinsurgency ") ) to lead to their contradiction: "Another problem with the official definitions of 'terror' and" terrorism "is that they necessarily require understanding the USA as the leading terrorist state." ( Hubris, p. 227 ) In a way, Chomsky abbreviates the above-mentioned dependency and relativization of the conceptual formation of context and perspective and can thus apply the term selectively.

Examples

Libya

Libya promoted Palestinian terrorist groups in the 1970s and 1980s , whom it viewed as freedom fighters in the fight against Israel , which the western world viewed as state terrorism.

Operation Condor

In Operation Condor in the 1970s, Argentina , Chile , Paraguay , Uruguay , Bolivia, and Brazil worked together with the support of the United States to jointly persecute and murder opposition groups .

Algeria

Habib Souaïdia, an officer in an Algerian anti-terrorist unit , accused the Algerian government of state terrorism in 2001. During the civil war of the 1990s , in which, according to Amnesty International estimates, up to 200,000 people died, she waged a "dirty war" against her own population in the strictest of secrecy . The government officially waged war against Islamist terrorist groups who carried out terrorist attacks against soldiers and civilians. According to Souaïdia, however, military personnel were at least involved in numerous massacres of the civilian population, and he himself witnessed state secret agents carrying out terrorist attacks against civilians in disguise , for which the Islamist terrorists were then officially and falsely held responsible. According to other witnesses from the secret services, the leadership of the largest terrorist group Groupe Islamique Armé (GIA - translated: “Armed Islamic group”) was infiltrated by agents of the Algerian secret services, and the secret services themselves formed new terrorist groups, which were then “completely out of control advised ”. The Algerian government had Souaidia, who had gone into exile in France, sentenced in 2002 to 20 years in prison for his statements in absentia. His allegations, which were also confirmed in a similar form by other witnesses, were never officially investigated. Instead, in 2005 a general amnesty for the crimes of all conflicting parties was put to the people's vote, denying any responsibility of the state organs for serious human rights violations and preventing them from being brought to justice.

France

From 1956 to 1960, the Red Hand carried out various explosive attacks and murders in the Federal Republic of Germany on members and sympathizers of the Algerian underground organization FLN . The most spectacular attack was the sinking of the Bremen freighter Atlas on October 2, 1958 in the port of Hamburg . The offenses have never been resolved until the present (2017).

The Greenpeace -Schiff Rainbow Warrior was by agents of the French on July 10, 1985 Service Action in Auckland, New Zealand sunk .

literature

  • Thomas Riegler: Terrorism. Actors, structures, lines of development , Innsbruck a. a. (StudienVerlag) 2009. ISBN 978-3-7065-4604-1 .
  • Paul Wilkinson : Can a State be “Terrorist”. In: International Affairs . Vol. 57, 1981, No. 3, pp. 467-472 (PDF) .
  • Alexander L. George (Ed.): Western State Terrorism. Polity Press, Cambridge 1991, ISBN 0-7456-0931-7 .
  • Walter Laqueur : The New Terrorism: Fanaticism and the Arms of Mass Destruction. Oxford University Press, Oxford 1999, Chapter State Terrorism , pp. 156-182 (preview) .
  • Philipp H. Schulte: Terrorism and anti-terrorism legislation. A legal sociological analysis (= criminology and criminalsociology. Vol. 6). Waxmann, Münster 2008 (also dissertation, University of Münster, 2008), pp. 25–28 and pp. 46–48 .
  • Tobias O. Keber: The concept of terrorism in international law (= public and international law. Vol. 10). Peter Lang, Frankfurt am Main 2009 (also dissertation, University of Mainz, 2008), p. 6 .
  • Richard Jackson, Eamon Murphy, Scott Poynting: Contemporary State Terrorism: Theory and Practice. Routledge, Abingdon, New York 2010 (preview) .
  • Gillian Duncan, Orla Lynch, Gilbert Ramsay, Alison MS Watson: State Terrorism and Human Rights: International Responses since the End of the Cold War. Routledge, London, New York 2013 (preview) .
  • Bettina Koch: Johannes von Salisbury and the Nizari Ismailites under suspicion of terrorism. For the critical evaluation of an aspect in the current terrorism debate. In: Journal of Legal Philosophy . 2/2013, pp. 18–38 (preview) .
  • Bettina Koch: State Terror, State Violence: Global Perspectives (= State - Sovereignty - Nation. ). Springer VS, Wiesbaden 2016, ISBN 978-3-658-11180-9 (preview) .

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ^ A b c Michael Lind: The Legal Debate is Over: Terrorism is a War Crime. (No longer available online.) In: Financial Times . Formerly in the original ; accessed on November 6, 2016 .  ( Page no longer available , search in web archives )  Info: The link was automatically marked as defective. Please check the link according to the instructions and then remove this notice. @1@ 2Template: Dead Link / www.ft.com  
  2. ↑ z. B. Noam Chomsky, Hybris, 2006 Piper, ISBN 3-492-24654-0 , pp. 225 ff.
  3. ^ Habib Souaïdia: Dirty War in Algeria. Report by an ex-officer in the Army Special Forces (1992–2000) . Translation from French. Chronos-Verlag, Zurich 2001, pp. 199–201.
  4. ↑ a b Amnesty International Algeria .
  5. ↑ a b "When the men of the DRS grew their beards, I knew they were preparing for a 'dirty job' in which they pretended to be terrorists." Habib Souaïdia: Dirty war in Algeria. Report by an ex-officer in the Army Special Forces (1992–2000) . Translation from French. Chronos, Zurich 2001, p. 113.
  6. ↑ a b c Djamel Benramdane: Algeria dirty war. Secret service agents unpack. ( Memento of the original from June 4, 2008 in the Internet Archive ) Info: The archive link was automatically inserted and not yet checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice. In: Le Monde Diplomatique , March 18, 2004. Retrieved November 11, 2017. @1@ 2Template: Webachiv / IABot / www.eurozine.com
  7. ↑ a b Ali Al-Nasani: The everyday massacre. In: Zeit Online , October 2002. Retrieved November 11, 2017.