The intense and prolonged Irish prison protests of three decades ago, in which I took part, were as much a rejection of the terrorist label as they were a refusal to accept the status of criminal. The need to attach the label “terrorist” onto an opponent, so that it is displayed everywhere like a car number plate, is a crucial weapon employed by ensembles including states who use the same violent methods for which they have dismissed their enemies as terrorists.
In this most probing of examinations, Ekaterina Stepanova approaches the vexing issue of terrorism with subtlety of mind and a penetrating intellect. She employs the term “terrorist” only after much thought and then avoids the moral haughtiness so often adopted by those most persistent in its usage. She is not blind to the widespread existence of state violence against civilian populations nor does she seek to excuse states when they engage in it. She finds an academic utility value in her management of the term and it is through that prism that her work should be read. Her definition of terrorism is;\
the form of violence that most closely integrates one-sided violence against civilians with asymmetrical violent confrontation against a stronger opponent, be it a state or a group of states.1
This locates terrorism exclusively within the armoury of the weak as a weapon against the strong. Terrorism is strategically directed violence against civilians as a means of redressing a power disparity. By way of example, she illustrates Palestine, where she argues that an asymmetry between high nationalist mobilisation and a low possibility of that nationalism achieving its goals increases the likelihood of terrorism being deployed.
In the post-9/11 world, Stepanova, without losing sight of the fact that local acts of terrorism produce more fatalities, posits a quasi-religious armed force as the major form of terrorism and her focus is on the brand that gives the greatest “bang for the buck”— superterrorism.
Stepanova with considerable persuasiveness explains how global Islamic terrorism has evolved using a combination of the vanguardist ideas recommended by the martyred thinker generally identified as having spawned Islamic terror, Sayid Qutb, and the Brazilian communist Carlos Marighela’s prescripts for networking terrorism. These new networks of terrorists are more difficult to contain than the old localized hierarchical structures.
For Stepanova, this highly toxic blend in the hands of bellicose Islamic global terrorism poses a major threat to civilian populations. But rather than argue that the objective of those trying to eradicate the phenomenon should be utter obliteration, she calls for a radical reorientation toward inserting a strategic wedge between the nationalistic and the religious components that constitute the overall terrorist grid. Her logic is stunningly simple: the international system of modern states is in no position to compete with the extremists in terms of ideological mobilzation. Since the collapse of Marxism, Islamicism offers an alternative global ideological vision. Against it the Western state system stands little chance of providing an alternative ideological centre of gravity that can draw masses away from violent Islam. “It is self-delusional to think that quasireligious extremism can be neutralized by using modern western style democratic secularism.”2
For Stepanova the only alternative is to encourage the nationalisms and the combination of forces in their orbits that the West once sought to suppress. Underpinning this radical assertion is a contention that the state has “something in common with even the most violent and radical ethnoseparatists, including those that employ terrorist means, the central focus on the state itself as the main point of reference.”3 If those fighting the state merely seek to achieve an improved upon copy of what they are battling the opportunity opens up for the in situ state to “identify, deal with, and transform” the insurgents.4
In a recent work by the Liverpool academic Kevin Bean this was made demonstrably obvious in the case of the defeat of the Provisional IRA in Northern Ireland. There that defeat was secured by the British state manoeuvring, cajoling, flattering, and squeezing the IRA leadership into a position where it too could poke its snout into the state gravy train. By contrast, religious terrorism operating outside the state framework shares no common ground which the state could fertilize, and out of which could sprout an accommodation with its violent adversary.
Stepanova believes that because scholars and academics do not come up with a thorough understanding of Islamic terrorism then public comprehension of the matter is shaped in the main through the much distorted filters of the security experts. Just how damaging, not to mention useless, this corpus has been in helping society better understand Northern Ireland is not for discussion here. It is enough to say that were its perspectives to have held sway over the past two decades Northern Ireland would still be in the grip of armed conflict.
Scholars and academics need to be reinforced by a wider perspective which looks at the quasi religious phenomenon which Stepanova so firmly believes Islamism is. The broader religious terrorist phenomenon is not rooted solely in matters of “pure” theology. It is constitutive of wider ranging societal concerns such as politics, economics, culture, and identity. Most groups that operate locally and are Islamist based are also subject to strong nationalist influences. Examples illustrated are Chechnya, Kashmir, and Iraq.
In particular Stepanova seems to develop her perspective from her observations of the Hamas experience. In it she sees a group that, whatever the theological leanings of its key figures, is very much tempered and constrained by its need to keep public support in the areas where it is most representative. This “resort to nationalism” has a moderating affect on their violence.5
In the application of this to Iraq Stepanova argues for a move away from a security based policy of suppressing nationalist elements towards one which is more supportive of such elements. It has the ring of rather than unite and conquer the US forces should divide and conquer. But there is nothing new under the sun here. The decision is as always who to side with. Then when the excesses of the supported side can no longer be hidden from public view, as it occurred in Argentina, the US ends up in the dock of world opinion and its reputation excoriated.
One anomaly in Stepanova’s perspective is where she labours somewhat to argue that the end goal of Islamic terrorism, the establishment of the Caliphate, is “by no means an analogue of the theocratic state in its Western interpretation.”6 She claims that rather than have a ruling clergy the Caliphate is ruled directly by god. How useful a distinction this is remains dubious. What makes clerics of all varieties powerful and influential is their ability to sell themselves as specialized or privileged interpreters of the thought of God.
Nevertheless, this is a refreshing work. Rarely are so few pages as tightly packed with ideas, reasoned argument, and skillful presentation as Ekaterina Stepanova has managed here.
Review first published in Democracy and Security, 5:100–102, 2009.
Notes
1. E. A. Stepanova, Terrorism in Asymmetric Conflict: Ideological and Structural Aspects (New York: Oxford University Press, 2008).
2. Ibid., 153.
3. Ibid., 53.
4. Ibid., 125.
5. Ibid., 115. 6. Ibid., 73.
Ekaterina A. Stepanova: Terrorism in Asymmetric Conflict: Ideological and Structural Aspects (New York: Oxford University Press, 2008).
What began as a day out in the spring sunshine 20 years ago ended as the darkest hour in the history of British football - Peter Went
I think I have a good memory of events from twenty years ago today. It was a Saturday and I had been listening to the radio most of the day in my H-Block cell. Liverpool would be playing in the FA Cup semi final cup in the afternoon and their opponents were Nottingham Forest. Liverpool had been in such form throughout the season and were sufficiently smarting from the previous year’s defeat at the hands of Wimbledon in the final of the same competition that Forest could not conceivably stand in their way.
I had another reason for listening to the radio long before the match was due to kick off. Earlier in the week two IRA volunteers had been arrested on active service in West Belfast just after they had attached a booby trap bomb to the gate of a RUC barrack. One, Pat Sheehan, was a close friend and a former hunger striker from the protest that had taken the lives of ten of his comrades. He had visited me on a number of occasions in the jail after he had been released. The roles would be soon reversed. The other, Marie Wright, now deceased, was also a former prisoner.
On hearing of their appearance in court I was devastated, particularly for Pat given that I had known him so well. As determined as both of them were, knuckling down for the long haul would be no easy challenge. I had no thoughts for their intended victims. We were at war with them and they with us. That’s how it was then. Compassion was a finite resource, limited to our own side and denied to the other. With thoughts of Pat and Marie still in my mind I settled down to listen to the game. Like everybody else 6 minutes was as far as I got before disaster struck. My thoughts of what had happened in a Belfast courtroom were soon to be displaced by trauma from a Hillsborough football stadium, the pangs of which still tug at my emotions to this day.
As a Liverpool fan I had always wanted to stand amongst that multitudinous throng of moving, swaying, chanting bodies. There was a deep affinity with the souls who populated the Kop. Many years earlier on black and white television after Liverpool had pulled back from a two goal deficit to beat derby rivals Everton, the camera stayed on the moving mass in the Kop for what seemed like an eternity. It looked like heaven on earth. It wasn’t live. Outside of FA cup finals which were televised as they were happening we had to wait to that evening or the following day to watch English soccer. Years later I would make it to the Kop. But the experience has become indivisible from the tragedy of twenty year ago. Today 25, 000 people gathered throughout Anfield to remember the dead.
96 fans lost their lives that day, men and women, boys and girls. So rapid was death that only two fans died in hospital. The oldest was 67 and the youngest 10. Their names are etched on a monument outside Anfield. Whenever I am in Liverpool for a game or not I make a point of visiting the shrine. The emotion is powerful. I can only compare it to visiting the resting places of republican hunger strikers. That says a lot about its potency.
One thing that annoyed me deeply after it was when some fool called Albert phoned up the popular BBC Talkback show to suggest that because the Anglo Irish Agreement had been signed at a place called Hillsborough the horror visited on the Liverpool fans in a Sheffield stadium of the same name might be God’s revenge. There is no bigot like a religious bigot. His hateful comment prompted me to write a piece called ‘Albert the Imbecile’ which I sent out to a local Sinn Fein newssheet in South Belfast. The editor declined to carry it on the grounds that it might have sounded sectarian.
Immediately after the disaster the police and gutter press between them began lying with the intention of putting the blame for the disaster onto the Liverpool fans alleging they were drunken hooligans. Professor Phil Scraton describes how the cops got together to falsify their accounts and realign their stories. Lord Justice Taylor who carried out the inquiry into the disaster in his report rubbished the notion that ‘hooliganism’ played any part in the events of the day. He placed the blame on bad police management and was scathing of the police officer in charge for being ‘untruthful’ in his account. He also rubbished the Sun for its reporting which showed that the paper had attacked Liverpool fans with a venom usually reserved for Irish people.
The disgraceful inquest verdict of two years later recording ‘accidental death’ infuriated and depressed the families of the dead. The path that Taylor had blazed through the fog of cover-up had been rerouted back into a marsh where truth was sucked down. With the approval of the coroner the police through a coordinated legal strategy fought an action aimed at discrediting the Taylor finding.
Undeterred, those who want justice for the 96 continue to this day, determined that they shall never walk alone.
I don’t often go to Duleek. There is little in the course of my daily life that would take me to the neat little village in County Meath. On the previous occasion I had been there it was for the unveiling of the hunger strike monument last June. It is a work of considerable craftsmanship situated less than half a kilometre from the main street. It is the property of the Duleek 1916-1981 Monument Committee. Today it was the site of the Easter commemoration. The Monument Committee, organisers of today’s event, is an independent republican cultural body which dedicates itself to the politics of memory with a specific focus on all Irish hunger strikers who lost their lives in the course of struggling against the British.
Every Easter Sunday I try to attend one of the events. On occasion I end up at commemorations organised by groups I have little in common with other than a shared desire to pay tribute to fallen comrades plus the fact that we are republicans not traitors. I don’t mind who organises it. It would be dishonest of me to say I would attend a Sinn Fein event; for the same reason that when Sinn Fein was still a republican body and I was a member it would never have occurred to me to attend an Easter commemoration organised by the Workers Party or Fianna Fail. Now that it is in name a republican bank, but with absolutely no republican assets, coupled with the party openly calling on people to become touts the gap between me and it is 180 degrees.
This afternoon, I travelled with my wife and two children over to Duleek village green. It was a beautiful day and the children joined with others of their age in romping around the green. Playing not politics is what captures their imaginations; although they do like the noise of the band. That reminded me of the wisdom of the old Chinese proverb ‘if your neighbour annoys you buy each of his children a drum.’ By the time we arrived the band had already assembled and it wasn’t long before we moved off along the main street then turning left to make our way up to the monument. I estimated the crowd to be about 200 strong. The ubiquitous Garda presence prowled on the fringes without ever becoming intrusive.
What I liked about it was that there was no standing on ceremony. As soon as we arrived at the monument it was down to business. The wreaths were laid, the proclamation read, and flags lowered as a minute’s silence was observed. The one dissenting voice from the silence was the noisy howling of my three year old. He had either lost his toy car or had been upset by his sister in some way so he decided to protest in the way that three year olds do. No one other than me seemed bothered. The main speech was delivered and with the playing of the national anthem complete the assembly began to disperse.
‘Traitors’ featured in much of the discourse both from the speakers and amongst the crowd. The redoubtable Breandan Mac Cionnaith of Garvaghy Road prominence was the main speaker and he hit out at Martin McGuinness’s use of the term against republicans who refuse to back him in his political career as a British micro minister. Some in the crowd including myself would jokingly address each other as ‘fellow traitor.’ Breandan Mac Cionnaith delivered a radical address which left little room for misinterpretation. Those operating partitionist institutions north and south had failed the people of the country, the ideals of the 1916 proclamation had not been achieved anywhere and no matter how dispirited people were republicanism would come again.
I try not to be an emotional republican. Emotion always distorts reason which ultimately is what should guide us through life. But it is difficult not to feel a surge of emotion racing through the veins when reflecting in those situations on what the men and women of 1916 gave up in order to make a stand against a malign foreign power which had long subverted Irish independence for no end other than its own.
After proceedings had come to a close we spent a few moments chatting to Breandan Mac Cionnaith and some of those behind the event. Mac Cionnaith has battled long and hard in his adult political life and we wished him well for the future as he tries to salvage something from the wreckage of republicanism. The organisers thanked us for coming. We in turn thanked them for having built a monument so fine that it made the visit an honour; we felt privileged to stand beside it. Before making the journey back to our home we had some family photos taken at the monument. Whether our children grow up to acquire republican perspectives is a matter for them. As their parents we are just glad that that they can share moments that are special for us.
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