DEFINING TERRORISM

by RAY FLEMING l AN interesting exchange took place at the Home Affairs committee of the House of Commons yesterday.
Charles Clarke, the Home Secretary, said that he “could not think of a situation in the world” where terror would be justified for political change. This appears to mean that in Mr Clarke's book the people of Burma, of North Korea and of Zimbabwe, to take three prominent cases, have no alternative than to submit meekly and indefinitely to the brutal regimes which have taken their freedom away from them. Is this really Mr Clarke's and the Labour government's position? If Mr Clarke were a Zimbabwean and a political opponent of Robert Mugabe's totally discredited regime would he think it reasonable that he could take no action to remove his oppressors, especially since all the evidence available to him showed that neither the United Nations, nor the African Union, nor South Africa, nor the United States, nor Britain, was willing to do anything beyond indulging in “quiet diplomacy” to restore his democracy and his freedom to him? During a discussion at the committee of Mr Clarke's “glorification of terrorism” provisions, he was asked the Mandela question, which I have posed in this space more than once. Would anyone who supported Nelson Mandela's African National Congress during South Africa's apartheid era have been prosecuted if Mr Clarke's proposed legislation had been in force? In classic new Labour fashion, Mr Clarke answered a different point by saying that people would not have been guilty “by not condemning” the Congress.
At his monthly media conferencce yesterday Mr Blair repeated his belief that terrorism must be fought, even if in doing so some long-established human rights are foreited, because of the overriding importance of “one basic civil liberty, which is the right to life of our citizens and freedom from terrorism”. The Prime Minister's point is valid in the case of terrorism directed against, say, an internal threat such as the IRA once posed to British lives.
But it is less persuasive when Britain intervenes unecessarily in other international situations where it has no legal standing. The attempt to condemn all terrorism, even when it may represent a last resort for those undertaking it, is misguided and unhelpful.