International law

Terrorism beyond the law

Eric Moonman, MP

The drama of a hijacking lasts only until the news editor gets another story for his front page. But the tragedy persists long after it has lost the public's attention.

In recent years a number of hijackers have been handed over to the Palestine Liberation Organisation, following denunciation by that body and promises of trials and justice. Not one of the men surrendered to the PLO has ever stood trial or received punishment, and the majority have resumed their terrorist activities with the PLO or its offshoots.

For some time now the PLO has managed to maintain to the outside world that acts of terrorism are against its current policies because they are invariably carried out under fict 'ous labels, often, as with the Mohammed Boudia Group, the names of dead terrorist eaders. Boudia himself was responsible, between 1971 and 1973, for an attempt to blow up several Israeli hotels, for an explosion at a fterdam oil storage tank, and for an attempted attack on the Schonau immigration camp outside Vienna. Boudia was killed when a bomb blew up his car in Paris, but since then the following terrorist activities have been carried out in his name: the explosion of four bobby-trapped cars near a newspaper office in Paris, in October 1973; a terrorist attack on the Israel Tourist Office in Frankfurt in October 1974; and two attempted attacks on El Al planes at Orly Airport this year, in one of which a Yugoslav airliner was damaged.

Other names used by Arab terrorists have been the 'Sons of the Occupied Lands' who hijacked a Japanese plane to Libya in July 1973; the Seventh Abu Yusuf Suicide Group, used by the 'two terrorists involved in the Athens airport incident; the Punitive Organisation, who attacked the Saudi Embassy in Paris in September, 1973; the Eagles of the Palestinian Revolution, used by the group who attacked a train carrying Russian immigrants near Vienna; and in November last year, the Hero 'Abu Mahmud Group, sobriquet used by the men who hijacked a BEA plane to Tunis and named after a Fatah leader who was gunned down, presumably by rivals, in a Beirut barber's in September 1972.

Following this last hijacking, the Fatah leader Salah Khalef (Abu Ayad) went so far as to call a press conference in Cairo, at which he undertook on behalf of the PLO to publish a detailed report of the affair and full confessions from the hijackers if they were surrendered to the PLO. On this basis the three men were flown to Damascus — and no action has been taken against them.

Nor was any action taken against the 'Sons of Occupied Lands' who hijacked the Japanese jumbo jet in July 1973 who were handed over to the PLO, as were also the four murderers of the Jordanian Prime Minister, Wasfi Tel, killed in Cairo in November 1971; and the eight terrorists who murdered three diplomats at the Saudi Arabian Embassy in Khartoum; and the hijackers of a Dutch flight to Libya in November that year. Despite the PLO's demand for surrender of all these terrorists to stand trial, no trials have ever taken place. The failure of the PLO to carry out its undertakings to try the individuals involved in these terrorist activities is only one indication of their involvement with these 'fictitious'groups.

But it is not only the terrorists handed over to the PLO who have not been tried. In fact, up until 1973, only two terrorist trials have been held anywhere; one at Winterthur, near Zurich, in 1969 following an attack on an El Al airliner and the other in Israel when the only survivor of the suicide squad responsible for the Lod Airport massacre was tried.

Part of the reason for this lack of law enforcement is the absence of any clearly defined international law against terrorism. The 1937 convention for the Prevention and Punishment of Terrorism as primarily aimed at the protection of heads of state and most of its provisions were aimed at defining what was meant by "international terrorism." It was ratified by only one country and never came into force. A Draft Code of Offences against the Peace and Security of Mankind was prepared by the International Law Commissionin 1954 and several resolutions of the United Nations have reaffirmed the piinciple it laid down that encouragement given by one state to guerrilla activities in another is a form of international "terrorism contrary to international law. But wars of self-determination are regarded as an exception to this rule and it is from this that present legal difficulties arise.

The International Civil Aviation Organisation has had less difficulty in establishing definitions of offence and has,ty Conventions of 1963, 1970 and 1971 prohibited a number of activities, including hijacking, as "aerial terrorism." Even so, the problem of enforcement remains.

The United Nations has proved powerless against terrorist activities because of the opposition of the Afro-Arab and Eastern European blocs to the proposals put forward in the Draft Convention for the Prevention and Punishment of Certain Acts of Terrorism submitted to the Sixth Committee by the US. Even the majority of Western powers took an equivocal attitude to acts in pursuance of national liberation in the debate.

But as the ICAO have found, even if you can get the law defined, catching the offender is a totally different matter. The organisation of terrorist groups is designed to avoid penetration and preventative action. Modern terrorist groups are small, usually no more than five members independently controlled, which restricts the scope for infiltration by intelligence agencies. The planning of operations and surveillance of potential targets are carried out by groups on the ground and the operations squad is dispatched the shortest possible time before the act of terrorism takes place. The rewards for long-term surveillance by intelligence men are therefore few.

Violence is an integral part of PLO philosophy as the press statement issued the day after the Kiryat Shmona atrocity illustrates:

Through violence alone the revolutionaries have won worldwide recognition as the representatives of the Palestinian. Only a determination to continue the struggle by violent means will enable us to maintain and consolidate our position.

Yet the cult of violence undoubtedly contributed, along with the suppression undertaken by both Jordan and Israel, to the decline of the Palestinian resistance in the late 'sixties and early 'seventies. The concentration of resources on armed combat Led to a failure to organise any durable political organisation or political action. In addition the "all or nothing" policy with its demand for the total annihilation of the State of Israel, alienated a number of Arab states who were prepared to engage in diplomatic compromise. No doubt these factors, combined with the dissension among the leaders of the PLO and the increasing isolation of the Palestinian activities in international affairs as one atrocity followed another, contributed to Arafat's apparent conversion to diplomacy. But despite accusations by the extreme militants of having sold out because of his fight to get exclusive right of representation for the PLO at the Geneva Conference, his UN appearance demonstrated that behind the soft-sell he was still holding a gun at the heads of the UN representatives.

Certainly there has been little evidence of an abandonment of violence on the part of the Palestinian movement, however disguised its members might now be. And their access to modern destructive weapons means that they are considerably more powerful in relation to society at large than any previous generation of pirates or by-Wits. It therefore is imperative that sodiety finds ways of defeating their intentions before incidents occur, and succeeds in getting united action from sovereign states.

Undoubtedly, the increase in airport security has contributed as much to the decline in hijacking in North America as have the various International Civil Aviation Organisation Conventions already referred to. These Conventions have certainly assisted in getting the law clarified, but even more effective have been the bilateral treaties entered into, at the initial suggestion of Canada, between Cuba and Canada, Cuba and the United States, and Cuba and Mexico in 1973. This means that, in the American continent, there is virtually no place for a hijacker to go. But this is not true for planes' hijacked in Europe, because hijackers can still find co-operation in the Middle East. And here the first line of defence must be airport security. Yet even now the security precautions taRen in respect of passengers and their luggage is no more than perfunctory at some airports. Until we can show a near-certainty of potential terrorists being caught before take-off, incidents will still occur; and with the exception of the pompous few, most people will co-operate in such measures as personal and luggage searches, because they realise that they are for their own safety.

That such precautions are not taken is due as much as anything to the failure of the authorities to appreciate the arsenal that is available to the urban guerrilla, not only in terms of weapons but also in terms of ruthlessness. The natural reluctance of civilian governments to put the lives of hostages at risk inevitably increases the bargaining power of terrorists from incident to incident, since terrorists have no such squeamishness in killing their hostages as bargaining fails. And a government which decides to take the longer view that it is better to imperil its hostages and catch or kill the terrorists in order to prevent future incidents, as Israel has done on occasion, is likely to be criticised for so doing. And even here, the authorities can seldom win, for among extremists, the possibility that what is being undertaken is a 'suicidal mission' is hardly ever a deterrent.

The rare successes in getting both the hostages released and the terrorists caught tend to occur as the result of events outside the initial situation. For example, the Schveningen Prison affair was described by one newspaper as "a sophisticated combination of bluff, psychology and brute force". In fact, the principal factor in breaking the deadlock was the mistake made by the Palestinian ringleader in allying himself with two Dutch criminals with records of instability and violence, which made it unlikely that any country would give them asylum and also made the use of force inevitable.

Despite more than a decade of violent incidents, the international community is no nearer finding a solution to the problems these pose. Yet concern is spreading as more and more organisations take up the weapon of violence against uncommitted civilians. Indeed, it is only in the past year, with the outbreak of IRA bombings in England, that we have become really concerned in this country about terrorism, and even so there is no proper response to these attacks. On the international scene, the response is even less proportionate to the alarm engendered by events. The problem is, in fact, threefold: to prevent terrorist acts, to apprehend those engaged in terrorism, and to bring those who are caught to Justice.

The first priority must be prevention. Surprisingly it is also the most straightforward way of dealing with terrorism. Since the way in which terrorist groups are organised prevents advance warning of impending attacks, everything depends on security at the point of risk, which must include all travel termini, especially airports, all tourist attractions and all places of public entertainment. The need is for the adoption of the full range of security precautions — personal search, luggage search, the use of metal and explosive detection devices and of tracker dogs trained to sniff out explosives; and where travel is involved, the identification of luggage with individual passengers.

Security precautions on this scale will lead to the apprehension of some terrorists. When an act of terrorism has actually taken place, especially one involving hostages, apprehension is more difficult and involves close co-ordination of all services involved and split-second timing; the need then is for contingency plans and training. Once the terrorists are caught, they must not be returned to organisations who are themselves engaged in terrorism. In the absence of any coherent international law, they must be tried and sentenced according to the law of the country in which the offence was committed. The certain knowledge that the law will be allowed to run its course will reduce the credibility of terrorism as a political weapon for those not already engaged in it, and will also assist in forming international attitudes and, ultimately, international law.

Eric Moonman is Labour MP for Basildon.