terrorism

terrorism, notoriously difficult to define, is the deliberate attempt by self-appointed groups to employ violence, often indiscriminately, to attain their objectives, national, political, religious, or criminal. Its object is to create panic, weaken resolve, destroy opponents, discredit governments, and produce political and economic dislocation. In Britain, an early terrorist attempt was the Gunpowder plot of 1605 which would have killed the king and many members of Parliament. Edmund Burke claimed that the French Revolution of 1789 had introduced a new concept of terror, supported by governments themselves. The Cato Street conspirators of 1820 intended to murder the British cabinet at dinner as the prelude to an insurrection.

Britons became familiar with terrorist outrages—the maiming of cattle, destruction of crops, burning of houses, and murder of opponents—during the Irish agitations of the 19th cent. Great indignation was felt in 1867 at the murder of a policeman by Fenians, though the perpetrators, who were hanged, were regarded by Irish nationalists as the ‘Manchester martyrs’. The later 19th cent. saw an increase in assassinations, often by anarchists. In the USA, Presidents Lincoln, Garfield, and McKinley were killed (1865, 1881, 1901); Alexander II of Russia was blown up by a bomb in 1882; the empress of Austria shot in 1898; King Humbert I of Italy murdered in 1900; and Stolypin, the Russian reformer, shot at the opera in 1911. The murder of the Archduke Franz Ferdinand and his wife in 1914 led directly to the First World War.

After 1945, terrorism acquired new dimensions, with links between international groups, and growing disregard for the loss of innocent lives. Mahatma Gandhi was assassinated in 1948, President Kennedy in 1963, Aldo Moro, a former prime minister of Italy, kidnapped and murdered by the Red Brigade in 1978, Lord Mountbatten killed by the IRA in 1980, and Indira Gandhi killed by one of her own bodyguards in 1984. Car-bombs and aircraft hijacking became increasingly common and, in the Middle East, suicide-bombers proved hard to stop. In 1988 nearly 300 people died when Pan Am flight 103 was destroyed over Lockerbie; the Real IRA killed 26 people and injured 200 more with a bomb at Omagh in 1998. These atrocities were dwarfed on 11 September 2001 when the World Trade Centre at New York was destroyed by supporters of Osama bin Laden with the loss of nearly 3,000 lives. Britain joined in the coalition to root out the al-Qa'eda terrorist network in Afghanistan, and in the 2003 campaign in Iraq which overthrew Saddam Hussain. In Britain itself, international terrorism moved closer with the attack in 2005 on London's transport system, which left more than 50 people dead.

J. A. Cannon