The deliberate confusion of resistance to occupation with terrorism serves to reinforce the latter, argues Ayman El-Amir* The release, for humanitarian reasons, of Abdel-Baset Al-Megrahi, the Libyan intelligence agent serving a 30-year jail sentence in Scotland for his role in the bombing of Pan Am flight 103 over Lockerbie, Scotland, in 1988, has reopened the debate over the insidious problem of terrorism. Megrahi, who has been diagnosed with terminal pancreatic cancer, flew to a much-vaunted welcome in Tripoli, led by Libya's strongman Colonel Muammar Gaddafi. The special aircraft that transported Megrahi home, and the ostentatious welcome he received, seemed to suggest the Libyan leadership was thumbing its nose at the Western world. It was a costly revenge, though. Libya has paid $1.5 billion in compensation to the families of the 270 people killed in the crash. A sense of outrage spread following news of the release of an agent who had followed the instructions of his superiors without the least qualm about the fate of the innocent victims on the ill-fated flight. US President Barack Obama said the release was "highly objectionable". A dozen other countries, together with Scottish opposition parties, denounced the decision. Libya's leaders, though, have left little doubt that they view the release as a victory. Saif Al-Islam Gaddafi, the Libyan leader's son and rumoured heir-apparent, has made it clear that Megrahi's early release had been raised at every set of business negotiations Libya has engaged in with Western partners over recent years. The implication, of course, is that Western moral values, and the judicial justice system itself, could be bought if the price was high enough, and it seems to be a price that oil-rich Libya could afford. The release of Megrahi may be the closing chapter in Libya's long history of state-sponsored terrorism. It has been a decade since Libya renounced state terrorism and divulged the secrets of its amateurish nuclear programme. That said, Gaddafi's maverick regime has contributed long-lasting damage to the national liberation causes it pretended to support. By extending funds, weapons and moral support to any number of self-styled groups of rebels Gaddafi made a major contribution to undermining the decades-old Palestinian struggle for self-determination. He may not have had anything to do with the events of 9/11, but those outrageous acts of senseless terrorism constituted a defining moment for the future of legitimate national liberation struggles. Israel, the successor to apartheid South Africa, connived with George W Bush's administration to proclaim resistance against military occupation in Palestine as acts of terrorism. There was a time when national liberation movements were honoured as the culmination of the anti- colonial struggle that led to the liberation and independence of almost half of the member-states of the United Nations. Even the obdurate, white minority racist regime in South Africa caved in to majority rule under global pressure in support of the ethnic majority struggle of blacks. In 1990 Nelson Mandela, the iconic leader of that struggle, was released and his African National Congress (ANC) legalised. Three decades earlier, in 1962, the Algerian war of liberation, and the political struggle supporting it, resulted in the independence of Algeria. The Algerians, who lost almost one million in the war of liberation, used "terrorism" as a standard military combat tactic, planting bombs and explosives in French officers' clubs and government buildings. Such targeted acts were later recognised, in a 1988 United Nations anti- terrorism resolution, as legitimate in the struggle against foreign military occupation. Then came the bombing of Pan Am flight 103 over Lockerbie and the 9/11 attacks in the US, senseless acts of terrorism that distorted the concept of national liberation struggle. Libya was neither occupied by the US, nor was it at war with it, while Al-Qaeda, which eventually claimed responsibility for 9/11, had simply committed a blatant act of terrorism. Armed resistance against the US military occupation of Iraq and invasion of Afghanistan qualify as a national liberation struggle against foreign military occupation. However, in the case of Iraq this struggle has turned into a fratricidal, sectarian conflict that has claimed the lives of tens of thousands of Iraqis and created a refugee population of three million. On 20 August alone five explosions in Baghdad resulted in the death of 95 people and the wounding of 500 more, an unconscionable act of revenge terrorism that had nothing to do with the US military occupation. Israel has everything to gain by the confusion of national liberation struggles with senseless acts of terrorism. When it occupied Palestinian and Arab territories and killed their populations it persuaded the deranged Bush administration to equate resistance against foreign military occupation with terrorism. Through its lobbyists and intermediaries in WashingtonIsrael co-authored the US global war on terrorism which has so denigrated Muslims and Islam. For decades the United Nations struggled, and failed, to coin a comprehensive definition of terrorism that could separate it from the legitimate right of armed resistance against foreign military occupation. The US and Israel were instrumental in aborting such a definition. Terrorism as a political weapon has expanded its scope to include separatist movements such as ETA in the Basque region of Spain, the Tamil Tigers in Sri Lanka and the Chechnyans in Russia. Other minorities -- the population of Tibet, the Uighurs in Xinjiang, Western China, and Muslims in Northern Nigeria -- have pressed on with their demands which have sometimes turned into violent confrontations. The use of violence against innocent targets has grown out of hand under a US-Israeli carpet definition that reduces all acts of political violence to acts of terrorism and which betrays the concept of national resistance against foreign military occupation as it was developed and legitimised in France and other European countries conquered by the armies of the Third Reich in World War II. The corruption of the national liberation struggle, or what is left of it, is due in no small part to the irresponsible actions of hare-brained dictators who assume the false mantle of revolutionary zeal. A Libyan intelligence operative like Megrahi could not have committed the heinous act that took the lives of 270 innocent passengers without it being approved at the highest level of the state. It is a pity the International Criminal Court was not in existence at the time of the crime. Terrorism as a global phenomenon is not only on the rise but is becoming more lethal. Car bombs, hostage- taking and the wanton assassination of politicians are causing ever higher casualties. In the absence of a universal, terrorism-curbing treaty, it will be the responsibility of individual states to abide by a voluntary moral code of conduct to isolate acts of terrorism from the recognised struggle for national liberation. * The writer is former Al-Ahram correspondent in Washington, DC. He served as director of United Nations Radio and Television in New York.
