Historical Dictionary of Terrorism Third Edition

80 • BLACK JUNEparamilitary training. The Black Hand used secret oaths and goryinitiation rituals, and defectors were often murdered. Gavrilo Princip,the assassin of Archduke Francis Ferdinand, underwent trainingwith the Black Hand and was supplied by the Black Hand with thepistol used to murder the archduke. With the occupation of Serbia byAustro-Hungarian and German forces in 1915, the royal governmentof Serbia had removed itself to Thessaloniki, Greece. In May 1917Dmitrievich was tried for treason against the royalist government andexecuted, marking the end of the Black Hand group.BLACK JUNE. Black June was a Palestinian group founded by AbuNidal, a onetime al Fatah member who later opposed the PalestineLiberation Organization’s (PLO’s) increasing reliance on diplomacyrather than armed struggle. Black June was an Iraqi state-sponsoredgroup with the revolutionary aim of destroying Israel and establishinga Palestinian state by force of arms. Secondary objectives includedthe use of terrorist coercion against the PLO to punish it for retreatingfrom the use of armed struggle as the primary means for the liberationof Palestine. The Iraqi government also used Black June as a means ofmaintaining its own influence over the Palestinian movement withinLebanon. Black June was one of a number of different groups foundedby Abu Nidal and numbered about 500 members.Black June took its name from June 1976, when Phalangist troopswith Syrian backing massacred Palestinian fighters and civilianswithin the besieged Tal az Za’tar refugee camp. Black June tried tokill the Syrian foreign minister in 1977 but missed him, instead killinga bystander, the visiting United Arab Emirates’ minister of statefor foreign affairs. Black June has made numerous attacks on PLOrepresentatives and offices abroad. In the period from 1978 to 1979they killed Sa’id Hammami, the PLO representative in London, ‘AliYassin, the PLO representative in Kuwait, and Izzidin Qalaq, thePLO representative in Paris, and bombed a PLO office in Istanbul inAugust 1978, killing four people.Following a truce with al Fatah, Black June turned to attacks onJewish and Israeli targets. On 3 June 1982 a Black June gunman attackedand injured Shlomo Argov, Israeli ambassador to Great Britain;Israel used that attack to justify its invasion of Lebanon a fewdays later. On 9 August 1982 Black June made a grenade attack ona Jewish restaurant in Paris and then opened automatic-weapons fire