Historical Dictionary of Terrorism Third Edition

STATE CO-OPTATION • 639repression, use of active measures, and surrogate groups outside thestate’s national boundaries; and second, revolutionary terrorism bygroups enjoying state sponsorship fighting a given regime, whether ina domestic or an international arena. Both extremes ordinarily assumethat the sponsoring state or the state being attacked is strong relative toits antagonists. In many developing nations, however, the state may beso weak that nonstate groups can effectively usurp control over statebodies or agencies, making the penetrated state agency, in effect, asurrogate actor for the penetrating group. In such cases where the stateorgans are being used to perpetrate terrorism, it would be misleading tospeak of state sponsorship of terrorism since both society and the stateas a whole are being attacked or usurped by the terrorists.In the case of El Salvador during the 1980s, the transitional regimethat seized power on 15 October 1979 tried to dissolve governmentrundeath squads such as the ORDEN militia. Nonetheless, Salvadoranoligarchs opposed to the government’s proposed land reformsenlisted the aid of military and police security personnel, who maintainedseveral death squad organizations despite official governmentpolicy. In the case of Northern Ireland, the Ulster Defence Regiment,an official armed forces unit, became dominated by sectarian ProtestantUlstermen, including members of the proscribed Ulster FreedomFighters and Ulster Defence Association, who then exploitedaccess to Ulster police files and weapons to pursue their own vendettasagainst the Irish Republican groups and nationalist population.In the case of the Islamic Republic of Iran, it appeared that radicalIslamic fundamentalist factions within the Iranian government hada greater role in influencing the actions of the students holding theU.S. embassy hostages than did the president of Iran or the Iranianinterior and foreign ministries. Each of these is an example of stateco-optation.The reality of state co-optation presents U.S. policy makers withdilemmas in dealing with co-opted states. While the perpetration ofinternal terror or external terrorism by agencies nominally under thecontrol of the weak state would ordinarily call for punishment ofthat state as the responsible party, in effect this often plays into thehands of the penetrating groups, which only gain if the state is furtherweakened. Failing to respond to such terrorism, however, also wouldhave the effect of emboldening the penetrating group to continue itsterrorist abuses.