Historical Dictionary of Terrorism Third Edition

666 • TERRORISM, DEFINITIONA fundamental distinction is often made between domestic, or territorial,terrorism and international terrorism: Domestic terrorism islimited to given countries or regions and is usually part of an internalinsurgency or revolutionary war. International terrorism is nonterritorialin that it is not limited to any one region. An example of a domesticinsurgency is found in the case of the Farabundo Martí LiberationFront (FMLN) in El Salvador: following its failure to overthrowthe Salvadoran government in its ill-fated “final offensive” in 1981,the FMLN retreated to the jungles and then undertook a campaign ofbombing the economic infrastructure and murdering local officialsor notables close to the government. In this case, the bombings can beviewed as a rational tactic for crippling the economic resources of thegovernment, while killing many of the Salvadorans could be rationalizedon the grounds of their being functionaries of the government.The Argentine Anti-Communist Alliance of Argentina representsan example of a right-wing death squad that remained domestic inthe scope of its activities.By contrast, the Chilean Fatherland and Liberty group, whichwas a right-wing death squad, not only engaged in domestic terrorismagainst leftists in Chile, but became international in scope byassassinating the former Chilean foreign minister, Orlando Letelier,outside his home in Washington, D.C., in 1976. The campaign ofbombings in England and Germany, and attempted actions in Gibraltarcarried out by members of the Irish Republican Army (IRA) inthe 1970s and 1980s expanded the scope of IRA terrorism from beingmerely domestic to international. The English civilians or Britishsoldiers in Germany who were killed were usually quite unconnectedwith Northern Ireland, and the resulting damages inflicted no directblows on the IRA’s enemies, namely, the British government, Unionistpoliticians, or the Ulster Protestant militia groups. The object ofsuch attacks was rather to create terror and consternation among theBritish public to incite them to put pressure on the British governmentto withdraw its troops from Northern Ireland and to allow theIrish to resolve the question of the fate of the northern six counties ontheir own. Similarly many Islamic fundamentalist terrorist groups,such as the al Qa’eda group of Osama bin Laden, have resortedto terrorism crossing international borders, both in their attemptsto impose their vision of Islamic rule on those Muslim nations theyhave targeted as well as attempts to punish nations they perceive asenemies of Islam, such as the United States and Israel.