TIME: Almanac 1993/TIME Almanac 1993.iso/time/081390/0813007.000

Text File | 1992-08-28 | 5.9 KB | 124 lines

                                                                                WORLD, Page 26

EUROPE

Don't Count Them Out


On the decline from their bloody peaks of a decade ago,
terrorist groups are still inflicting a deadly toll


    In a swiftly changing Europe, the decline of terrorism from
its bloody peaks of more than a decade ago would seem
inevitable. Extremist ideologies are fading, after all, so
recruiting militants to fight for anachronistic or lost causes
ought to be growing more and more difficult. Besides, notes
Paul Wilkinson, director of the Research Institute for the
Study of Conflict and Terrorism in London, "it is no longer
fashionable for young people on the left to see terrorism as
glamorous and romantic. It's regarded as a futile gesture." Yet
the virus is proving surprisingly resistant.

    In Britain last week the outlawed Irish Republican Army, as
part of its stepped-up campaign beyond the borders of Northern
Ireland, assassinated Ian Gow, a friend of Prime Minister
Margaret Thatcher and a Conservative Member of Parliament, with
a bomb that wrecked his Montego car in the driveway of his
home. Three days earlier in West Germany, the Red Army Faction
almost succeeded in killing Hans Neusel, State Secretary of the
Interior Ministry and Bonn's top antiterrorist expert, in a
similar attempt. The actions demonstrated that while their
numbers may be dwindling, both the I.R.A. and the R.A.F. do not
need popular support, or even broadly based groups of
sympathizers, to remain murderously effective.

    Across Europe no terrorist group matches the I.R.A. in its
ability to sustain a campaign of deadly violence. Although the
level of I.R.A. attacks today is only 20% of that of the 1970s,
some 200 to 300 I.R.A. Provisionals are still striking at
targets in Ulster, Britain and beyond in an effort to sway
public opinion. Backed by 2,000 supporters who furnish hideouts
and surveillance, the Provisionals are using a wide variety of
weapons -- automatic rifles, pistols, letter bombs and mortars,
as well as the terrorist's special, the Czechoslovak-made
plastic explosive Semtex.

    Two weeks ago, a Roman Catholic nun was killed along with
three Ulster policemen in a land mine explosion in County
Armagh. Four days earlier a bomb exploded at the London Stock
Exchange, causing considerable damage. In June eight people
were wounded when a similar device went off in the Carlton
Club, a Conservative Party bastion near London's St. James's
Palace. In May two Australian lawyers were gunned down in the
town square in Roermond, in the Netherlands, apparently mistaken
for off-duty British soldiers.

    The I.R.A.'s biggest score, though, was Gow, 53, Thatcher's
parliamentary private secretary during her first four years in
office and a passionate defender of Britain's constitutional
ties to Northern Ireland. Although Gow's name was on a hit list
of some 100 persons, the M.P. continued to give his address and
number in the phone book. Under the cover of darkness, police
deduced, a 4 1/2-lb. Semtex charge was attached to the bottom
of Gow's auto while it was parked outside his 16th century home
in the village of Hankham, in Sussex, 60 miles from London. The
bomb exploded seconds after Gow got behind the wheel to drive
to call on a constituent.

    By comparison with the I.R.A., which thanks to Libya's
Muammar Gaddafi remains well armed, West Germany's Red Army
Faction is modestly equipped. The group's ranks are divided,
and it is demoralized by the loss of the sanctuary that was
offered to terrorists until a year ago by the Communist regimes
of Eastern Europe. Still, the R.A.F.'s hard-core leadership of
15 to 20 people retains considerable destructive force. Over
the past five years the R.A.F., a successor to the feared
Baader-Meinhof gang, has attempted to assassinate six leading
West German figures -- and succeeded four times. Eight months
ago, the group killed Deutsche Bank chief executive Alfred
Herrhausen, a personal adviser to Chancellor Helmut Kohl, by
exploding a bomb along a street as Herrhausen's armored
Mercedes-Benz 500SE limousine passed by. Antiterrorist expert
Neusel escaped that fate only because his chauffeur was on
holiday: Neusel was driving and the blast ripped through the
passenger side of his BMW.

    The prospect of a united Germany may be fueling the R.A.F.'s
latest violence. A five-page letter to the press following the
attack on Neusel decried the emergence of a "greater Germany
pursuing the same goals and imperial plans as Nazi Fascism."
The apparent anti-unification campaign follows the arrests of
10 R.A.F. operatives in East Germany in June. Three were
released on legal technicalities, but six have been handed over
to West German authorities, and one is in an East German
prison. At a press conference in East Berlin, Interior Minister
Peter-Michael Diestel confirmed that well-known terrorists
like the notorious Carlos (real name: Ilyich Ramirez Sanchez)
and Abu Daoud, a leader of the Palestinian terrorist group
Black September, were frequent visitors to East Germany under
the ousted regime of Erich Honecker.

    Despite the flare-ups in Britain and West Germany, experts
believe the threat of homegrown terrorism in Western Europe is
receding. In Italy the Red Brigades, once a veritable scourge,
have not mounted an attack in more than two years. In France,
Action Directe, a far-left extremist movement, appears to have
been crushed. Experts warn, however, that a new menace may be
looming: the ethnic and religious conflicts springing out of
the dissolution of the Soviet empire could give rise to a new
strain of the terrorist virus. The Soviets appear to be so
worried about that possibility that they are sending two retired
KGB generals to London this autumn to attend a conference on
terrorism.


By Frederick Painton. Reported by Anne Constable/London and Rhea
Schoenthal/Bonn.