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                                                                                WORLD, Page 29

TERRORISM

Wanted: a New Hideout


As Gaddafi refuses to hand over two Libyan agents, terrorists
are increasingly turning up in, yes, Sudan

By GEORGE J. CHURCH -- Reported by Ron Ben-Yishai/Jerusalem,
William Mader/London and Elaine Shannon/Washington


    It seemed too good to be true and, sure enough, it was.
As the United Nations Security Council prepared early last week
to vote on sanctions against Libya, that country's ambassador
announced that his government would hand over to the Arab
League two Libyan intelligence agents suspected of bombing Pan
Am Flight 103, which exploded over Lockerbie, Scotland, in 1988,
killing 270 people. The understanding was that the two would be
passed on for trial in either the U.S. or Britain. But when an
Arab League delegation called in Tripoli, Libyan leader Muammar
Gaddafi pronounced his ambassador "incorrect" and sent them away
empty-handed. Meanwhile, the World Court in the Hague opened
hearings on a Libyan charge that the U.S. and Britain have
resorted to "blackmail" by threatening the use of force unless
Libya surrenders the suspected bombers.

    Gaddafi's chicanery, though, appeared to win him only a
brief delay. Without waiting for the World Court's ruling, the
Security Council is expected this week to adopt sanctions
directing U.N. members to break all airline links with Libya,
stop all sales of arms to that country and expel most Libyan
diplomats. Such penalties, and Gaddafi's desperate efforts to
escape them, signal that the civilized world's terrorist
counteroffensive has made much more progress than is often
generally recognized.

    Not long ago, Gaddafi was the world's most public promoter
of terrorism. Now he substitutes hypocrisy for defiance. He
has, for example, closed some well-known terrorist training
camps in Libya -- while allowing less publicized ones to keep
running. Nonetheless, the fact that even Gaddafi no longer
espouses their cause openly illustrates how terrorists, like
everyone else, have had their world turned upside down by
political upheaval.

    The dissolution of the Soviet Union has cut off a
principal source of money and materiel for left-wing extremist
groups throughout the world. The formerly communist countries
of Eastern Europe that once offered training bases and safe
haven to terrorists are now cooperating with the West in
tracking them down. In the Middle East, allied bombs and U.N.
sanctions have left Iraq without the means or gumption to
continue sponsoring terrorists. Since the gulf war, Syrian
President Hafez Assad has taken care not to antagonize the U.S.
He has expelled some foreign terrorists from Syrian-controlled
Lebanon and has reportedly told others that they can stay in the
Bekaa Valley only on condition that they do not venture forth
to hit Western targets.

    The upshot: a tally of international terrorist incidents
compiled by the State Department fell from a peak of 864 in 1988
to 457 in 1990, the lowest since 1977. The count rose to 557 in
1991, but about half of those occurred during the Persian Gulf
war and caused minor damage and few casualties -- and even so,
the count was relatively low by the standards of the '80s.

    State's figures, however, do not include incidents staged
by terrorists who operate within one country with little or no
foreign state sponsorship, such as the Irish Republican Army,
the Shining Path guerrillas of Peru and the Tamil Tigers in Sri
Lanka. Even the more conventional Middle East-based terrorists
retain a dangerous capacity for bloodshed, as evidenced by the
mid-March bombing of the Israeli embassy in Buenos Aires and
assaults by Kurdish separatists who last week machine-gunned a
bus in Istanbul and attacked policemen and police stations in
five cities throughout Turkey.

    Intelligence experts fear that many terrorists have been
able to replace Soviet financing with money from Iran, which is
said to be backing undercover extremists from Algeria to
Thailand -- while simultaneously bidding for better official
relations with the West. A rising fear is that Tehran may seek
to capitalize on the chaos engendered by the collapse of the
U.S.S.R. by inspiring Islamic fundamentalist terrorists in the
mostly Muslim Central Asian republics once ruled from Moscow.
Worldwide, "Iran's attempts to export the Islamic revolution
have largely replaced the former Soviet Union's communist
revolutionary zeal" as a source of aid and comfort for
terrorists, says Anat Kurz, an expert on terrorism at the Tel
Aviv University in Israel.

    Egyptian, Israeli and Western intelligence sources report
that Iran has already helped establish a new terrorist refuge
and base of operations in the African nation of Sudan, which
has been taken over by another fundamentalist Islamic regime.
Tehran is known to have dispatched thousands of its
Revolutionary Guards there, and they are said to be conducting
instruction in the arts of bombing and bloodshed for members of
several extremist organizations at new training camps around
Khartoum.

    Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak reportedly has warned
Sudanese officials that they are risking a military clash with
Egypt by allowing the camps to operate, and the U.S. is
considering adding Sudan to its list of countries that sponsor
terrorism, but none of that so far appears to have had much
effect. Many terrorist organizations and their sponsors seem for
the moment to be lying low. But just as the devil in Christian
theology is supposed to be most effective when people no longer
believe in him, terrorists may be most dangerous precisely if
-- and because -- the civilized world begins to downplay the
threat.