The Principal and Vice-Chancellor of the University of St Andrews, a public research university in St Andrews, Fife, Scotland, Professor Louise Richardson, has been awarded an Honorary Doctorate by leading Russian university MGIMO at a ceremony in Moscow on November 11, 2013. After the award, Professor Richardson addressed MGIMO students and academics on contemporary terrorism in a Doctorate lecture entitled “Terrorism – what have we learned?”
What particular advice could Dr. Louise Richardson give to university students in a country, which is as familiar with the issues of terrorism as Russia is?
Aside from the most evident features of terrorism that could not be denied any way, Dr. Louise Richardson has tried to infuse additional meaning into its definition in a poorly concealed attempt at mitigating if not undermining accepted firm policies in Russia towards terrorism. Bypassing the criminal aspects of terrorist acts themselves, Dr. Louise Richardson substituted a notion of a clumsy almost juvenile-like “communicator” for the classical notion of a terrorist. A terrorist is a person who uses or advocates the use of violence and/or threats of violence to intimidate or coerce, especially for political purposes as well as the use of terroristic methods of governing or of resisting a government. However, in the lecture, terrorism has been defined as a means of communication and terrorists were depicted as “action-oriented people operating in an action-oriented in-group”. While listening to how terrorists were nearly compared to innocent children, vying for attention, one could almost feel tender pity, emanating from the stage, to the poor buggers.
“It is through action that they communicate” it has been said. Besides, terrorism has been characterized as pursuing legitimate goals through targeting “non-combatants”. It seems that Dr. Louise Richardson was also trying to imply that resisting a government through the use of violence was in itself a legitimate, if not praiseworthy, goal even though it was done through the use of violence against innocent civilians, rigidly referred to as “non-combatants”, by way of a deliberate strategy on the part of sub-state groups. In their turn, such terrorist groups, it has been implied, in their mindsets, are similar to juvenile delinquents, who are trying to gain reaction to their despicable acts of terror because it is through action that they solicit response as a proof of their importance.
In short, at attempt has been made to diminish the grave nature of terrorist activity and the degree of accountability for such acts on the part of the perpetrators of terrorist attacks. Moreover, that was a misrepresentation of terrorism, which has become an increasingly popular contemporary means of political struggle in some parts of the world and one of the major threats to social and political stability the world over. The significance of the issue has been toned down by suggesting that the terrorists do not wish to defeat their opponents through their acts of terror but simply to communicate their message to others. Terrorism being a political act by definition, such a misleading softened approach to outright savagery and crimes against humanity on the part of terrorists is very surprising and suspicious.
It seems that an attempt has been made to have Russia’s coercive approach against perpetrators of terrorist acts undermined through excessive introduction of conciliatory measures aimed at the societies where the roots of terrorism have not yet been fully eradicated. While stressing the importance of hard and soft approaches, mysterious “successful governments” have been mentioned throughout the second half of the lecture suggesting Russia’s closer cooperation with their intelligence agencies as the only important weapon in counter-terrorist arsenal.
These days, it is more than clear that the so-called conciliatory policies addressed to the broader public where there is a support for terrorism, especially when applied in coordination or with support of the US/UK intelligence agencies, can only bring about an increased covert terrorist activity in those areas. Such cooperation there can only lead to subsequent open violent terrorist outbursts, also assisted by the same above-mentioned foreign intelligence agencies. Thus, such conciliatory measures could only undermine the already existing counter-terrorist policies in Russia, which have consistently proved to be effective because they are straightforward and dependable.
There has also been a contradiction in the way the modern-day terrorist groups have been described in terms of their size and materiel. It was reiterated throughout the lecture that the non-state terrorist groups tend to be smaller yet more lethal these days. For example: “Non-state terrorist groups are fielding lethal capabilities ones thought to be the preserve of the governments. Weapons of greater and greater lethality are falling into the hands of smaller and smaller groups. The smaller the groups the harder they are to detect.” The most recent facts on the ground have shown us that weapons of greater lethality, including WMD, can end up in the wrong hands only if the “successful governments”, who think that they have everything in control, allow such weapons to be delivered into the wrong hands. That is exactly what had happened when chemical weapons were delivered through the Turkish border to Islamist fighters in Syria last summer. We all know what happened there after that weapon of mass destruction ended up in the hands of the Islamist terrorists.
In other words, these days when larger state governments exercise increasingly more pervasive intelligence gathering capabilities, genuine independent non-state actors tend to be less powerful and less lethal, whereas state-sponsored wide-networked terrorist groups (like Al-Qaeda) are indeed becoming more difficult to detect and they pose increasingly more lethal threat to other governments.
In this context, for Russia, or any nation for that matter, applying for help from US/UK intelligence agencies to engage the communities from which the present-day non-state terrorist groups draw their support would produce bad intelligence and facilitate the formation of radical groups within those communities and the emergence of a separate global community complicit in the future violence. That novel global terrorist community, controlled by foreign intelligence agencies, targets the states that engaged their local communities with the intention to produce intelligence there. One such recent tragic example is Turkey.
The lecturer did not hesitate though to conclude that there were going to be more terrorist attacks, perpetrated by non-state terrorist groups. “When the inevitable terrorist attacks occur, it would be critical to maintain our perspective, not to exaggerate the threat they pose, and not to play into the terrorist hands by providing actions to be avenged or by giving them the reaction or the renown they seek.” It sounds as if the author of those words had tried to play down the significance of future terrorist attack against Russia.
Given the achievements of the governments’ intelligence communities in recent decades, the reality of genuinely independent non-state or sub-state terrorist groups becomes almost nonexistent. Whatever violent activities take place throughout the world they are becoming increasingly state-sponsored and are perpetrated by certain states by proxy these days. In this case, whatever terrorist acts take place their masterminds do seek no renown or simply reaction. The state-sponsored terrorist actions are directed against specific states and governments to destroy their political and economic infrastructure, to topple their governments, and to attain easy access to their national assets.
The state-sponsored terrorism is becoming increasingly widespread. The terrorist-states make use of violence for short-term political purposes and they make use of non-state or sub-state terroristic methods of governing or of resisting other states’ governments for long-term strategic purposes. By shifting one’s attention exclusively to the soft aspects of the so-called non-state terrorism, one inevitably advocates for or is trying to smokescreen the state-sponsored terrorism of nowadays.
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