Terrorism, Drugs & Crime in Europe after 1992

Richard Clutterbuck

• Publisher: Taylor & Francis
• Year: 2013
• Print ISBN: 9780415616232
• eBook ISBN: 9781317829362
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Politics
• Index: Politics & International Relations

First published in 1990, Richard Clutterbuck's fascinating analysis of European security confronts the problems of internal European community frontiers and technological aids in combating terrorism and international crime. He looks at what the EC countries have done in the past, describes the technology now becoming available, and makes radical proposals for airport security, fighting drugs, and overcoming the intimidation of witnesses and juries. Above all, he foresees he exciting prospect of the USSR, the USA, and a united Europe co-operating for the first time to overcome the common enemies of terrorism and international crime.

Part I

Introduction

Chapter one

The challenge of 1992

Terrorism, drugs and computer crime

In June 1985 a TWA aircraft was hijacked to Beirut and one American was killed before the other passengers were released. As a direct result of this (and of its massive and emotive television coverage) 6 million Americans cancelled their vacation plans in Europe and the Mediterranean in 1986. There could be few better illustrations of Sun Tzu’s ancient Chinese proverb: ‘Kill one, frighten ten thousand’.

During 1987 and 1988 there were repeated rumours of huge concessions (diplomatic and financial) by the US, French and German governments to secure the release of individual hostages from Lebanon.

In 1984 the US, French, Italian and British governments withdrew their Multinational Peacekeeping Force (MNF) from Lebanon as a direct result of two suicide bombs which killed 241 US Marines and 60 French soldiers in their bases.

Whether Western governments and people should or should not be swayed by terrorism, they are. There is no logic about this. The annual killing rate per million of the population in Northern Ireland is by far the highest in Europe, yet it is only half the annual death-rate in Northern Irish road accidents,¹ and far less than half the criminal homicide rate per million in Los Angeles or Washington, DC. Compared with world wars or even regional wars, or with famines, floods and earthquakes, the terrorist killing rate is minute.

The explanation is that we identify with the individual victims of terrorism because we see their faces (and the faces of those who love them) nightly on television. Whether they want to or not, democratic governments cannot afford to ignore the intensity of public emotion which is aroused. When even one or two of its citizens’ lives are held in the balance in a major terrorist incident, a government has to give it overriding priority. When other countries are involved, either as sponsors of terrorism or as half-hearted allies, public passions may prejudice working relationships with those countries when national interests would be better served by those relationships’ being restored.

In 1984 the President of the General Assembly of Interpol said that the most pressing problems in international crime were the narcotics trade, white-collar crime and terrorism.² The narcotics trade certainly causes more deaths than terrorism world-wide (from drug overdoses and murders), though as yet most of these are outside Europe, where the main damage is to society and to the economy. Computer crime is growing at an alarming rate and it could generate even more illegal money than the drug trade. In fact they are closely linked; all three may be greatly affected by the implementation of the Single European Act after 1992, but because of its perverse influence on public perceptions and on political decisions, terrorism is the main concern of this book.

Towards a united European Community

After 1992, the intention of the Single European Act (SEA) is that it will be as easy to cross the frontier between France and Italy as between Kansas and Missouri, or to consign a truckload of goods from Athens to London, without check-points, as easily as from New York to San Francisco.

Yet Europe has problems which the USA does not have. At most borders in the European Community (EC), there are changes in languages, changes in the law and, in some cases, radically different judicial systems. In the USA the great majority of teenagers and adults, of all races, were educated with English as the medium of instruction, and are there because they or their ancestors wanted to be citizens of the USA rather than of their mother countries. There are many immigrants in the EC who still look first to their motherlands and their mother tongues.

Foreign terrorist groups already find it much easier to find cover and operate in the EC than they would do in the USA. The challenge to be faced is that they will find it easier still after 1992 in the EC, unless member countries can harmonize their measures for prevention and response, and co-operate in applying them.

The EC is already making strides towards political as well as economic union. The Council of Ministers has now reduced the areas in which unanimity is required, and can in other matters pass legislation binding on all its members, unless twenty-three out of seventy-six votes³ are against it which, with the weighted voting system, means that it can be vetoed only if three of the largest countries (France, Germany, Italy or the UK), or two of those countries plus any one of the smaller countries except Luxembourg, or five of the smaller ones, all vote together against it. By these means, nearly 300 legislative proposals needed for the 1992 internal market have been passed. The trend is towards increasing the powers of the Council of Ministers over those of the twelve national governments.

Similarly the powers of the European Parliament, which has been directly elected since 1979, are gradually extending at the expense of those of national parliaments. Progress here has been and will probably continue to be slower than with the Council of Ministers, chiefly because the Members of the European Parliament (MEPs) are not regarded by the voters as their representatives in the same way as the members of their national parliaments or their ministers; also because the European Parliament’s debates are in public, and there is less chance of useful behind-the-scenes discussion amongst 518 MEPs than amongst 12 ministers. So it is more difficult for them to reach compromises than for the Council of Ministers, whether at the summit or at departmental level, meeting together in private. It is hopeless to conduct delicate negotiations entirely in front of the television cameras.

Apart from ease of movement, there are other likely developments which may increase rather than reduce conflict. There will be a greater flow of cheap labour into countries whose governments and trade unions permit them to undercut the wage levels of nationals; this may lead to a greater response to neo-Nazi politicians which could explode into violence. Environmental pressure groups have already become violent in Germany (mainly against property rather than people) and this trend may spread. As the East–West accord develops, both Eastern and Western Communist parties may be regarded by the ideological and intellectual left as traitors for accommodating capitalism, and this could increase the bitterness and the frustration, much as the strength of the Communist Party of Italy (PCI) and its co-operation with the parliamentary process embittered the Red Brigades (BR) in Italy in the 1970s. The escalation from violent demonstrations to bombing of installations to killing people is sadly a familiar by-product of frustration.

The policy of the European internal market will be to make up for removing internal frontiers by strengthening its external frontiers. Seaports and airports are both internal and external. Airports should present no insurmountable problem, since most international airports already have separate access for international and domestic flights. Major international seaports, like Southampton, accustomed to ferries from the Isle of Wight, France and world-wide, are equally geared for it. Smaller ports will be harder to secure, small fishing and yachting harbours harder still. Countries with deserted sandy beaches could be made more secure only with expensive surveillance equipment and personnel. Land frontiers – mountainous, wooded or rural – present few obstacles to small groups of terrorists or criminals. The EC would therfore be unwise to rely too much on a secure external frontier. Once in Greece, the intruder could be in London or Madrid without further check – unless subjected to irregular spot checks anywhere on the way.⁴

The world in the 1990s

The microelectronics revolution is the fastest industrial revolution of all time, and may prove to be the most profound. The rate of change it is bringing to European societies may be at its fastest in the early 1990s, in the fields of robotics and information technology. The percentage of the population of industrial countries employed in manual work (agriculture, mining, manufacture, etc.) had already fallen from 42 per cent in 1972 to 29 per cent in 1982 and will be between 10 and 20 per cent by the end of the century. The majority employed in service industries will therefore rise to over 75 per cent in the early years of the European single market. This majority does not create wealth, but merely opens the way for its creation, processes and distributes it and provides leisure and other facilities for the producers. To pay for these service industries, the actual producers of wealth will have to produce a great deal more – much more than was produced by more people in longer working hours in the past. They should be able to do this comfortably with the higher productivity resulting from robotics and information technology. In fact, if we are to avoid the constant burden of 10 per cent or more unemployed, we shall probably have to reduce the working week to about thirty hours, four shifts, or four days; this will mean still more leisure, more leisure industries, so still more surplus wealth needed to pay for them.

So far from closing the gaps between rich and poor, internationally and domestically, these changes are likely to widen them. The economic growth rate of industrial countries will be faster than that of the Third World countries. Though their economies too will grow, so will their populations, and they will fall further and further behind. The information explosion will ensure that their peoples know that there are places where the grass is greener, and that there are ways of getting to them. The pressure for immigration, therefore, will grow, and, if legal immigration is restricted, there will be more and more attempts to find other ways: witness the tip of the iceberg in the form of the Vietnamese boat people and other ‘economic migrants.

Within industrial societies there will be widening gaps between the skilled and the unskilled, especially in the service industries, where there will be a new kind of rich and poor. The ‘information rich’ will be those who master and keep pace with the new information technology; who may be able to work a relatively stress-free day at home with their intelligent computers, teleconference screens, fax and other aids; and who will have fulfilling well-paid jobs. The ‘information poor’ will be those who are unable or unwilling to keep up with using the technology, and will fall into duller and duller routine jobs, if they have jobs at all.⁵

Most homes will have a choice of up to fifty television channels, including some via satellite. Authoritarian governments are likely to control these channels and use them to mould their people’s minds. Democratic governments will generally give them free rein, which will enable anyone who has the money, from inside or outside (including politically-minded TV barons, the PLO and Colonel Gadafi), to disseminate whatever propaganda they wish in the form of news and current affairs or entertainment. This flood of information will make it easier for those who wish to destabilize democratic societies. This may tempt some democratic governments to become more authoritarian to counter it. It is uncertain how the European internal market would handle the situation if some national governments went this way and others did not.

The rapid growth of plastic money and of the instant electronic transfer of money abroad through the international banking system will affect the choice of targets for both criminal and terrorist operations and will facilitate the laundering of illegal money from either of these sources. These and associated problems, and possible solutions to them, are discussed in Chapter 9, 14, 16 and 17.

The nature of the terrorist threat

Indigenous European terrorist movements range from those with a hard core of 10 or 20 to movements like the IRA (Irish Republican Army) and ETA (the Basque terrorists) with a hard core of 50 to 100 and a fringe of active supporters of 200 to 300, needing a budget of about £5 million a year. All of the ideological movements, such as the Red Brigades (BR), the Red Army Faction (RAF) and Action Directe (AD), at their peak were in the 50–100 category, though most were cut back in the 1980s to small gangs of 10 or 20.

The richest of all is the conglomeration of Palestinian movements under the umbrella of the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO), which has assets estimated at $5 billion and an annual income of about $1.25 billion.⁶

The bitterness and frustration amongst the Arabs over their inability to get rid of Israel, despite their huge superiority in numbers and wealth, is so intense that, even if there were a political settlement, there would be some Arab rejectionist groups who would continue to use violence both in the Middle East and Europe to overturn it. The same applies in Northern Ireland, where rejectionist groups would include both Republicans and Unionists. Neither the Palestinian nor the Northern Irish problem will go away.

Unlike the Northern Irish Catholics, the Basques are in a majority in their region of Spain and enjoy a high degree of autonomy. The conflict there is therefore more likely to fade away as the terrorists realize that they are losing popular support by their violence.

Other nationalist movements (such as the Corsicans in France) may also be defused, but experience sadly shows that new ones are almost certain to arise, or old ones re-emerge. Some of those outside the EC may also try to fight their battles on West European streets, as the Armenians, Croats, Arabs and Iranians have already done, and as, possibly, Slovenes, Slovaks, Ukranians and other Soviet national communities may do in the future. Like the Palestinians, the more they fail at home the more they will seek to make an impact on the international stage.

The ideological left and right suffered major set-backs in Western Europe in the 1980s and, with the possible exception of the Revolutionary Cells (RZ) in Germany, seem likely to continue to decline. Nevertheless, experience has shown that two or three ruthless and dedicated people, with the propaganda skills to attract support from idealistic or disgruntled sections of the population, can build a new and highly lethal terrorist movement quite quickly. Chapter 3 gives an account of the growth of one such movement from just such beginnings – the Red Brigades in Italy. In less than ten years, a handful of ideologically motivated people were able to create a movement which made the Italian political and judicial systems dance to ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Original Title Page
• Original Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Table of Contents
• Preface
• Abbreviations
• Prologue
• Part I: Introduction
• Part II: Threat and response 1969–89
• Part III: Technological development
• Part IV: Public safety and civil rights
• Part V: What is to be done?
• Notes and bibliography
• Index