Terrorism and Counter-Terrorism in Africa

Fighting Insurgency from Al Shabaab, Ansar Dine and Boko Haram

H. Solomon

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2015
• ISBN:
  9781137489890
• Topic: Politik & Internationale Beziehungen
• Subtopic: Terrorismus

Traditional counter-terrorism approaches, with their emphasis on the military, are failing. This is seen in the fact that there is an average of three terrorist attacks per day in Africa. This study calls for more holistic solutions, with an emphasis on development and better governance to curb the scourge of terrorism.

1

Understanding the Terrorist Threat in Africa and the Limitations of the Current Counter-Terrorist Paradigm

Introduction

For the young schoolgirls of Chibok in northeastern Nigeria, 11 April 2014 was to be no ordinary day. As the girls aged between 16 and 18 years sat for their physics paper at the local school, militants from the Islamist sect Boko Haram stormed the school and abducted more than 230 young girls. They were taken to one of Boko Haram’s hideouts in the sprawling 60,000 square kilometre Sambisa forest.1 Various attempts to rescue the girls ended in failure, while subsequent reports indicated that at least some of the girls had been taken to Boko Haram’s other camps in Cameroon.2

The abduction captured the world’s attention. A twitter campaign using the hashtag ‘#BringBackOurGirls’ highlighted their plight. Soon marches calling for swift action to reunite these girls with their parents took place from Washington and London to Abuja and Johannesburg. Prominent personalities and leaders, like the First Lady of the US, Michelle Obama, and British prime minister, David Cameroon, soon joined the campaign.3 This public campaign resulted in offers of assistance from the international community to the Nigerian authorities in rescuing the girls. However, the girls have not yet been rescued.

The story of the abducted girls graphically illustrates the terrorist threat in Africa and the challenge of confronting it. Invariably it is ordinary civilians who suffer the ravages of the terrorist scourge while political elites are safely ensconced in their villas. The ease with which the militants mounted their operation and moved the girls into a neighbouring state points to the growing sophistication of these attacks and the issue of porous borders. The use of the Sambisa forest as a militant hideout, meanwhile, highlights the issue of ungoverned spaces where the writ of the government that is nominally in charge has no meaning – spaces that are exploited by terrorists. Conversely, the inability of the Nigerian government to protect its citizens highlights issues of state weakness, leading to state contraction, and in extreme cases, state collapse. Mali lost control over its northern parts showing state weakness and allowing Islamists to capture key towns. In Somalia the Islamist Al Shabaab continues to mount attacks against the weak Somali Federal Government (SFG) and its African Mission in Somalia (AMISOM) backers. The fact that the Nigerian government has been unable to rescue the girls despite support from countries like the US, Britain and Israel, meanwhile, suggests problems with the existing counter-terrorism paradigm. Before understanding the nature of the threats posed and problems with the existing counter-terrorism paradigm we need to unpack our terminology.

Modern definitions of an old concept

The term ‘terrorism’ is one of those few words, like the Internet, that has insidiously worked its way into our everyday parlance; yet there is no clear, consistent definition of either what constitutes terrorism or who the terrorist is.4 The purpose of this section is to contextualise terrorism as a global phenomenon historically and, in particular, within Africa.

Terrorism as a phenomenon is gradually becoming a pervasive, often dominant influence in our daily lives. It affects the manner in which governments conduct their foreign policies and the way corporations transact business. It causes alterations in the structure of our security forces and forces us to spend huge amounts of time and money to protect public figures, vital installations, citizens and even our systems of government.5 But what is terrorism? Academics, politicians, security experts and journalists have employed a variety of definitions of terrorism throughout history, changing the meaning and usage of the word over time to accommodate the political vernacular and discourse of each successive era.6

Examples of terrorism can be traced all the way back to the ancient world, where the Assyrians – perhaps the ancient world’s fiercest and most violent people – conquered people with material assets and large populations through large military formations of chariots and cavalry, subsequently ruling their remote and diverse empire from the ninth to seventh centuries BCE through systematic terror.7 The Greek historian Xenophon (c. 431–c. 350 BCE) was the first to write of the effectiveness of psychological warfare against enemy populations.8 More specifically terrorist history dates back to the times of the Sacarii of Judea and the Zealots, both Jewish terrorist groups active during the first-century Roman occupation of the Middle East. The Sacarii, who obtained their name from their favoured weapon, the sica (short dagger), used to murder those they deemed traitors. The Zealots, on the other hand, targeted Romans and Greeks and, like the terrorists of today who usually seek media attention, they killed in broad daylight in front of witnesses sending a clear message to the Roman occupiers and the Jews who collaborated with them.9

Political terror and the theory and practice of righteous killing figured prominently in both the Islamic world and Christian Europe during the centuries between the collapse of Roman rule in the West and the dawning of the modern era.10 Terrorism perpetrated by groups became more common during the Middle Ages, with widespread assassinations by the Brotherhood of Assassins, a sectarian group of Muslims in Jerusalem who were employed by their spiritual and political leader, Hassan I Sabah, to spread terror in the form of murder and destruction among religious enemies.11 Tyrannicide – the assassination of a (tyrant) political leader – was fairly widely practised throughout Italy during the Reformation, while it was also at least advocated in Spain and France during the Age of Absolutism.12 Juan de Mariana, a Spanish Jesuit scholar and the leading advocate of the doctrine of tyrannicide, stated that ‘if in no other way it is possible to save the fatherland, the prince should be killed by the sword as a public enemy’,13 an assertion that people possessed not only the right of rebellion but also the remedy of assassination.

Although there is no clear, consistent and widely accepted definition of what modern terrorism entails, consensus has been reached by many authors and theorists about the origin of our modern conception of terrorism. The decisive move away from tyrannicide towards terrorism in its modern guise dates back to the French Revolution, with the Reign of Terror (la Grande Terreur) associated with key public figures, such as Maximilien Robespierre, through the centralised revolutionary dictatorship constructed by the Jacobins between 1792 and 1794.14 Robespierre15 considered terrorism a vital tactic if the new French Republic was to survive its infancy, proclaiming that ‘terror is nothing other than justice, prompt, severe, inflexible; it is therefore an emanation of virtue; it is not so much a special principle as it is a consequence of the general principle of democracy applied to our country’s most urgent needs’.

The modern definition of terrorism has largely been influenced by four modern waves of terrorism as identified by David Rapoport:16 the Anarchist, Anticolonial, New Left and Religious waves. He posits that modern terrorism began in Russia in the 1880s and spilled over to Western Europe, the Balkans and Asia within a decade. The Anarchist wave was the first global or truly international terrorist experience in history. It lasted for some 40 years and was characterised by assassination campaigns against prominent officials. The waves that followed were the Anticolonial wave, beginning in the 1920s and lasting for about 40 years, and the New Left wave, which was greatly diminished by the end of the twentieth century, though a few groups remain active today in Nepal, Spain, the United Kingdom, Peru and Colombia. The fourth wave is identified as a Religious wave and, if the pattern of the previous three waves remains true, it should fade by the year 2025.

Oladosu Ayinde,17 meanwhile, offers an alternative genealogy of terrorism in African history and proposes three different phases of terrorism development on the continent: the Afro-Oriental, Afro-Occidental and Afro-global phases. The first phase is termed the Afro-Oriental phase because ‘external’ terror was occasioned by the invasion of Arabs into Sub-Saharan Africa (SSA) in search of slaves. ‘Internal’ terror simultaneously arose from the threat of cannibalism. The appearance and active involvement of Europeans in the enslavement of Africans marked the beginning of the Afro-Occidental phase of African terrorism. Slavery remained the greatest act of terror during this phase and, although the physical torture and enslavement of black Africans became outlawed globally some time ago, the psychological implications continue to this day. People bear permanent mental scars and are pained each time they think of their forebears’ experiences – the lasting psychological effects of terrorism. The end of slavery marked the advent of the Afro-global phase of terrorism in Africa. It is argued that since power gained by force of arms is often sustained through the same means, the British in Nigeria, Sudan, Somalia, Egypt and other parts of Africa had no option but to resort to violence and terror to maintain their empire. The 130-year history of French colonial rule in Algeria during this period is of particular importance for the abhorrent terror tactics employed to coerce Algerians into submission.

During the Cold War, the Soviet Union’s attempts to secure a foothold in Africa resulted in the US lavishing attention and resources on the continent, forming ‘special relationships’ with geostrategically important states such as South Africa and Zaire (now the Democratic Republic of the Congo [DRC]), to counter communist expansion.18 It is worth recalling that, in 1957, a two-day tour across the continent by then vice president of the US, Richard Nixon, resulted in the creation of an African Bureau in the US Department of State. At the end of the Cold War, this patronage collapsed, resulting in the collapse of state institutions in many African countries such as Liberia, the DRC, Somalia and Sierra Leone. The massive influx of weapons and small arms from Eastern Europe during the 1990s fuelled the conflicts and, with no central authority to govern the states, civil unrest broke out.19 Ayinde20 asserts that although these episodes of terrorist events are violent and abhorred for their inhumanity, they should not be treated in isolation from each other and it should be recognised that the spaces of terror across Africa are far more elastic than generally imagined.

The uniqueness and persistence of the four waves of modern terrorism, along with the aforementioned brief historical contextualisation of global and African terrorism, indicate that terrorism is deeply rooted in modern cultures.21 It is evident that definitions of terrorism are not fixed and that they change over time according to the political vernacular and discourse of each successive era, and the cliché ‘one man’s terrorist is another man’s freedom fighter’ provides little assistance in ach...