WHAT THE UN CAN DO TO FIGHT TERRORISM

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NEW YORK, Jan 2 2004 (IPS) - UN Resolution 1373 required UN member states to pass laws banning every type of terrorist action and to ratify various international treaties: the question is whether governments will enforce them, writes Inocencio F. Arias, Spanish Ambassador to the UN Security Council and president of the UN Committee Against Terrorism. In this article for IPS, Arias argues that the Committee against Terrorism created by 1373 must have the means to verify enforcement and denounce cases of voluntary failure to the Council and the international community. Globalisation, technological progress, and the proliferation of suicide strategies has made terrorism potentially devastating. The possibility of terrorists gaining access to weapons of mass destruction, nuclear, chemical, or biological, is neither science fiction nor a movie plot. Sooner or later, science fiction will become reality. The UN must use the instruments available to it to minimise this possibility. The efficiency of the organisation\’s efforts in this area will reduce the unilateralist temptations of the powerful to impose their own solutions and will alleviate human suffering.

It is by now a commonplace to state that terrorism is one of the major threats facing humanity.

Some would argue that there are other equally pressing problems that affect tens or hundreds of million people, such as AIDS or hunger, which receive less attention because they are less attention-grabbing. This is true, but the fact that terrorism steals more headlines in no way diminishes its gravity and the massive effect it has on the behaviour of many states, among which the most powerful state in history, the US. The doubtful need only remember that without the terrorist atrocities of September 11, the elimination of the Taliban in Afghanistan or the recent war in Iraq would be nearly impossible to explain.

How is the UN dealing with this threat? Having sought state approval over the years of various conventions on terrorism (against the use of explosives, high-jacking airplanes, etc), the UN reacted promptly to the September 11 attacks, which occurred within view of its headquarters. The next day the Security Council, invoking each state’s right to self-defence, unanimously authorised US intervention in Afghanistan, whose government had been previously sanctioned by the UN for backing terrorism and refusing to extradite Osama bin Laden. In legitimising military action against the state that protected the perpetrators of September 11, UN Resolution 1368 established a new precedent.

At the end of that month, the Council approved Resolution 1373, which required that all UN member states pass legislation banning every type of terrorist action, criminalise sheltering, helping, or financing terrorists, and cooperate in battling terrorism, through extradition for example; 1373 also required states to ratify certain international treaties.

The resolution created a Committee against Terrorism charged with overseeing implementation of 1373. The Committee required all 191 member states to report on their legislative progress. All responded. Countries whose responses were unsatisfactory were required to provide new reports. The first difficulties arose here: 56 states were behind, presumably more for technical reasons that for lack of political will.

In the area of ratification, progress, though great, was unequal. Ratification jumped from 28 to 115 for the International Convention for the Suppression of Terrorist Bombings, from 5 to 104 for the Convention for the Suppression of the Financing of Terrorism, and from 96 to 136 for the Convention against the Taking of Hostages.

However, response has varied dramatically according to region. In Europe, the rate of ratification is high (80 percent of conventions); in the Americas, it was adequate (over 50 percent); in Asia, less satisfactory, with enormous gaps in the Southeast; in the Middle East it was very poor: many states ratified the convention on air security, but few others.

The moment of truth will come in the medium term when states have completed passing the required legislation. A government may have adequate laws, but will it enforce them? Will it take the issue seriously or look the other way once the Security Council is satisfied? The Committee against Terrorism must have the means to verify enforcement and denounce cases of voluntary failure to the Council and the international community. At that point the Committee will need an executive arm and an office, prestigious but of limited size, headed by a figure with the authority and stature to command respect. This figure should have the capacity to inform the Security Council and the UN Secretary General, without restriction or favouritism, which states are openly or covertly violating Resolution 1373 and which are in compliance. The Security Council will then have to decide whether or not to take action.

Those who believe that terrorism affects only the United States or the West are simply naive, as recent events make all too clear. So are those who hold that the perpetrators are usually fundamentalists of a given religion. This does not square with reality.

On the other hand, while it is certain that the international community must eliminate injustices, which have been growing more extreme in recent decades, the notion that poverty is the primary cause of terrorism is also an illusion. There are extremely poor countries where there is no terrorism and rich ones that have been plagued by it for years. The perpetrators of the September 11 attacks came from well-off families, and many of these from a prosperous country.

The fact is that terrorism, which has been around since antiquity, has not waned with the coming of the new century. Worse yet, globalisation, technological progress, and the proliferation of suicide strategies has made terrorism potentially devastating. The possibility of terrorists gaining access to weapons of mass destruction, nuclear, chemical, or biological, is neither science fiction nor a movie plot. A handful of letters tainted with anthrax paralysed the US government; the hundreds of litres of the same substance that, according to UN inspector Hans Blix, Saddam Hussein could not account for were behind the US intervention in Iraq; the release of sarin nerve gas in the Tokyo subway system set off intense urban panic. Sooner or later, science fiction will become reality.

The UN must use the instruments available to it to minimise this possibility. The efficiency of the organisation’s efforts in this area will reduce the unilateralist temptations of the powerful to impose their own solutions and will alleviate human suffering. (END/COPYRIGHT IPS)