Talking Up Terrorism

In March 2002, seven Asian immigrants were killed in Macedonia, in an operation described by the government as an important contribution to the global war on terror. Those killed were, according to the Macedonian government, Al Qaeda agents, in Macedonia intending to de-stabilize the fragile balance between the country’s Muslim and Slav population. Two years later, the government owned up to the fact that this was a pure fabrication on its part – an event staged in order to gain favour in Washington. An Interior Ministry spokesman admitted in 2004, “It was a monstrous fabrication to get the attention of the international community.”

This tendency for small and weak states to try to secure their legitimacy, and gain attention, through playing up the threat of Al Qaeda terrorism would appear to be playing out today in Gaza and the West Bank. The Guardian reported yesterday that the Palestinian leader, Mahmoud Abbas, had declared that “we have indications about a presence of Al Qaeda in Gaza and the West Bank”. There is certainly a history of terrorist attacks in the region, claimed by Al Qaeda groups. Three simultaneous suicide bombings killed 63 people in Amman, the capital of Jordan, in November 2005.

What is striking, however, is the political context for Abbas’ claims. Last month, Hamas, the militant Islamist group, won the elections to the Palestinian parliament, defeating Abbas’ Fatah party. Hamas is treated as a terrorist group by the United States and the European Union, and it isn’t difficult for Abbas’ statement to blur the lines between the elected public representatives of Hamas and the shadowy figures of Al Qaeda. Israel’s acting prime minister, Ehud Olmert, responded to Abbas by pointing out that “one must not forget that Islamic Jihad and Hamas are also part of the global terrorist movement, and have always received support and assistance from international terrorist elements… thus the ability to discern a link between terrorist elements in the territories and international terrorism is neither surprising nor new”.

It would be naïve to think that Abbas was unaware of how easily his words could be used to tar Hamas with the brush of international terrorism. It may be that his intelligence sources notified him of something, but it’s likely that his words were also a political calculation, drawn from the fractious context of Palestinian politics, and the weak position of Fatah in the current moment. The Macedonian example was perhaps extreme, but Abbas’s words denote a more general trend: the role played by the War on Terror as an external source of political legitimacy in weak and peripheral states. Of course, it is hard to imagine how Abbas thinks it could be beneficial to Palestinians to convince the rest of the world that they are being recruited to Al Qaeda. Drawing on the war on terror might seem like a way to strengthen his position at home, but in the long term it can only undermine Palestinian aspirations to self determination.