The City as a Battlefield: A Global Concern
THE street is the stage,” says the American Yippie Jerry Rubin in Do It!, his handbook for the modern revolutionary. In cities throughout the non-Communist world, that stage is alive with alarming activities: politically motivated arson, bombing, kidnaping and murder. Closely related to these is the phenomenon of skyjacking, for just as the highly complex 20th century city is the most vulnerable point in man’s terrestrial sphere, so is the thin-skinned, 600-m.p.h. jet the most vulnerable in the atmosphere. The terrorist activity is worldwide, and most of it is carried out by a new type in the history of political warfare: the urban guerrilla.
In Belfast and Londonderry, barbed wire, sandbag bunkers and helmeted troops have been fixtures since Northern Ireland’s ancient religious antagonisms flared into violence last summer. In Calcutta and its industrial satellites police have been loath to venture off major arteries since Maoist Naxalites stabbed three of their colleagues to death in dark alleys as part of a deliberate campaign of terror. Heavy guard details have trailed diplomats in Montevideo since July, when Uruguay’s Tupamaro guerrillas shed their Robin Hood image and wantonly murdered a political hostage. Canada was still tense following the brutal murder by fanatic Quebec separatists of a government official; a small band of terrorists, trying to blackmail the government, succeeded in frightening the entire country and forcing the suspension of some civil liberties.
In Washington, officials were frankly worried about the possibility that a radical group might try to kidnap or assassinate a U.S. official or a foreign diplomat. Rarely has the capital been so security conscious. “I’m sorry, but we’ve got to think paranoid,” said one of the government’s top security officials last week. Secretary of State William Rogers and other high officials have been urged to vary the routes they follow to and from their offices. The Secret Service is rapidly adding 300 more men to a recently created 550-man Executive Protective Service assigned to guard the embassies of other countries, and Washington police are getting bomb-disposal training at the Army’s Aberdeen Munitions Center.
Disproportionate Power
Unlike the fortified towns of old, the besieged cities of 1970 are threatened not from without but from within, by armies that are hardly ever in sight. Nor are the troops preparing for anything so vast as the great popular upheavals that swept the revolution-torn capitals of mid-19th century Europe. The cities are threatened in each case by a few hundred or at most a few thousand men. But, as the Canadian example showed, small numbers can affect a whole nation, if the right pressure point is found. In the late-20th century, minuscule bands possess disproportionate power to render a society immobile.
To what end? The new urban guerrilla talks in vague terms about building a new world. When pressed, he usually describes that world in Marxist terms . Beyond some immediate goals, like preserving a particular piece of real estate from “exploitation” or “imperialism,” the urban guerrilla has little to say about the shape of the future. Says Political Scientist Richard
Rubenstein of Chicago’s Roosevelt University: “It might be easy in a mechanical way to screw up the system—forcing the airlines to spend millions on armed guards, or to mess up the electrical or telephone systems. But what’s wrong with the new terror is that it is creating social chaos without at the same time preparing people for a new order.” Implicitly, at least, the Maoists, the radical separatists in Quebec, the Naxalites in India, the Weathermen and Panthers in the U.S. all share the spirit of anarchism: its fascination with violence, its chaotic organization, its insistence on absolute freedom . Often their cult is pseudo-religious, even monastic: it is consecrated to a dead or distant deity like Che Guevara or Mao Tse-tung; its communicants gather in intimate, almost confessional cells: and they observe a ritual secrecy that eventually cuts them off from society altogether. Their ideologies differ, but in general their rationale is that “the system” is incapable of real change and that the official violence of the government can only be countered by violence. The aim is ultimately to destroy what cannot be reformed. Thus, in essence, they subscribe to the dictum of the 19th century patron saint of anarchy, Mikhail Bakunin, that “the urge to destroy is really a creative urge.”
The distinguishing feature of the urban guerrilla, says Rubenstein, is that he is “short-circuiting” the classic concept of revolution. Theorists from Locke to Marx to Herbert Marcuse have always discussed revolution in terms of mass movements. The very vulnerability of the modern industrial world allows the urban terrorist to skip the painstaking, step-by-step process of organizing a mass revolutionary movement and then taking disruptive action.
So far, the new terror has been relatively limited; as far as is known, no group has sought to plunge a city into chaos with simultaneous attacks, for example, on its power stations, water supply and main roads. But the degree of terror has increased notably with the cop-killing campaign in the U.S. and the murder of hostages in Canada, Argentina, Uruguay and Guatemala. Thus the urban guerrillas have revived the system of diplomatic ransom that flourished from the Dark Ages until the Renaissance, when kings and princes routinely used ambassadors as hostages. As Brandeis Sociologist Richard Sennett puts it: “The terrorism of today is the diplomacy of Henry the Eighth.”
In the U.N. last week, Sweden’s Premier Olof Palme called for some way “to counteract technology’s multiplication of the power to destroy.” British Prime Minister Edward Heath warned in the same forum: “It may be that in the decade ahead of us, civil war, not war between nations, will be the main danger we will face.” During a campaign stop in Columbus, Ohio, Richard Nixon said that the ubiquitous terrorism was “an international disease.”
So far, the disease has struck nowhere more dramatically than it has in Canada. Climaxing a long series of bombings and bank robberies, the French-Canadian separatist group known as the Front de Libération du Québec kidnaped two high officials: James R. Cross, British trade commissioner in Montreal and, later, Quebec Labor Minister Pierre
separatist counterrevolution is the work of a powerless petit-bourgeois minority afraid of being left behind by a 20th century revolution. Rather than carving themselves out a place in it by ability, they want to make the whole tribe return to the wigwams by declaring its independence. Separatism a revolution? My eye.”
Trudeau’s wigwam theory is challenged by some academic experts, who argue that the world’s tribal minorities are not so much trying to drop out as to get back in the mainstream. Roosevelt University’s Rubenstein describes increasing tribal violence as the typical desperation of “groups which are in danger of extinction. It’s an attempt to re-enter the political universe.” Terror is born when they demand re-entry on their own non-negotiable terms, and the rest of mankind be damned if those terms prove unattainable.
Terrorism in the U.S.’s northern neighbor is a relatively new phenomenon. To the south, it has long been endemic. To a great extent, the terrorists of Latin America claim to be acting in behalf of an underclass whose need is not “reentry” so much as simple entry —into economic, social and political structures from which they have always been barred. Then, too, Latin American politics have always been characterized by theatricality and excitability.
There are almost as many varieties of terror south of the Mexican border as there are countries. Brazil has been racked by a drawn-out campaign whose net effect has only been to set Latin America’s most powerful country back by several political lightyears. The army took power in 1964, the first terrorist bomb exploded in 1966, and a cruel upward spiral of terror and repression, including torture, has been under way ever since. The country has never had more than half a dozen terrorist bands, totaling perhaps 300 to 500 hard-core members. But their spectacularly successful kidnaping and ransoming of U.S. Ambassador C. Burke Elbrick a year ago, in return for the release of 15 jailed radicals, was the first intimation that a few urban guerrillas could force even the strongest governments to give in to their demands. Brazil’s terrorists never developed a benign image; their acts have resulted in 40 deaths and nearly 200 injuries in the past two years.
Until recently, the Tupamaros of Uruguay could claim a large, disciplined membership of 3,000, and a reputation for stealing from the rich to help the poor. Some of their $1,600,000 haul from kidnaping wealthy businessmen and robbing banks went as welfare to families of imprisoned members. The good-guy image evaporated last August. In a remarkable parallel to the events in Canada, the Tupamaros abducted and murdered Daniel Mitrione, a U.S. police adviser, because the government would not free 160 “political” prisoners. Backed by a shocked public. President Jorge Pacheco Areco got the often cantankerous Uruguayan Congress to grant him emergency powers to fight the terrorists. More than 200 Tupamaros have been collared, in a manhunt that was pursued with decidedly un-Uruguayan zeal. At one house, the troops went so far as to confiscate books on “cubism,” because they thought it was propaganda from Havana. So far, however, the troops have not been able to locate two other hostages, American Agronomist Claude Fly and Brazilian General Aloysio Mares Dias
psychopaths. Nor has there been a halt to terrorism from the right. Only last week, two members of an anti-black underground group called “The Raiders” were convicted of blowing up 36 school buses in Longview, Texas, last July. Police in Houston still are hunting bombers who have twice blown up the facilities of the liberal Pacifica Foundation’s Radio Station KPFT.
Inflammatory Rhetoric
Still, a growing number of bombings and attacks on police are the work of the left extremists. There are roughly a dozen extremist groups bent on revolution in the U.S. Operating with no apparent central direction or any attempt at coordination of tactics, they can, according to official estimates, muster about 4,500 members. There is the “New Year’s Gang,” a group of University of Wisconsin students who claim credit for bombing an Army-supported research center last August and killing a physics researcher. The gang has warned that if its various demands are not met by the end of this week, it will initiate “open warfare and kidnaping of prominent officials.” There are the Weathermen, with a long, possibly inflated list of bombings to their discredit.
Like the Weathermen, the Black Panthers, with perhaps 1,000 members, may well be taking the blame for more terrorist activities than they have actually carried out—so far. Though 13 are on trial in New York on charges of a conspiracy to bomb buildings and railroad tracks, no Panther has been convicted of killing a cop or blowing up anything. Some have fired at officers raiding their headquarters, but only Panthers have died in such exchanges. By its own accounts, however, the organization stockpiles arms and ammunitions in “self-defense,” and its literature features cartoons in which blacks are shown machine-gunning porcine police. The Panthers’ rhetoric is inflammatory and irresponsible, and it is impossible to say how many people take their “off the pig” injunctions seriously. By their own testimony, the Panthers consider themselves urban guerrillas and in solidarity with revolutionary movements outside the U.S.
The ethnic and racial diversity of the U.S., and its relative youth as a country, have much to do with its social unrest. But terrorism occurs in some of the oldest and most settled societies. Europe’s oft-revised map—and its tribal feuds—have given rise to many terrorist movements. In the province of Alto Adige on the Italian-Austrian border, German-speaking separatists set off 200 bombs and killed ten policemen over a five-year period to punctuate their demands for reunification with Austria. Belgium’s Dutch-speaking Flemings and French-speaking Walloons have been at each others’ throats for 50 years, toppling 18 governments in their attempts to gain primacy. The Breton Liberation Front blows up a police station occasionally by way of reminding Paris of the long-smoldering separatist movement in Brittany, “France’s forgotten province.” Young Protestant and Catholic toughs are still fighting the 1690 Battle of the Boyne in Northern Ireland, and the old Irish Republican Army, whose terrorist tactics of bombing and assassination prefigured today’s urban guerrillas by a generation, is showing signs of stirring.
The Continent’s major cities are quieter than they were during the Marxist student upheavals of
1968, but there are signs that they are stirring under the influence of the new terror. In Paris, police credit a Maoist group called the Proletarian Left with 82 terrorist acts in the first five months of 1970. This summer, its “No Vacations for the Rich” program featured sabotage attacks on Riviera resorts. Philosopher Jean-Paul Sartre belongs to the 2,000-member group and edits its newspaper, but his efforts have gone unnoticed; the police have confiscated every issue since Sartre took up his pencil.
The world’s most visible guerrillas are probably the Palestinians. They can hardly be described as “urban” in the desert camps from which they attack Israeli border settlements, and their attempts at sabotaging Israeli cities have been notably unsuccessful. But the fedayeen have scored a major triumph of sorts with the airline hijackings. They now seem to have concluded that such tactics are counterproductive; George Habash, leader of the extremist Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine, is reported to have “considerably cooled down” on skyjackings. Nevertheless, they inspired other terrorists by seizing the very symbols of modern technological power and holding the world at bay for a harrowing week of blackmail. They also serve as models and instructors for other terrorist groups.
Global Cross-Pollination
One reason the new terror often appears to be epidemic is that the tactics are so similar. The guerrillas all study the same texts—by Mao or Che or Carlos Marighella . Instant communications, moreover, guarantee a sort of global cross-pollination of radicalism. Harvard Professor of Government Seymour Martin Lipset tells of the time he “asked a revolutionary in South America whether he kept in touch with developments in the U.S. He replied, ’We watch television. We saw everything at Berkeley.’ ”
Though the similarities among guerrilla groups seem less a matter of conspiracy than a kind of contagion or psychological empathy, there is evidence that organizations like the Panthers, in the U.S., and Palestinian guerrillas exchange not only ideas and moral support but also financial backing. There is no lack of spots where guerrillas of several continents can get together. In Cuba, Fidel Castro’s Sierra Maestra Guerrillero camps have taught more than 5,000 foreign recruits such techniques as sabotage, bomb making and murder since 1961. Most of Castro’s trainees have come from Latin America, but he has had numerous callers from the U.S. Among the American Weathermen visiting Cuba have been Mark Rudd, Bernardine Dohrn. and two would-be city-busters who were killed when the Greenwich Village town house that they were using as a bomb factory blew up last March, Diana Oughton and Ted Gold.
Black radicals, too, have made the Havana circuit. It was at a conference in Cuba in 1967 that former S.N.C.C. Leader Stokely Carmichael declared: “America is going to fall, and I only hope to live long enough to see it.” Angela Davis, now fighting extradition from New York to California on charges of murder and kidnaping, called on Castro in July 1969.
Selective Assassination
Algeria is becoming an ever more popular meeting ground. The 44 Brazilian terrorists who were released from jail and flown to Algiers after the kidnaping of West German Ambassador Ehren von
stood at one or the other of two extremes: “strict, cruel and unjust or weak, vacillating, ineffective or absent altogether.” The son grows up hating the father, and learning to take on the cop, capitalism and the Establishment. He can, says Wahl, even murder without guilt. Many revolutionaries suffer from searing feelings of inadequacy, Wahl adds, and therefore have a greater-than-ordinary need for notoriety. Supporting this view, De Paul University Psychologist Thomas Milburn speaks of the “Icarus complex” among many terrorists—”even though you fall to earth, you’ve tried one spectacular thing.”
The Palestinian skyjackers, Historian Sharabi insists, are not suffering from psychic hang-ups, but from such despondency that “literally any means is justified by the end.” Leila Khaled, the P.F.L.P.’s almond-eyed, two-time skyjacker, is a case in point. When Leila and an accomplice attempted to seize an El Al 707 in September, they were stopped cold by gunfire from El Al guards . Now back in Beirut, where she cuts a modish figure in floppy hats and close-fitting slacks, Leila is downright indignant about the El Al security men. “They had no sense of responsibility,” she complained to TIME Correspondent Gavin Scott last week. “Bullets were flying all over the cabin. They were completely ruthless.”
As far as her own actions are concerned, Miss Khaled told Correspondent Scott: “If we throw bombs, it is not our responsibility. You may care for the death of a child, but the whole world ignored the death of Palestinian children for 22 years. We are not responsible.”
Double Danger
How should governments deal with the urban guerrilla threat? Brazil’s tough response has put all but a few fanatics out of the terror business, and it is not hard to see why. “When we invade a terrorist cell,” explained one Brazilian official last week, “we use twice the force necessary. We make a demonstration so overwhelming that the people know there is absolutely no way out.” Off-duty police and troops have also formed unofficial “death squads” to search out and eliminate known terrorists.
Canada and Uruguay have moved decisively, but within constitutional limits, knowing full well that to scrap the constitution à la Brazil would only play into the terrorists’ hands by inviting real disorders. In Ottawa, Trudeau’s Cabinet is already drawing up new laws to replace the War Measures Act, so as to permit more effective action against civil disorders. With its May 1968 upheaval in mind, France has beefed up its police force, and enacted a tough new anti-demonstration measure known as the “anti-wrecker’s law.” Under the law, police can arrest anyone standing in sight of an unlawful demonstration.
Compared to some of these foreign countermeasures against urban guerrillas, the U.S. is still proceeding mildly, all the loose talk about “repression” notwithstanding. Certainly, given the present political climate in the U.S., no American President could have invoked wartime powers as easily as Trudeau did to summarily outlaw a group of militant dissidents. In the U.S., officials can move strongly against an urban guerrilla threat under the recently enacted Organized Crime Control Law; among other things
it gives the FBI a green light to investigate bombings or attacks on police, cases that previously were not normally handled by federal authorities. On one issue, U.S. officials insist that they intend to play it tough. If an official or a foreign diplomat is kidnaped, they maintain that they will reject ransom demands in an effort to discourage terrorists from trying again. Despite the obvious need for toughness in such situations, any democratic country faces dangers from too harsh as well as from too weak a reaction. The only countries that may prove immune to the new terror may be the most authoritarian ones. Winning out over terror is of little benefit if it leads to a police force with permanently enlarged powers and a citizenry with permanently curtailed rights. In fact, this is precisely what many of the guerrillas want to bring about: government repression that provokes widespread discontent and ultimately revolution. The final weapon against the urban guerrilla is a secure and self-confident society that can contain its enemies without resorting to the terrorists’ own methods.
At Manhattan’s John Jay College of Criminal Justice, which conducts liberal-arts training for New York police officers. Law Professor Isadore Silver argues that the U.S. has had it relatively easy so far because terrorists have been committing acts that are more symbolic than anything else. “They attack police stations, corporate headquarters, research labs, but more often than not. they call and warn in advance that they’re going to do it.” Says Silver: “It’s as though they were sending up one last desperate cry: ’Damn it, pay some attention to us!’ ”
Pay Attention
The U.S. is paying plenty of attention to them, both to their excesses and to the underlying causes of their despair, if despair it is. In fact, some observers believe that the radical movement in the U.S. has passed its peak. Harvard’s Seymour Lipset notes that “terrorism can mark either the beginning or the end of a movement.”
It is undoubtedly far too soon to proclaim the end of the urban guerrillas in the U.S. Sooner or later, however, the terrorists themselves may pay closer heed to a lesson that their hero Mao Tse-tung could have taught them. “Guerrilla warfare must fail,” Mao wrote, “if its political objectives do not coincide with the aspirations of the people and their sympathy, cooperation and assistance cannot be gained.”
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