Pure Evil

WHEN the news came that the 199th victim of the Madrid bombs was a girl of six and a half months, the following thought suggested itself. At the heart of every terrorist movement worth being called so, is a purity of purpose. It is the kind of purity of purpose described, in the 1979 film Apocalypse Now, by the character of Colonel Kurtz - played by Marlon Brando.

Kurtz talks of a day when, as a US special forces officer, he assists in the inoculation of a group of Vietnamese children in a village: some time after leaving, his troop is called back by an old man, shocked and wailing. They return - to find that the Vietcong had come in as soon as they had left, and cut off the arms of the inoculated children. It was an act which was, in Kurtz’s words, "pure, crystalline, perfect".

The more, and the more often, the terrorist group approaches to the "pure, crystalline, perfect" act, the more hideous it is - and the less it is possible to find a ground for negotiation, and an end to the terror which terrorists visit on populations. For purity of this kind demands a closed universe of hate: one impervious to pity, as well as to the normal social qualities of balance, compromise and understanding of the other.

‘Normal social qualities’ are anathema to terrorism: theirs is a cast of mind which moves to the beat of a drum of history. They are the inheritors of the traditions of blood and soil: the soil they wish to claim, or reclaim as their own - whether in Northern Ireland, the Basque country or the Middle East; and the blood of the enemies with which they must irrigate that land in order to loosen the hated grip upon it.

It was this consideration which lay behind the doubt, expressed by everyone who knows anything of terrorism (a wide circle, these days: almost all of us) that ETA perpetrated the massacre of Madrid. As this is written, it may still prove to be the guilty party, for all its curt denial of complicity. But the purity of horror had al-Qaeda’s mark.

We should not, of course, take from the more familiar terrorist groups a recognition that their cores, too, were pure. You must have that certainty of purpose to be sure that the death you bring, and the grief you inflict on the living, is worth it in a greater purpose. The IRA, which caused such human calamities as the 1987 Poppy Day explosion - called a "massacre", the day produced 11 dead; an index of massacre-inflation over the past 17 years - did not recoil from such ventures because of a collective crisis of conscience. It recognised - because if the core could be pure, the rest of the structure was connected with the real world - that even its supporters could be sickened. And so it looked for talks with the representatives of those it had murdered and, ultimately, got them, and the rewards of them.

ETA is different. Founded in the late Sixties with an anti-Franco-ist ideology, it nevertheless has committed its worst crimes after the dictator’s death and the re-birth of Spanish democracy, in 1975. Successive governments over the past nearly 30 years have conceded to the Basque country (and to Catalonia) the trappings of a sovereignty which makes Scotland look like a district of Westminster - with entirely separate taxes, separate police force, separate language, all within a region which is among the wealthiest in Spain and a culture which is among the most bourgeois in its habits and comforts. Among other things, the nationalists - a nationalist government rules - control education, which means the nationalist, anti-Spanish story is repeated over and over again to schoolchildren.

The ETA core remains largely pure - even though it tried a brief period of negotiation in the late Nineties, influenced by the tactics of the IRA. But it found negotiation uncongenial, perhaps because the case of savage repression it made against the Spanish government sounded, when it had to be defended with words rather than bombs, so feeble.

So it returned to purity once more; and to extortion and intimidation of those in the Basque country who would oppose its will, as non-nationalist politicians of the left and right, police officers, officials and journalists. The writer Isabella Thomas cites the case of a woman from a village near San Sebastian who is a councillor for Jose Maria Aznar’s Popular Party: she has two guards with guns at the ready watch over her as she works - as a cleaner for her local bank. The same was true, says Thomas, for the anti-ETA priest, Father Jaime Larrinaga - and has only ceased to be so because he was forced from his parish by his local Basque nationalist council. The writer and scholar Edurne Uriarte, well known for her anti-ETA writing, had a bomb placed in the lift of her university (it was spotted by her bodyguard). For ETA, as for the IRA before the Belfast Agreement, the people about them who want peace and who disagree with them are at least as much an enemy as the ‘fascist’ Spanish state.

Yet, in their own minds, they use violence sparingly, with precision. Enough to keep the militants satisfied, opponents terrified and the Madrid government nervous. Mass slaughter was not its way. That is why, though nothing it says should be taken at face value and though it is a movement prone to splits and to freelance activities which the leadership does not control, its expression of innocence may be correct.

For massacres with a modern meaning, we have to look to al-Qaeda. With al-Qaeda, we move into the area of a terrorism wholly unassuageable, and for most - still - incomprehensible. The note sent on Thursday to the London-based al-Quds newspaper - which may or may not be genuine but certainly speaks to the mindset - spoke of a successful strike against "the Crusaders". It demanded to know why the group should have sympathy for the dead from the carnage, when "the Crusaders" had none for the women and children of Muslims killed by them. At the back of the statement lies the memory that Spain was, until the 16th century, a Muslim-ruled country: and that the flatness of al-Qaeda’s version of history - seeing all defeats, no matter when inflicted, as reversible, all possessions returnable, all lost territory reconquerable, all Crusader and above all Jewish lands takeable - might have chosen these Crusaders for slaughter for that very reason.

All terrorism’s first violence is to history. The IRA’s reading sees Ireland as a helpless virgin, systematically violated by the English and the Scots for centuries, occupied in the north by Protestants planted to defile its purity, destined to be expelled or at least conquered. ETA posits a land groaning under the yoke of imperial Spain - even though a territory called the Basque land probably never existed, and much of what they claim is in France. And al-Qaeda sees Muslims as the victims of Christian and Jewish oppression - the latter thrust into Muslim holy lands and sustained there by the former. All agree, though with varying degrees of passion, that they are pure; that they are blameless; that they are victims; and that they will win.

No protest group, no matter how radical, would associate itself with Madrid’s carnage. Nor - in the main - do real terrorists have much time for protestors, though they have been known to join them on protests, use them, recruit from among them or hide themselves behind them. Protesters - even the sporadically violent anarchists - do not inflict terror. Even when not pacifist themselves, the anti-globalisation protesters are often deeply affected by pacifism. Further, exactly because they view their task as rousing the many against the few, they are usually respectful of the lives and limbs of the masses whose allegiance is their object.

Yet the protesters have a point of agreement with the terrorists on the nature of the modern world: they see it as under the sway of an American imperialism which is dedicated to oppression. Only the IRA stands aloof from this analysis - in large part because it has had so much assistance from the US, and so much of its new-found respectability was conferred upon it by the Clinton administration, that its heart cannot really be in a hatred of America. For the rest, America is the very devil, or rather, the Lucifer which looms behind the lesser devils with whom they are more familiar - as George Bush looms behind Aznar.

A government which has been as abrasive, careless and riven as is the present US administration is hard to defend. But our own national sense of survival, demands the exercise of some reason. The US is no imperialist. It had invaded - in Kosovo; Afghanistan; Iraq and most recently (if in a minor way) Haiti in order to underpin or establish representative government. Its politics are such that it is there on the sufferance of its own electorate. The greatest danger to the countries in which its military are deployed, and to the world, is not that it stays, but that it leaves.

Does it have corrupt, venal and narrow minded men and women in offices of power? Yes. Do its business lobbies succeed in getting lush contracts because of favours past and favours promised? Yes. Do its soldiers at times kill friends, torture enemies and terrorise women and children? Yes. Do the state, and the military, and even corporations, have in the end to account for this? Yes.

And look a little beyond. This state, now called rogue, was in the Cold War engaged (with our consent, or active participation) in a series of actions which propped up brutes, caused democratic governments to fall and encouraged massacres. Kennedy tried to have Castro killed and Cuba invaded.

The engagement in Vietnam was a massive miscalculation which killed tens of thousands. Saddam waged war on Iran and on his own population with Western aid. Afghanistan was devastated by Cold War calculations; the mujahedin morphed into al-Qaeda with CIA backing.

Now, a world-wide alliance anathematises an America which has deposed the world’s leading fascist murderer, has helped bring a lesser fascist murderer to trial in the Hague, is struggling to guard and guarantee democratic development in Afghanistan and is seeking to stabilise a desperate Haiti. If fanatics are beyond the pale and young idealists must live for a while in their delusions, at least the rest of us should recognise the change. A curmudgeonly, limited and hard-to-like administration is pursuing causes which liberals have wished to be pursued for decades.

One of these causes is the defeat of terrorism. Whatever we discover on the identity of the Madrid massacre, the largest bulwark we have against terrorism’s success is the United States. The ‘international community’, usually equated with the UN, is in the end a collection of nation states which will, when push comes to shove, protect themselves.

It can only say that its ‘cabinet’, the UN Security Council, intervened to stop carnage since the war on a number of occasions which can be counted on the fingers of two hands. Policing the globe is a burden which we, the Europeans, have so far politely declined. The US is, as Philip Bobbitt has written, "the one state with the power and willingness to intervene on behalf of world order".

Madrid reminds us that we need that willingness, whatever pure evil hand left these bombs among the early morning workers of Spain.