CHAPTER ONE
INTRODUCTION
Terrorism is violence or threat of violence calculated to create an atmosphere of fear or alarm and thereby bring about some social and political changes. This definition is in line with the explanation offered by a South American Jurist more than 30 years ago, according to him “Terrorism consists of acts that are in themselves may be classic-crimes, murder, arson, the use of explosives, but that differ from classic crimes in that they are excited with the deliberate intention of causing panic and terror within an arranged or organized society1. It is the use of violence and most especially the fear it causes among people for political objectives.2
It was also defined by the Terrorism Research Center as “the systematic use of physical violence against non combatants but with an audience greater than the immediate victim in mind to create a general climate of fear in a large population in order to affect some kind of political and social changes”3.
The United States Federal Bureau of investigation (FBI) defines terrorism as “the unlawful use of force or violence against persons or property to intimate or coerce a government, the population or any segment thereof in furtherance of political and social objectives”4. In basic terms, terrorism is an act of inflicting terror upon the people in the process of achieving personal or political objectives5.
Although from the above definitions, it can be rightly concluded that there is no precise or widely accepted definition of the concept of terrorism, it is generally believed that terrorism is the use of covert violent actions in order to achieve certain objectives. It is a form of covert attack directed at targets that are outside a certain range of clearly military targets. Though the terrorist attack on the world trade centre in New York and the Pentagon in Washington DC constitute a prime case, most terrorist attack are aimed at domestic regimes or other targets within the terrorist own country7.
Terrorism is not new on the world stage. Northern Ireland had been dealing with terrorists for more than forty years, Israel with Palestinian terrorists for much the same period and Spain with Basque terrorists.
Although the use of terrorism as a political tool extends far back into history, recent decades have seen a rise in the practice for several reasons. One is the overwhelming advantage in weapons that governments usually have over dissident groups. Because many governments are armed with aircraft and other high tech weapons that are unavailable to opposition forces, it has often become nearly suicidal for armed dissidents to use conventional tactics.