(i) It
is premeditated: Planned in advance rather than an impulsive act of rage.
(ii) It
is political: Not criminal, like the violence that the group such as the Mafia
use of get money, but designed to change the existing political order.
(iii) It
is aimed at civilians: Not at military targets or combat-ready troops
(iv) It
is carried out by sub-national groups not by the Army of a country.
There are certain limitations in the CFR,s criteria.
First, due to the level of sophistication in the strategy employed by the
terrorists, it may be targeted at both civilians and military. The attack on
pentagon (September 11, 2001) is a typical case. Several attacks especially
suicide-bombing have also been carried out against us military base and
personnel in Iraq. What distinguishes terrorism from other military
confrontations or conventional war is the element of surprise. Second, the
official security agents of the state may perpetuate certain state sponsored
terrorism against real or perceived enemies of the state. The mass murder of
millions of Jews in Germany prior to World War II a good example.
According to Wilkinson (1986), he noted three
important reasons to explain this difficulty, first, terrorism is frequently
employed in a number of undifferentiated ways to mean variously a concept,
Human activity, Felony, specific event. An emotion, method of intimidation or
condition of being terrorized-second, is the concept of terrorism itself is
emotion-laden because it has expensive content, the function of which is to
evoke feelings, attitudes or emotions. Inherent in this usage is the notion of
fear with the consequence that the concept automatically acquires an emotive
meaning. The emotive quality causes distortion when attempting to communicate a
precise meaning. The third is the problem of achieving a precise definition,
one that would be universally acceptable. Thus, English words such as terror,
terrorize, terrible, terrorism and deterrent are derived from the Latin verbs
terrier that means to tremble or cause to tremble and deferred that means to
frighten. The definitional problems and the divergence of political perspective
which produce them, have practical consequences. They have impeded the building
of international norms and international co-operative practices.
Hence, two schools of thought have made effort to
define terrorism in two different perspectives. Namely; the liberal and the
Radical view points. The liberal scholars use the concept of terrorism in a
pejorative connotation. If one side to a dispute succeeds in attaching the
terrorist label to its opponent, it has gained an important psychological
advantage. This group of scholars attaches the label of terrorism to some acts
of violence, whose under lying objective they do not accept. Edward (1978), for
instance, defined the concept as the use or “threat of use of anxiety including
extra-normal violence for political purposes by an individual or group, whether
acting for, or in opposition to established governmental authority when such
action is intended to influence the attitudes and behaviour of a target group
wider than the immediate victim.
For sample (1987), terrorism is defined as a
clandestine act of violence against non-combatants for the specific purpose of
bringing political change. According to him, terrorism is usually characterized
by a very of tactics, such as assassination, hijacking, kidnapping, sabotage
and by the exploitation of innocent victims to affect a third party. It is
intended however, to produce fear in a population in order to force the
existing system to meet the terrorists demands. The Northern Alliance that
helped America to remove the Taliban regime in Afganistan were seen as freedom
fighters rather than terrorists. For example, the United States does not
describe the group currently fighting for the overthrow of Saddam Hussein in
Iraq as “terrorists”. Still, other similar groups fighting for homeland and
freedom in the Middle East and United Kingdom have been listed as terrorist
groups. Palestinian liberation organization (PLO) has been tagged as one of the
terrorist groups. This by implication, one man’s freedom fighter is another’s.
This explains why the United Nations General Assembly members have refused to
agree on who is, and is not a terrorist. On that note, it is important to note
that radical scholars see terrorism as a form of protest and political
participation.