Europe Coddles a Terrorist, Again
By Michael Ledeen
Events before and after the arrest of Kurdish terrorist Abdullah Ocalan by Italian police suggest that authorities in Europe have reverted to the appeasement of terrorists that characterized the 1970s.
Any doubts about the lack of serious leadership in the new Europe should have been laid to rest by the Ocalan and Pinochet affairs. In the former, one of the world’s bloodiest terrorists, the leader of a violent movement that has killed tens of thousands of people in one of NATO’s key countries, has been treated by a large part of the European political class as if he were a distinguished statesman. In the latter, a man who put an end to a bloody civil war in South America and led his country to peace, democracy, and prosperity is treated by European politicians and magistrates as if he were a bloody terrorist. This sort of topsy-turvy behavior can only be explained by a combination of political confusion, narrow opportunism, and outdated ideology.
Appeasement of Terrorists
The Ocalan affair is a throwback to the worst moments of international terrorism in the mid-1970s. At that time, European governments of both left and right made deals with various terrorists in order to ensure that violent acts were not committed in Europe. These terrorists included Abu Nidal (who led Black September, the extremist Palestinian group that was the most dangerous of all Palestinian terrorist organizations), Carlos the Jackal (the Venezuelan-born terrorist who commanded the kidnapping of OPEC oil ministers from Vienna in December 1975), George Habash (the Marxist Christian Arab who was leader of the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine, which carried out bombings and hijackings and trained terrorists from all over the world in Lebanon), and various elements of the Palestine Liberation Organization.
Most, if not all, of the Western intelligence services, including the U.S. CIA, the French SDEC, and the Italian Sismi, had representatives in Beirut who liaised with the PLO and other groups, and many terrorist leaders lived and traveled in Europe, protected by the benevolent indifference and even the private cooperation of the host governments. If, by chance or an excess of bureaucratic zeal, a terrorist was arrested, he or she was generally put on a private plane and flown to safety in North Africa or back to Beirut. The Italians actually chartered Alitalia planes to fly terrorists to Libya; the French preferred Beirut.
Against this backdrop of active appeasement, the idea of terrorism was deconstructed by the intellectuals of the day, who coined catchy phrases—such as "one man’s terrorist is another man’s freedom fighter"—that justified the Europeans’ failure to fight the terrorist plague. Indeed, some terrorists became folk heroes, such as Libyan dictator Moammar Gadhafi, Carlos the Jackal, and the dashing Leila Khaled, a Palestinian hijacker who carried out, among other exploits, the hijacking of an El Al airliner in London in 1970. So long as appeasement worked, so long as the terrorists’ targets were Israelis, Spaniards, Turks, and the occasional American diplomat, so long as European cities and citizens were left alone, the terrorists operated freely.
Away from Appeasement . . .
Things changed when terrorism was unleashed against Europe. It eventually became clear that European terrorists of both political extremes trained at the same camps as the foreign groups, and that there was a substantial degree of cooperation among them. Spanish Basques trained in North Africa and Lebanon, Italians of the Communist Red Brigades and those of the right-wing Ordine Nero trained in the Middle East and Eastern Europe, along with Germans of the Baader-Meinhof group and the Red Army Fraction. The IRA got support from Libya, as did most any terrorist who bothered to ask.
These were unpleasant facts that made it hard to justify tacit support for foreign terrorists, especially when European passenger aircraft were hijacked by Palestinian terrorists, and European airports became sites of mass murder. As the Europeans cracked down on their own terrorist groups in the late 1970s and early ’80s, many of the "freedom fighters" lost their sex appeal. Hardly a murmur was heard from the European intelligentsia and political elites when Carlos was finally arrested in Sudan a couple of years ago and locked away in a Parisian jail.
. . . and Back Again
But hard lessons are often learned by a single generation and then forgotten. The latest crowd of European politicians has re-embraced the myth of the terrorist as freedom fighter, especially when the terrorist is far away and has some credentials from the political left (no right-wing terrorist is given the benefit of the doubt). Hardly any European leader questions the political legitimacy of the PLO, the Irish Republican Army, or the Basque separatist organization ETA, and there is an active competition among the political elite for sponsorship of these groups. One can hardly remember the last time a major European figure insisted that any such group actually disarm, or renounce previous calls for the total destruction of its enemies, before being granted entry into government, or title to its own province, region, or country.
The Ocalan affair is exemplary. Abdullah Ocalan is one of the bloodiest terrorists of modern times. Not even Amnesty International or Human Rights Watch, which have little sympathy for the government of Turkey, defend him. Indeed, they have provided us with a picture of an organization that not only slaughters Turkish officials and civilians, but ruthlessly tortures and murders Kurds who fail to support the Kurdistan Workers’ Party (PKK). And he has not limited his operations to his own land; enemies and defectors have been assaulted in Germany, leading to an arrest warrant. Nonetheless, the "Kurdish cause," by which is usually meant a separate Kurdistan and punishment of Turkey, receives wide support from European intellectuals and parliamentarians. And while the left is rather more supportive, the Kurds do not lack supporters on the right. A year ago the Foreign Affairs Committee of the Italian Chamber of Deputies voted unanimously to support the Kurdish cause (a motion sponsored by the right-wing National Alliance), and then issued an invitation for a joint meeting with the Kurdish "parliament in exile," duly held in September. The Turks were so enraged that they recalled their ambassador. The Italians "explained" that parliament is independent, but that such meetings were purely private and had nothing to do with official policy.
This was only the beginning of the legitimization of Ocalan and his movement. The PKK has offices in Rome, and its European representative, Kani Yilmaz, has spent considerable time there in recent months. He was spotted by some Italian journalists, but apparently overlooked by the authorities, who have issued a warrant for his arrest. Meanwhile, leading Italian Communists from Rifondazione Communista (who at the time were members of the governing coalition) held meetings with Ocalan and offered to work with him to gain the support of the European Union for the "peace process" in Kurdistan. In other words, a virtual replay of the methods of the late 1960s and early ’70s: a free pass for the terrorists in Italy, and support for their cause internationally.
A Full-Scale Mess
This cozy deal blew up when, for reasons that are still not clear, Ocalan was arrested in Rome after a flight from Moscow. If Mr. Yilmaz (not to be confused with the former Turkish prime minister of the same name) could quietly dine on Via Veneto, why not Ocalan? (And if Ocalan was arrested, why not Yilmaz?) Ocalan was accompanied by the Communists’ shadow foreign minister, Ramon Mantovani, who briefed his bosses in Rome before the flight. The Italian foreign minister, Lamberto Dini, says the Russians did not inform his government of Ocalan’s arrival. Perhaps an overzealous policeman took the arrest warrants from Germany and Turkey too seriously, much to the embarrassment of the government. Perhaps the Communists informed somebody in the government, who in turn gave orders to the airport. Certainly, the government would have preferred to handle the matter as quietly as possible. Now it has a full-scale mess.
Italy cannot extradite Ocalan to Turkey because its constitution forbids extradition to a country that has the death penalty. Italy could extradite Ocalan to Germany, but the Germans—with two million Turks (including half a million Kurds) in the country—are unenthusiastic. So while Mr. Dini and Prime Minister Massimo D’Alema speak hopefully about a German extradition request, German officials whisper to the press that they don’t want to interfere in an Italian legal process. Recently, trial balloons have floated over both capitals, suggesting some as yet unclear "international" or "European" solution. A meeting between German Foreign Minister Joschka Fischer and Italian Fo reign Minister Lamberto Dini produced a decision to see Mr. Ocalan brought to justice via an international court.
It’s hard to imagine how true justice will be done in this way, not least because both the law and jurisdiction are so vague. One of the costs of appeasement is the abandonment of principle, and neither the Germans nor the Italians (nor, for that matter, the Belgians, who also asked for Ocalan’s arrest) have any stomach for this case. They just want it to go away so they can go back to wooing the PKK and playing a role in the "peace process."
Meanwhile, the majority of German and Italian politicians have no problem with Augusto Pinochet. He’s a mass murderer, they say, and should be hammered with the full force of the law. No matter that, after winning his own dirty civil war, he instituted a real peace process, which has made Chile the wonder of Latin America. No matter that he supervised a peaceful transition from his own dictatorship to the current full democracy. The Europeans, including even the "virtual" Europeans in Great Britain, find the old general a far more evil figure than the young terrorist, now waiting for the Italian courts to rule on is request for political asylum.