They Also Made History

By James Kelly

He is the Hydra of our day, a multiheaded monster whose many faces, all different, all grotesque, pop up around the globe without hint of their coming. Defined broadly, the terrorist is the perpetrator of political violence, one who, to paraphrase Clausewitz, seeks to extend war by other means. Rarely does the crime itself fulfill the terrorist's dream; it is usually designed to achieve revenge, publicity, leverage or anarchy. The year saw savage terrorists in all their guises, but 1984 also witnessed a clamorous debate over whether and how a government should strike back.

Perhaps the most chilling image was the truck bomb, with its driver and vehicle wired to explode to kingdom come. In September, the rig came hurtling at the U.S. embassy annex in East Beirut, but a well-aimed shot by a bodyguard caused it to blow up short of its main target and kept casualties low. Religious fanaticism played a part in the hijacking of Kuwait Airways Flight 221, when gun-toting youths, their eyes staring coldly out of paper masks, riveted the world's attention on a Tehran tarmac for six days. Affiliations were never declared, but the hoodlums were believed to belong to the Hizballah (Party of God), the shadowy Shi'ite group blamed by some U.S. officials for the Beirut annex assault and the 1983 attacks against the U.S. Marine barracks and the main U.S. embassy in Lebanon.

The ugly episode illustrated how terrorism so easily can feed on itself: the hijackers' demand was for the release of 17 fellow terrorists held in Kuwaiti jails. As proof that they were deadly serious, the men killed one American before the answer came; once their ultimatum was rejected, they killed another American. The suspicion still lingers that Iran colluded in the crime or at least did not act swiftly enough to end it.

Religious hatred of another sort claimed Indira Gandhi, who was gunned down by two of her own Sikh guards in her tamarind-scented garden on a sunny October morn. She had just bid her guards "Namaste," the gracious Indian salutation accompanied by the crossing of hands before the face. Assassination may be the most invidious of terrorist acts, since the consequences can ricochet disastrously through a country and beyond. Mrs. Gandhi's death produced such a tragedy: some 2,000 Indians perished in the flames of sectarian violence that followed.

Fortune proved kinder to Margaret Thatcher, who had just left her bathroom in a Brighton hotel when an I.R.A. bomb demolished four floors of the hotel and damaged the spot where she had been standing minutes before. Terrorism came of high-tech age that night; the explosives had apparently been planted under the floorboards weeks earlier and detonated by a microchip timer.

There were other blinding flashes of fear: diplomats cut down on fashionable European streets, mines strewn in the Red Sea, even the awards ceremony for Nobel Peace Prizewinner Bishop Desmond Tutu disrupted by a bomb threat. From the elegant Libyan embassy on a leafy London square, a mad spray of gunfire aimed at marching dissidents killed a young British policewoman. Muammar Gaddafi's murderous schemes embarrassed him when Egyptian authorities faked the death of a former Libyan Prime Minister marked for extinction by Tripoli. Gaddafi took responsibility for the assassination that never was.

Frustrated by Washington's paralysis in the face of terrorism, Secretary of State George Shultz advocated retaliatory strikes against bomb throwers and gunmen, lest the U.S. become the "Hamlet of nations, worrying endlessly over whether and how to respond." Secretary of Defense Caspar Weinberger preached caution, likening a counterattack to shooting a gun into a crowded theater in the hope of hitting the guilty. That debate is likely to intensify in 1985. Meanwhile, the continuing threat forces leaders into ever tighter cocoons and inflicts on ordinary citizens the alarming realization that all are potential targets for a crazed few.

Terrorism kills moderation, trust, courage. It poisons society and invites the response of repression, which can breed further wanton violence. Could there be a scarier pronouncement for 1985 than the one made by the I.R.A. after the failed Thatcher murder? "We have only to be lucky once. You will have to be lucky always."