WASHINGTON: US Secretary of State Colin Powell said on Thursday that some groups sometimes described as terrorist might be seeking to redress grievances, gain rights or achieve freedom from oppressors.
In language that contrasts strongly with the Bush administration’s previous rhetoric on terrorism, he said that not every case would be “black and white” and that there would be “grey areas” that might need to be treated politically.
Speaking to the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, Powell said the Al Qaeda organization led by Osama bin Laden was one clear case of a ‘terrorist’ group against which it would not be difficult to sustain an international alliance.
The leftist Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC) and the Real Irish Republican Army in Northern Ireland “probably meet a similar standard”, he added.
“But then you start to run into areas where one man’s terrorist is another man’s freedom fighter and that’s where you have to apply judgment,” he added.
To test whether groups qualify as targets against which the United States could sustain an alliance, one would have to ask whether they have a better way to “express grievances”, “change the political problem” and “gain your rights”, Powell said.
“These are difficult calls to make... You can be quite challenged in explaining these differences with respect to the Middle East,” he added.
The United States usually resists any attempt to draw distinctions between the groups on the State Department’s list of “foreign terrorist organizations”, which includes the FARC, the Real IRA and an array of Middle Eastern groups.
President George W. Bush, in his rallying cry to the nation on September 20, said: “Every nation ... now has a decision to make. Either you are with us, or you are with the terrorists.”
SUGGESTS FLEXIBILITY ON MIDDLE EAST: Powell and other US officials have said repeatedly that countries cannot pick the “terrorist” groups they like and dislike — a rebuke to countries such as Iran and Syria, which dispute the US definition of terrorism.
Iran, Syria and many other Arabs say that Lebanese and Palestinian groups which Washington calls terrorist are fighting a legitimate struggle against Israeli occupation.
Powell’s remarks on Thursday suggested some US flexibility on the subject, especially when it comes to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.
The United States is trying to discourage comparisons between its war on Osama bin Laden in Afghanistan and Israel’s use of force against the Palestinians, on the grounds that in the Middle East a political process is possible.
Powell said: “We can use this coalition to go after the clear cases of terrorism and then to start to explore the grey areas where there have been longstanding differences that have not yet been resolved.”
“It’s going to take the kind of patience and diligence that gave us the breakthrough... in Northern Ireland, where two groups fighting all these years finally realized that this wasn’t going to do it.”
The Irish Republican Army began to disarm on Tuesday, marking a historic breakthrough in the long and bloody conflict between Irish nationalists and pro-British loyalists in Northern Ireland. The Real IRA is a splinter extremist group which opposes the IRA’s ceasefire.
“We’re just going to have to persuade everybody to stick to it and continue to make distinctions between that which is legitimate protest and legitimate movement toward freedom against an oppressor and that which simply doesn’t meet that standard. But there are not going to be black and white rules in every instance,” Powell said. —Reuters
