Europe's old-fashioned terrorists run for cover in an al-Qaida world

DUBLIN, Ireland -- Not so long ago, when a bomb went off in London, you could be sure it was the Irish Republican Army. If the target was Madrid, that meant the Basque separatist group ETA.

But al-Qaida has shattered the old certainties -- and accelerated the decline of European paramilitary groups that peg their survival to a bedrock of public support. The continent's two most entrenched bands of outlaws, the IRA and ETA, have taken their biggest peacemaking steps in the shadow of al-Qaida carnage.

"The old terrorist groups, at leadership level, would not want to be linked in the public mind with this new type of terror. They wouldn't want to be seen to be competing for attention with it," said Christopher Langton, an analyst at the International Institute of Strategic Studies in London.

"With the IRA and ETA and others, they call cease-fires and want to be negotiated with," said Mr. Langton, a retired British army colonel. But with al-Qaida, he said, "there's nobody to negotiate with."

He and Jonathan Stevenson, an anti-terrorism specialist at the U.S. Naval War College in Newport, Rhode Island, agree that the al-Qaida threat has greatly increased Western governments' willingness to share intelligence, toughen anti-terrorism laws, and tolerate repressive measures. Previously, Britain and Spain faced international criticism when they cracked down on the IRA and ETA, whose members were easier to identify and arrest.

"Sept. 11 and the rise of the new terrorism hardened governments against dealing with groups that commit terrorist violence," said Mr. Stevenson, an expert on conflicts from Northern Ireland to Somalia.

He said al-Qaida's "mass-casualty agenda" meant that the violence committed by the IRA and ETA no longer had "stun value."

In its peace declaration this week, ETA -- which killed about 800 people from 1968 to 2003 in hope of pressuring Spain into granting independence to the Basque region -- pledged its cease-fire would be permanent and demanded only admission to negotiations in return, a remarkable climbdown. The group hadn't killed anybody since March 11, 2004, when Moroccan radicals killed 191 people with blasts on Madrid commuter trains, an atrocity that the Spanish government of the day tried to pin on ETA.

The IRA, which killed 1,775 people during a failed 27-year campaign to wrest Northern Ireland from the United Kingdom, began disarming just six weeks after the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks on the United States. And just a few weeks after suicide bombers killed 56 people in London, the IRA formally instructed its members to renounce violence for political purposes and to dump their weapons for collection by disarmament officials.

The IRA had ruled out both moves for a decade. Analysts and IRA members alike say that growing international impatience, particularly in the United States after Sept. 11, helped make the unthinkable inevitable.

"Al-Qaida did change things for us," said an IRA veteran, speaking on condition of anonymity because IRA membership remains an imprisonable crime in both Britain and Ireland.

He told The Associated Press that the Sept. 11 attacks made it politically impossible for the IRA to break its 1997 cease-fire. He contrasted that with the fate of the IRA's previous 1994 truce, which ended with a two-ton truck bomb on the City of London, Britain's financial district, that caused vast economic damage and killed two men. The low death toll reflected the IRA policy of phoned warnings and followed two similarly massive strikes on the City of London in 1992 and 1993.

"Up to then, we could expect a certain level of sympathy internationally when we bombed the City of London. Those operations used to be, far and away, the most effective thing we did, the thing that really hit the Brits in their wallets," he said. "I wouldn't expect too many Irish-Americans in New York to cheer us if we did that today -- not after what happened to the twin towers."

Most of Europe's terror-practicing groups rose amid the radical chic and student protests of the late 1960s, when the continent was divided by the Cold War. Germany's Red Army Faction, Italy's Red Brigades and Greece's November 17 kidnapped, assassinated and bombed as they dreamed of Marxist revolution and the collapse of NATO.

Because they lacked any popular base, these small groups proved vulnerable to leaders' arrests. Once the Warsaw Pact collapsed, they disintegrated or lost their direction.

Fred Halliday, a human-rights professor at the London School of Economics, said the end of the Cold War undermined virtually all of Europe's paramilitary movements; the IRA, for instance, received Warsaw Pact weaponry through Libya and claimed to be fighting to create a socialist republic.

Mr. Halliday cited several factors that drove the IRA, then ETA, toward peace long before al-Qaida appeared. He said the IRA's Sinn Fein party was deeply influenced by the African National Congress' renunciation of "armed struggle" in the early 1990s. Then Sinn Fein jumped at the chance, in 1994, to enter mainstream politics with crucial encouragement from former President Bill Clinton. ETA, in turn, sought to emulate Sinn Fein's truce-for-talks strategy.

But he said the IRA's and ETA's long road to peace illustrated how long it would take to come to terms with al-Qaida as well as Hamas, the militant Palestinian movement. He said it was inevitable that, someday, the West would end up negotiating with the political descendants of both forces.

"The IRA and ETA must have realized 10, 20 years before their cease-fires that their war wasn't going anywhere. It took their leaders that long to shift their movement towards reality," Mr. Halliday said. "How long will it take al-Qaida and Hamas to travel the same journey? It's depressing."

Europe's terror groups Most of Europe's old guard of underground groups has collapsed, drifted away or been absorbed into the political mainstream.

SPAIN: The Basque paramilitary group ETA -- full name Euskadi Ta Askatasuna and meaning "Basque Homeland and Freedom" -- was founded in 1958 with the objective of carving out an independent Basque state from northeast Spain and southwest France. It killed more than 800 people, almost all in Spain, from 1968 to 2003. Its targets included police officers, soldiers, judges, politicians and journalists. ETA largely used the Basque region of France as a comparatively safe haven for members and arms dumps. In 1998 ETA called a cease-fire to open negotiations with the government of Prime Minister Jose Maria Aznar, whom it had tried to assassinate, but ETA violence resumed after 14 months. The group this week announced a "permanent cease-fire" and appealed for talks with Aznar's successor, Jose Luis Rodriguez Zapatero.

NORTHERN IRELAND: The Provisional Irish Republican Army spent 27 years trying to bomb Northern Ireland out of the United Kingdom and into the Irish Republic, killing about 1,775 people and maiming thousands before calling a July 1997 cease-fire. The group's Sinn Fein party representatives accepted a reform-minded 1998 peace accord for the British territory, and the Provisional IRA last year renounced violence for political purposes and disarmed. Three much smaller anti-British paramilitary groups -- the Irish National Liberation Army, the Continuity IRA and Real IRA -- have degenerated into gangs focused on smuggling fuel, cigarettes and drugs. Rival outlawed Protestant groups, the Ulster Defense Association and the Ulster Volunteer Force, are largely observing a 1994 cease-fire and similarly mired in crime.

FRANCE: A wide range of separatist groups on Corsica, part of France since 1768, have mounted hundreds of bomb attacks and occasional assassination attempts since the mid-1970s in hopes of securing political independence. The largest group, the National Front for the Liberation of Corsica or NFLN, was formed by the merger of two smaller underground groups in 1976 and has been blamed for most violence. Since declaring a 1999 cease-fire, the NFLN has been blamed for repeated breaches.

GERMANY: The Red Army Faction -- originally known as the Baader-Meinhof Gang after its founders, Andreas Baader and Ulrike Meinhof -- was launched in 1970 with vague aims of inciting Marxist revolution in West Germany. It kidnapped business leaders, gunned down politicians, prosecutors and police officers, bombed corporation headquarters and U.S. military bases, and hijacked an airliner. Baader and two other top figures committed suicide in prison in 1977 after the airplane hijacking failed to win their freedom. The group killed 32 people, its last victim in April 1991. The group formally disbanded in April 1998.

GREECE: A Marxist revolutionary group called November 17 -- the date of a 1973 student uprising at an Athens university -- claimed responsibility for more than 20 killings from 1975 to 2002. Among those it assassinated were a CIA station chief, a U.S. Navy captain, defense attaches at the British and American embassies, and a Turkish diplomat. It has been inactive since 2002, when police seeking to crush terrorism threats in the build-up to the 2004 Athens Olympics arrested key leaders, found hideouts and seized weapons dumps.

ITALY: The Red Brigades, founded in 1970 to inspire Marxist revolution in Italy, began by sabotaging factory equipment, but graduated quickly into kidnapping and assassination, killing hundreds of government officials, judges and lawyers, and police officers. In 1978, Red Brigades members kidnapped and murdered former Prime Minister Aldo Moro. The Red Brigades split into feuding factions in 1984, and their activities petered out with key arrests and the end of the Cold War.