Many of you who are here in this Assembly hall were [once]considered terrorists.
In his speech to the U.N. General Assembly last week, P.L.O. Leader Yasser Arafat was trying to make a propaganda point, seeking to remind many Third World delegates that they too were once considered outlaws by much of the world. His statement was not merely rhetorical. Like Arafat, many of his listeners had in fact once been hunted men—and had hunted other men themselves. Terrorism is universally repugnant to standards of human decency, but in the past 25 years, sadly enough, it has been essential to the birth of many of the world's now sovereign nations.
By definition, terrorists are people who use indiscriminate violence as a means of achieving a political goal. To the victims of the violence—most recently the Israelis, who have suffered through years of wanton attacks by Palestinian bombers and gunmen—terrorists are callous, cowardly murderers preying on innocent women and children. For their part, terrorists usually present themselves as revolutionaries, guerrillas and freedom fighters. They defend the use of violence as the necessary tactic of downtrodden peoples seeking to combat oppressive or colonial governments. In the eyes of their followers, the terrorists' successful use of violence often adds to, rather than detracts from their claim to respectability. Thus it is quite possible, if an independent Palestinian state is ever established, that statues of Arafat will some day be erected in the plazas of Nablus, like the plaques and statues of Eamon de Valéra in Ireland and Emiliano Zapata in Mexico. The fact that the leader of the P.L.O. appeared at the U.N. showed that it is already becoming respectable in the eyes of much of the world. "Respectability depends on whose side you're on," says Oxford Historian Alastair Buchan. "To the Turks, Lawrence of Arabia was a terrorist."
Oppressed peoples have often turned to violence as the first step in their fight for nationhood. If it were not for the guerrilla war carried out by the Irish Republican Army, for example, the Republic of Ireland might never have gained its independence. The unsavory reputation of the I.R.A. did not prevent its onetime leader, Sean MacBride, from receiving the Nobel Peace Prize last month for his subsequent crusade for human justice in Amnesty International.
In one of the bloodiest campaigns of terror in a bloody century, the Algerians forced the French to withdraw from North Africa in 1962. "My brothers, do not kill only, but mutilate your adversaries on the public highway," said one terrorist paper in 1956. "Pierce their eyes. Cut off their arms and hang them." F.L.N. militants took the words to heart, striking at the French, both in Algeria and in France itself, and at Algerian Moslems who refused to cooperate. In 1957 the F.L.N. murdered 300 residents of the Kabylia region whom they suspected of cooperating with a rival group. The French vowed never to talk with such murderers, but both sides eventually sat across a negotiating table at Evian-les-Bains.
A leader of the Mau Mau terrorist campaign against the British in Kenya now sits in the Cabinet of President Jomo Kenyatta, and the Mau Mau is officially regarded as a heroic freedom movement.