Old terrors fall to Al-Qaeda

“With the IRA and ETA and others, they call cease-fires and want to be negotiated with,” said Langton, a retired British army colonel. But with Al-Qaeda, he said, “there’s nobody to negotiate with.”

He and Jonathan Stevenson, an anti-terrorism specialist at the US Naval War College in Newport, Rhode Island, agree that the Al-Qaeda 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 Stevenson, an expert on conflicts from Northern Ireland to Somalia. He said Al-Qaeda’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 UK, began disarming six weeks after the Sept. 11, 2001. —SHAWN POGATCHNIK