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发帖数: 29846 | 1 By Patrick Goodenough
June 4, 2012
(CNSNews.com) – U.N. Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon addressed the advisory
board of a newly-established U.N. Counter-Terrorism Center in Saudi Arabia
on Sunday but was silent on the world body’s enduring failure to come up
with a universal definition of terrorism.
For well over a decade, the biggest single obstacle preventing a U.N.
agreement on defining terrorism has been the insistence by Muslim states
belonging to the Organization of Islamic Cooperation (OIC) that an exception
should be made for actions taken in “resistance” against foreign
occupation.
Support for the Palestinian cause has been a key driver for that stance,
although the occupation loophole has also been seen to apply to anti-
coalition violence in Afghanistan (and Iraq, before the troop withdrawal),
as well as attacks against Indian targets in the Indian-controlled part of
disputed Kashmir.
Ban’s weekend visit to Jeddah provided more than one opportunity to
confront the issue publicly, since he also paid a visit to the OIC’s
headquarters, becoming the first U.N. secretary-general to do so.
But the defining terrorism issue was not mentioned in Ban’s remarks to the
board of the Saudi-funded U.N. Counter-Terrorism Center (UNCCT), during a
joint press availability with Saudi foreign minister, or during remarks to
the media after his meeting with OIC secretary-general Ekmeleddin Ihsanoglu.
Instead, he focused in his speech to the board on matters like tackling the
financing of terrorism, the “need to try to understand – and counter –
the appeal of terrorism,” and the importance of protecting human rights
while combatting terrorism.
During his joint appearance with Foreign Minister Prince Saud Al-Faisal –
with whom Ban had co-chaired the UNCCT board meeting – the U.N. chief
praised the “visionary leadership” of Saudi King Abdullah for supporting
the center and U.N. counter-terrorism goals.
After his talks with Ihsanoglu, Ban said he encouraged the Islamic bloc “to
expand its valuable efforts to generate understanding and tolerance and
mutual respect among different cultures, civilizations and faiths.” (In its
own statement after the meeting, the OIC said Ihsanoglu had assured Ban of
the OIC’s support on issues of international concern, while Ban had “
expressed his appreciation for the visionary leadership of Ihsanoglu and
reiterated his conviction of OIC being a strategic partner of the U.N.”)
The OIC’s convention on combating international terrorism, produced in 1998
, states that “peoples’ struggle including armed struggle against foreign
occupation … shall not be considered a terrorist crime.”
The sensitive issue of defining terrorism has dogged every U.N. counter-
terror initiative for the past 15 years, with the OIC, and especially its
Arab members including Saudi Arabia, refusing to give ground on the
occupation question:
An OIC foreign ministers meeting in Yemen in 2005 condemned “terrorism in
all its forms and manifestations, while recognizing the importance of
distinguishing between it and legitimate resistance to occupation.”
An OIC meeting in Islamabad in 2007 endorsed a resolution stating that “the
struggle of peoples plying under the yoke of foreign occupation and
colonialism, to accede to national freedom and establish their right to self
-determination, does not in any way constitute an act of terrorism.”
Arab ministers meeting in 2010 agreed on a definition that “emphasized the
need to differentiate between terrorism and the legitimate struggle of
people against occupation.”
India, which like Israel has been a major target of terrorism, spearheaded a
push for an international terrorism convention during the 1990s, and in
1996 the U.N. General Assembly passed a resolution setting up an “ad-hoc
committee” to work on a draft proposed by India.
The committee has met 15 times since then, for a one- or two-week annual
session each spring, but failure to reach a definition of terrorism has
stymied efforts to produce a comprehensive convention.
As in previous years, the report on the most recent session, held in April
2011, spelled out the problem: “[S]everal delegations reiterated that the
convention should contain a definition of terrorism that would provide a
clear distinction between acts of terrorism covered by the convention and
the legitimate struggle of peoples in the exercise of their right to self-
determination or under foreign occupation.”
This year, for the first time since 1997, the U.N. has decided not to
convene the ad-hoc committee at all. Instead, according to a statement
issued early this year, the committee will next meet in 2013 “in order, to,
on an expedited basis, continue to elaborate the draft comprehensive
convention on international terrorism.”
Although the U.N. has been unable to nail down a convention, the General
Assembly in 2006 did manage to adopt a Global Counter-Terrorism Strategy.
The U.N. calls the document the first global and common approach to tackling
terrorism, yet it does not define it. It merely reaffirms member states’
commitment to resolve “the outstanding issues related to the legal
definition.”
The global strategy has four pillars – tackling the conditions conducive to
the spread of terrorism, preventing and combatting terrorism, building
countries’ capacity to counter terrorism, and ensuring respect for human
rights during the fight against terrorism.
In 2010, the UNCCT was set up, with three years of Saudi government funding,
to help implement the global strategy. The meeting in Jeddah Sunday was the
advisory board’s second.
The board currently comprises eight OIC members (Saudi Arabia, Algeria,
Egypt, Indonesia, Morocco, Nigeria, Pakistan and Turkey), eight Western
countries (the U.S., Britain, Belgium, France, Germany, Norway, Spain and
Switzerland), as well as Argentina, Brazil, China, Russia and India. |
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