Summary: Standby for Action - Terrorism as Carried out by RAF and Al Qaida
Wolfgang Taus
Terrorism as a commonly specific form of political violence, or its threat, against matter or men, has been a widespread and certainly not recent phenomenon. Having developed from the antiauthoritarian 68-Movement, in the 1970ies the Baader-Meinhof-Gang became the Red Army Fraction (RAF), which was to challenge the German constitutional state vehemently. The RAF saw themselves as a part of the International Communists; political assassinations and kidnappings were their doing.
The bloody "German Autumn" of 1977 was both height and turning point in the conflict between the guerrillas and the state: the imprisoned adherents’ release could not be obtained, neither by assassinations nor by hijacking with kidnapping. Attacks continued afterwards, but they did not match the intensity of the late 1970ies.
The "emergency powers" acts, passed in the course of the fighting against the RAF, were not revised after the official end of the RAF in 1988, and they should prove successful, especially now in the fight against Islamistic terrorism. Osama bin Laden’s" Dschihad” applies not only to the detested Western World but also to Moslem sectarians, as the Shiites are seen by him. He aims at disposing of those Moslem governments cooperating with the West, and at establishing a caliphate of all orthodox people.
Al Qaida represents a symbol of transnational Islamistic terrorism with many different groups, who know how to apply their destructive potential within the scope of complex operations against the West, with raised shock effects for the mass media. As far as fighting against terrorism is concerned, the preservation of democratic constitutional order seems necessary, resolutely facing all authoritarian challenges.
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