The case of the Canadian Nathaniel Veltman is exemplary, textbook.
At 20 years old, on June 6, 2020, he took the lives of four members of the Afzaal family, Muslims of Pakistani origin, by ramming them with his van in the Canadian province of Ontario.
After committing the multiple murder, he went to a shopping center, called the police, confessed and turned himself in.
Veltman was part of a broken family, with divorced parents, but a fundamentalist Christian.
During the interrogation, the boy declared that he killed the Afzaals after months planning to attack Muslims for the simple fact of being Muslims;
that he wanted to send a message to other young white people to do the same: murder citizens who professed Islam with their cars, including children, with the aim of making the impact, the terror, greater.
He wanted to generate a feeling of insecurity in that community so that they would leave the country.
On February 22, Judge Renee Pomerance sentenced him to life in prison.
The judge did not want to pronounce his name, but she made one thing clear: he is a terrorist, and what he did was a “textbook case” of terrorism.
More information
Twenty years after 11-M, what is former President Aznar laughing at?
The Veltman attack is one of the last tragic examples that allow, through the description of the events, to construct an almost universal definition of terrorism.
In this sense, Judge Pomerance's ruling has provided something new: it is the first ruling in Canada that classifies an attack carried out by white supremacists as terrorist.
And there have been other massacres of these characteristics in the North American country, such as the one that ended the lives of six people in a mosque in Quebec in January 2017.
Terrorism is perhaps the most serious crime committed in a non-war context.
The classification of an act as terrorist is also one of the most debated, both on the national and international stage.
And in remote contexts sometimes in a sidereal way.
If the description of Veltman's crime caused surprise in Canada, in Spain, the term terrorism is also a matter of debate today.
The Supreme Court has a case open against the former president of the Catalan Government Carles Puigdemont, among others, for possible crime of terrorism in the independence protests and riots of 2019. Some of those accused fled to Switzerland.
The Federal Office of Justice of the Swiss country, after receiving a letter rogatory from the Spanish courts, has described those acts of a "political nature", therefore questioning their terrorist nature.
On September 11, 2001, two planes piloted by Al Qaeda terrorists hit the Twin Towers in New York.
SETH MCALLISTER (AFP/GETTY IMAGES)
“The different national and historical experiences of States not only shape their understanding of what terrorism is and what it is not,” Simon Copeland, a researcher at the British think tank RUSI, points out in an email exchange, “but also their frameworks.” legislative measures to address politically motivated violence, further complicating the requirements for a universal definition.”
The Spanish case goes a long way, in line with what Copeland pointed out about the influence of national experience.
ETA, first, and jihadism, later, have forced us to act in the political and legal field: in the year 2000, and after several attacks, the PSOE and the Popular Party sealed the so-called Anti-Terrorist Pact in order, precisely, to avoid that the fight against the armed band of Basque origin was politically instrumentalized.
Fifteen years later, it was the growth of the Islamic State (ISIS) that motivated the reform of the Penal Code to adapt the law to the fight against jihadist terrorism.
More recently, the amnesty law agreed between the Government and the Catalan independence movement has revived the debate on what terrorism is.
A first draft of the rule excluded terrorism crimes included in the Spanish Penal Code from the amnesty.
The negotiation between the groups has replaced the reference to this norm with the directive on terrorism approved in the European Union in March 2017. Although very similar, Spanish and European law differ slightly in what constitutes a terrorism crime.
“The term is used as an insult to describe violence with which we do not agree”
Brian J. Phillips, terrorism expert
Almost 80 years of history have not served the United Nations to agree on a single definition.
It has been tried on many occasions, in the General Assembly and the Security Council, but still without result, as a spokesperson for the organization's Counterterrorism Office from New York confirmed when asked by EL PAÍS.
A simple reason for this disagreement would be provided by Brian J. Phillips, an expert on terrorism at the University of Essex: “The term 'terrorism' is often used not as an objective description, but as an insult.
To describe the violence with which we do not agree.”
Experts on the subject agree that no sane individual or armed group would qualify as a terrorist, a pejorative and disqualifying term.
The history of terrorism as a form of action has its roots in revolutionary France in the 1790s, in the period called the Reign of Terror, during which the State endorsed the use of brutal violence (public executions and mass murders) to annihilate the counterrevolutionaries.
A century later, at the Rome Conference of 1898, terrorism began to be heard in the fight against anarchist groups following the assassination of the Empress of Austria.
Back in 1960, the UN started working on it.
The Swiss researcher Alex P. Schmid, from the International Center against Terrorism, based in The Hague, counted in a report published last year about twenty treaties with the seal of the United Nations through which one can trace, taking from here and there, a definition of the terrorist act (against a plane, a ship, a nuclear power plant...), but not a single and universal one.
In that same report, by the way, Schmid pointed out another interesting point of consensus among academics that allows identifying the terrorist attack: the direct victims are not the final objective (unlike the common murder in which victim and objective coincide).
The death of three people at the hands of Jerad and Amanda Miller in June 2014 in Las Vegas could fit here.
The first two died in a pizzeria, and the third, in a shopping center.
At first glance it might seem like a crime committed by two common murderers with a vulgar motivation.
But the two had shown in writing and on their networks their rejection of Barack Obama's Administration, the ultimate target of their bullets.
The FBI called it “national terrorism.”
“Israel rejects considering the acts of the settlers terrorism even though they are directed precisely against civilians”
Olivier Roy, essayist
The expert from the University of Nantes Jenny Raflik, in an exchange of messages, dares with this definition of terrorism: “Deliberate, disproportionate and illegal violence aimed at exerting pressure, through terror, on a country, a society or a group of people.” people".
But she warns: “It is part of a broader political, social or religious project and, therefore, coexists with other modes of action.”
Motivation matters, a lot.
For example, the hijacking of a device, directing a vehicle into a crowd or cutting a person's throat constitute per se crimes classified in any penal code.
They may or may not be terrorism.
The key is in the reason for the action.
The border between a terrorist act and simple violence is fine: in June 2015, at the height of the ISIS phenomenon in Europe, a man beheaded his boss and attacked a gas company near Lyon.
There was clearly the imitation effect of the Syrian-Iraqi terrorist group, but the individual declared that he had no ties to it and that there was a professional dispute.
He was charged with murder for terrorist purposes, but he committed suicide before more could be learned.
Lack of agreement
The analysis of penal codes such as Spanish, French and American, as well as academic texts and international treaties, allows us to recognize several common points to describe a terrorist act similar to what Raflik said: violence, threat, terror , coercion, public order... The lack of agreement, according to the experts consulted, is precisely in the political use that each State or subject can make of the "terrorist" seal, because precisely "political motivation" is an essential component in academic and legal definitions.
A political actor judges a violent act with a possible political cause;
a cocktail that easily opens up to the instrumentalization and tortuous use of the term terrorism.
As stated in a message by the French essayist Olivier Roy, one of the most widely read experts on this matter inside and outside France, the lack of a universal definition “reinforces that each person has their own list of terrorists and, therefore, that the "The label of terrorism is more political than objective."
And he exemplifies it: “Israel rejects the term 'terrorist' to describe the acts of settlers in occupied territories [of Palestine], when precisely the latter practice violence against a civilian population.
“Egypt and the United Arab Emirates are trying to get Europe to label the Muslim Brotherhood as terrorists, although neither of them have participated in attacks outside of internal conflicts.”
A man visits the tribute to the four victims of the Muslim community murdered in Ontario (Canada).
Nathan Denette (Zuma Press / Contact)
The Israeli example that Roy talks about is very timely.
After the attacks on October 7, the Executive of Benjamin Netanyahu began to classify the author of the massacre, Hamas - on the list of terrorist groups of the European Union and the United States - as a group in the image of ISIS itself (known also by its pejorative Arabic acronym Daesh).
Washington, his ally, delved into it and collaborated, even through the mouth of Joe Biden himself, in the campaign in which he has tried to place the Palestinian militia and the Syrian-Iraqi terrorist organization in the same league.
Although Hamas, considered by many states to be a liberation movement, used terrorist tactics during the October 7 massacre, the nature and objectives of both groups are very different.
The French professor affirms that it is not possible to reach a “purely legal” definition of terrorism because there are many actors who can terrorize through violence: a State in declared war (the Allied bombing of Dresden in 1944), a liberation movement national where terrorism is one means of action among others (the Algerian FLN or Hamas) or an organization in which it is its essential form of action (Al Qaeda, Daesh).
“Distinguishing between these cases,” Roy continues in his argument, “is a political question and not a moral or legal one.”
Needless to say, what Brussels and Washington consider terrorism does not coincide much with what Moscow judges.
Hamas is again a good example.
Although the Kremlin has condemned the October attacks, the Palestinian militia at the head of the Gaza Government does not have the Russian seal of a terrorist organization.
Moscow maintains relations at least with the political branch of the liberation movement.
Stephanie Foggett, a researcher at the analysis center The Soufan Group, echoes Roy's reflection: “Given the inherently political nature of terrorism,” she explains, “there is a lot of power to decide what is included and excluded in such a definition of political violence.
As such, the process is not neutral and a singular definition is unlikely to satisfy the changing and divergent national interests of States.”
For the differences between the EU and the US regarding the designation of Russia as a country sponsoring terrorism, once again a matter of a political and not a legal nature.
The European Parliament has taken that step;
Washington, despite internal pressure and requests from Ukraine, has not done so.
Aside from arbitrariness and ambiguities, the absence of a universal definition of terrorism has negative consequences.
At first glance and in the face of different classifications, cooperation between countries to persecute transnational groups suffers.
But there is more.
Richard Barret, a former member of the British intelligence services and former head of the UN monitoring team on Al Qaeda, notes: “The lack of a definition blurs the division between insurgency and terrorism,” he says, “allows governments to gain international support (or avoid international criticism) for the repression of the opposition.
It also leads to excessive reinforcement of Government security and the militarization of civilian bodies such as the police and the abuse of power leading to the erosion of human rights and civil liberties.”
A scenario, the one described by Barret, that is reminiscent of the one drawn by the war on terror coined after the attacks of September 11, 2001 in the United States. It was then that the Western governments at the forefront of this campaign of punishment in the Middle East against Al Qaeda eliminated the cause component from the terrorist equation, that is, the motivation, to prevent the attacks from having any type of justification.
There were only murderers who killed for no reason.
The label “terrorist” began to spread uncontrollably, losing meaning in the process.
A current that has been qualified in the last decade through national and international laws, but that has not achieved a consensus for a universal definition.
Sign up here
for the weekly Ideas newsletter.
Subscribe to continue reading
Read without limits
Keep reading
I am already a subscriber
_