Word: terrorism
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...Monde, one of the two lawyers he retained last week for his defense, Jacques Verges, is identified in the files of the former East German Stasi secret police as the man who passed that letter to the French authorities, a role that suggests , an active participation with the terror clique. Verges dismisses the charge as "part of the Stasi program of disinformation." Former French government officials, however, confirm the report...
Such fears have a foundation: the world has seen terrorism continuously evolve to new heights of ingenuity and depravity. This week Carlos the Jackal is in jail in France, and North Korea is using the threat of nuclear weapons to try to extort billions from its neighbors. Their juxtaposition in the news, linking the worst of 1970s-style terrorism with the brazen threat of irresponsible nuclear ambitions, shouts a warning of a different sort of terror, still indefinable but extremely frightening. The combination of brutality and fanaticism with nuclear weapons could bring about disasters almost too chilling to contemplate...
...wave of terror, personified by Ilyich Ramirez Sanchez, is ebbing. "Carlos," says Paul Wilkinson, an expert on terrorism at St. Andrews University in Scotland, "symbolized a terrorism of the extreme left which has almost died out in Europe." Carlos and his Soviet, Marxist and leftist Palestinian allies represent failed ideologies. The inheritors today are nameless Islamic extremists from Hizballah, Hamas and their sponsors -- everyone thinks first of Iran as chief sponsor -- who see themselves as the force of the future in the Middle East. While their cause is the same -- derailing the peace process and destroying Israel -- the Islamists...
While the ultimate terror would be a working bomb constructed by terrorists on their own, the much likelier catastrophe is a large purchase of plutonium by a country looking for a shortcut to a nuclear arsenal. "It's clear that the highest bidder is going to be a state," says Phebe Marr, an expert on Iraq at the National Defense University in Washington. A government with nuclear ambitions would want not just a single bomb but an arsenal or significant additions to an existing arsenal. One or two bombs could attract threats and retaliation from abroad. So an interested state...
...only thing now holding the country together is a delicate equilibrium of fear. On one hand there is each ethnic group's terror of the other. Counterbalancing that is the fear that if either side gives in to its worst impulses, Burundi will detonate as Rwanda did. "It's a tense, threatening atmosphere," says Irish aid worker Orla Quinlan. "Every time someone is attacked or killed, you say that's it. That's the trigger that will blow Burundi apart...