Ira Terrorism. Essay - 2,507 words

IRA Terrorism. One of the main problems of the present is the global terrorism. Terrorism unfortunately became an integral part of the political and economic processes in the world thus making a threat for the civil and the national security worldwide. There are a lot of discussions on defining the terrorism. Sometimes the acts of the terror are called the revolutionary struggle, sometimes the terrorists are called the rebels, and sometimes they define themselves as the fighters for some high ideals. Nowadays the terrorism became an epidemic that has struck the world and changed completely all our understanding of security.


After the cold war is over and the mankind is supposed to breathe freely being liberated from all those senseless arms races, the confrontation between two super military political blocks was replaced by another one happened to be even more dangerous than the previous one, the confrontation between the civilized mankind and the barbarian terrorism. The most appropriate definition of the terrorists is something like the small armed groups using the threat or violence against the large groups of non-combatants to gain their political aims. The most important is that the thread or the violence is applied against the non-combatants, i.e. peaceful people. The terror is the prerogative of the weak, those who can not or do not want to gain their political aims by the conventional, accepted by the civilized world means and procedures. Unfortunately the definition of the terrorists is highly dependable upon the political views of this or that politician.


The same groups of the armed combatants attacking the civilians are called by the various politicians the terrorists and the freedom fighters, fighters for justice etc. These definitions explain the different attitudes of these or those leaders towards the terrorists, i.e. the moral aspect of the problem is mixed with the political one, which influences the humanitarian aspect of the problem greatly. The terror war is the war aimed to demolish the human dignity by means of fear. The September attacks on the USA marked the distinctive borderline in the global war with the terrorism. The civilization faced the new threat it happened to be unprepared to.


But the terrorism is as old as the civilization itself. If we study the phenomenon of the terrorism we realize that the terrorists do their actions when they feel they have the impunity. That does not concern the suicidal acts, because in this case the executors of the acts are actually the weapons of the terror rather than the terrorists. We can distinguish some kinds of terror. All of them have some ideological coverage of their aims. The terrorism based on the religious confrontation is the most dangerous due to the fanaticism of such movements. This fanaticism may be explained by the long history of the confrontation.


Such confrontation is as old as religion itself. While speaking of the terrorism based on the religion confrontation we mean the inter confession confrontation, that is Moslems vs. Christians, etc. But one of the first and the cruelest manifestation of the terrorism was the massacre between the Protestants and Catholics in the mid centuries in France. Such confrontation within the same religion, Christianity is the cruelest and it has no chances to stop. It very much resembles the civil wars, very cruel wars within one nation.


According to the aims of the terrorism we may distinguish the nationalists terrorists. These are the groups seeking the self determination. These groups can operate both within the country and outside. They have a certain ideological coverage, the struggle for the independence or something else. While using the terrorists methods they are defined as the terrorists and no ideological coverage can change their criminal nature. Sometimes the nationalists movements have certain religious basis.


In this case the minority practicing the religion different from that of the majority are committing their acts using the religion as the ideological basis for their crimes. The Christian inter confession conflicts have the long history. Such conflicts are very dangerous because the religion is the best ideological basis and the terrorists sometimes are very confident in it. If we speak about, say political confrontation, there is always a chance for the peaceful negotiations, while speaking of the religion based conflicts there is no chance at all. The religion is often is taken as a dogma and the only way to find the mutual understanding is to change the confession of any of the counterparty which is almost impossible. One of the country which became the target of the inter confessional conflict is the Northern Ireland. This country has been suffering from the political war between the Protestants and the Catholics for years.


The originality of this conflict is that there is no other such brutal opposition in the world based on the inter confessional basis within the one religion, namely Christianity. The key participant of this conflict is IRA (Irish Republican Army). The IRA gained its popularity as the terrorist organization characterized by the bloodiest actions against the innocent people and which is responsible for a great number of deaths of the innocent civilians. If we analyze the roots of the conflicts we can mark three sources of it. The first one is traditional suppression of the Catholics by the Protestants. The second is that the government is involved in this conflict assisting one side. While assisting one side of the conflict government produces the strong opposition from the other side. It is like the physics law that each action causes the counteraction.


Once government created its enemies it ignores the problems of the newly created enemies. It is like axiom, the enemies are created by the government and then the government has nothing to negotiate with the enemies. There may be some factors to improve by the government, but instead of improving such factors some governments prefer to ignore them because they are favoring the governments enemies. Then the opposition considers the terror to be the only way to attract the governments attention. The last factor is that apart from supporting one side of the conflict government sometimes act itself against such groups using the police and the military means which causes the opposition to the regime. All these factors are the background of the conflict in the Northern Ireland and the ideological basis for the IRA1. The IRA began its activity with the aims different from those it has now.


It was founded as the defensive military group for the Catholics in 1866. The objective necessity of its formation was to defend the Catholics against the Protestants in the North Ireland. The Catholics were the minority in Ireland. The religious motivation was added by the political one in 1921 when Ireland was divided into two countries, The Republic of Ireland and the Northern Ireland. The religious doctrine was added by the national doctrine and made the conflict even worse. The IRA was fighting for the reunification of The Northern Ireland with the Republic of Ireland2.


In 1969 the IRA was divided into two branches, the Official IRA with the more socialist principles and the Provisional IRA which has remained unyielding in the nationalist foundation and which was military directed. While using the term IRA in this paper we mean the Provisional IRA. The main statement of the IRA is Ireland had been conquered by force, partitioned by force, and by force would be saved" (Bell, 1997: 458).3 This dogma made the IRA one of the most dangerous terrorist group in the world being supported by the terrorists formation world wide including the USA. British governm ...................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................

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Essay Tags: northern ireland, terrorist, terrorism, terrorists, human rights

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