Another consideration that makes the word difficult to define is that some ‘terrorists’ go on to become Presidents and Prime Ministers. There’s a long history of the transformation of ‘terrorists’ into ‘statesmen’. In 1963 in Kenya, Jomo Kenyatta, believed to be one of the leaders of the Mau Mau insurgents who fought British colonial rule, became the country’s first Prime Minister after independence. In 1977 in Israel, Menachem Begin, the leader of the Irgun, who resisted the British presence in Palestine, became Prime Minister. In 1994 in the Middle East Yasser Arafat, the leader of Fatah, became President of the Palestinian National Authority covering the West Bank and Gaza. In the same year in South Africa, Nelson Mandela, the former leader of the African National Congress, became the nation’s first black President. And in 2007 in Northern Ireland Martin McGuinness, formerly the IRA’s most prominent leader, became Deputy First Minister in the province’s power-sharing government.
All judgements about the word ‘terrorist’ are subjective. It’s a word I try to avoid using in my work – and it’s one that is effectively banned on the BBC’s World Service and by Reuters, since many listeners, viewers and readers around the globe may not agree with the definition as applied to certain conflicts, not least that in the Middle East. But it can’t be avoided in writing a book with the title Talking to Terrorists. A terrorist is, literally, a person who uses the weapon of terror to target a state’s political, social and economic institutions. Invariably terrorists are driven by a mixture of political, social or religious grievances that they seek to rectify by the use of violence either to overthrow the state or to force it to address the issues that lie at the root of the recourse to violence. The IRA finally recognised that its atavistic aim of driving the British out of Northern Ireland was not going to be achieved by violent means, and in the end settled for compromise. But the politically uncomfortable reality remains that it was the IRA’s military campaign that finally forced the British government to negotiate. Although the IRA would split hairs to deny it, the fact is that the IRA waged a terrorist campaign to try to achieve its end. So were the IRA terrorists? In the strict sense of the word, the answer has to be yes, however vehemently they and their political wing, Sinn Féin, would deny it.
However, cause and motivation apart, there is a fundamental difference between the terrorist violence used by the IRA and that perpetrated by Al Qaeda, its affiliates and those who support its ideology. There are degrees of terrorism, although that may be of scant comfort to its victims. With notable exceptions, the IRA did not deliberately set out to kill innocent civilians, although when tactically convenient it would, for example, brand workmen employed to repair security-force installations that the IRA had bombed as ‘legitimate’ targets. In stark contrast, Al Qaeda deliberately sets out indiscriminately to murder as many civilians as possible, to create maximum outrage and maximum publicity. The attacks on New York and Washington on 11 September 2001, and the suicide bombings on London Transport on 7 July 2005, are but two of the most glaring examples. Bali, Madrid, Casablanca and Mumbai have also been the sites of terrorist violence carried out by Islamist groups that, if not directly affiliated to Al Qaeda, are supportive of its ideology. Al Qaeda is, as the IRA was, a terrorist organisation, although of an entirely different order. After 9/11 I asked Gerry Adams if he would describe Al Qaeda as terrorists. He said without hesitation that he would. He would never describe the IRA in the same terms.
However, in writing this book I sometimes put the words ‘terrorist’ and ‘terrorism’ in inverted commas – to indicate a degree of equivocation over the definitions at particular points in the narrative. Again, this indicates the subjectivity of the definition. This may not be an ideal solution, but at least it illustrates that ‘terrorism’ is not always black and white.
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Nelson Mandela is the most famous personification of the cliché ‘from terrorist to statesman’. In 1981 I made a Panorama programme about Mandela and the ANC when he was still a prisoner on Robben Island. I remember looking out to sea from a clifftop in Cape Town at the tiny speck on the horizon seven miles away that had been Mandela’s prison for fifteen years. I asked the then South African Prime Minister, P.W. Botha, about the possibility of releasing his most famous prisoner. ‘We don’t talk to terrorists,’ he replied. In the end, his successor F.W. de Klerk did.
The reason for making the film was to mark the fifth anniversary of the massacre in the Soweto township outside Johannesburg in June 1976, when South African police opened fire on students who were protesting against the Apartheid government’s insistence that the Afrikaans language be taught in Soweto’s schools. I’d heard that many students had subsequently fled South Africa to join the insurgents of the ANC, Africa’s oldest liberation movement, and I wanted to track down and talk to some of them. Were they ‘terrorists’ or ‘freedom fighters’?
My contact in the ANC, based in the Zambian capital Lusaka at the time, was Tabo Mbeki, then its press officer. I met him in London with Archbishop Desmond Tutu and Oliver Tambo, then ANC President, and I remember bringing Mbeki a paper cup of BBC coffee in the Panorama office, never imagining that one day he would become President of South Africa. I remember too being surprised that an Archbishop seemed to be so closely associated with an organisation committed to the use of violence to overthrow the Apartheid regime.
After months of protracted negotiations, I finally got the ANC’s agreement to let me film some former Soweto students training in the bush in Angola, on condition that I never disclosed where they were. Other conditions were that I was to go alone, and to do the filming and sound recording myself. I got my visa from the Angolan authorities in Paris, booked a flight and was ready to go. Then, the day before my planned departure, I received a phone call from Tabo Mbeki, who told me that the trip was off. No reason was given. I rang my ANC contact in Paris and arranged to meet him at Charles de Gaulle airport the following day, in the hope of getting the decision reversed or at the very least receiving an explanation. He said he was unable to enlighten me. The ANC, like Sinn Féin, was centrally controlled and highly disciplined. Orders were given and obeyed. My flight to Luanda was leaving in an hour. I had a ticket and a visa, so I decided to take my chances.
On the long journey south to Angola, I had plenty of time to work out my plan of action when I arrived in Luanda. I would not be met, and I would have no Angolan government minder, so I would be on my own, and would have to play things by ear. I didn’t need a cover story, as I had an official invitation from the ANC, rubber-stamped by the Angolan government. I just needed a convenient lapse of memory that I’d received the phone call cancelling the whole thing. I managed to talk my way through immigration and security by waving the original piece of paper from the ANC, but once I was through passport control I discovered that I couldn’t book into a hotel without the authorisation of the Angolan authorities. Again, I managed to talk my way around this, ending up in a hotel that had seen better days and more guests, ironically named the Hotel Panorama. My room had a commanding view and aroma of the harbour’s less than fragrant mudflats.
The following morning I made my way to the ANC office just outside Luanda, where I found a very surprised-looking ANC Commissar. ‘What are you doing here?’ he asked. ‘Didn’t you get the message?’ ‘Message? What message?’ I replied disingenuously. There followed a knife-edge discussion over two hours in which I tried to persuade him to let me do what I’d come to do, and he tried to convince me that orders were orders. It was one of those times when you do everything you can to avoid returning to base empty-handed. I was thinking too of the financial cost of the trip. In the end, to my amazement and relief, the Commissar seemed to relent, and told me to come back the following morning, without intimating what might or might not be in store. He said a driver would pick me up at the hotel at the crack of dawn.
A grey, humid morning broke over the mudflats. It didn’t seem like a good omen. I checked my 8mm Bolex camera, cassette recorder, batteries and