[Opinion] National Terror

“If our protest movement is a terror, than what Israel is perpetrating is a ‘national terror’.”

During his life, Palestinian protest movement organization Hamas’ leader Ahmed Yassin, who was killed by Israel’s missile attack, advocated this assertion. A national terror not only includes the terror intervention of a country, but also the illegal violence in which the country took the lead. One of the typical forms of national terror is “target killing” of the enemy’s leader, such as this killing of Yassin. This is not the first time Israel made an attack aimed at the leaders of an Arab resistance force.

If a superpower self-declaring itself as the international police becomes the subject of national terror, the situation becomes much more perplex. Leonid Ivashov, vice president of the Russian Geopolitics Academy, advocates a radical argument that the “U.S. is also a terrorist country.” The U.S.’ war against terror is also a kind of national terror disregarding the international law and public opinion. Objections to this assertion are the right of self-defense and preventive war. It is to carry out a preemptive strike to prevent in advance the damage expected from the terror. The assertion that the U.S. is a target and the victim of many terrors makes it hard to understand the meaning of terror and who the terrorist is. Who will stop the U.S.’ terror fighting against terror?

Russia, who criticizes the U.S., also lacks fairness. Zelimkhan Yandarbiev, former president of Chechen, was killed in Qatar. The Qatar government arrested two Russian secret agents as suspects. Russia also killed Chechen’s President Dzhokar Dudayev with a missile in 1996. The western countries criticized Russia over this. Each defends its action as fighting against terror and pushes the other’s violence to national terror.

National terror can also perpetrate into the country’s people. USSR’s dictator Stalin’s liquidation of North Korea’s concentration camp are representative cases. If Seoul National University Professor Choi Jong-kil’s death, which had brought criticism recently, was act of the past central government, this will be included as national terror. The U.S. criticizes that North Korea is a terror country, and North Korea advocates that whenever the U.S. puts pressure, they are being terrorized. Even with all this, we take in the “Korea peninsula as an area taking no concern with terror,” and seem to live peacefully.

Kim Ki-hyun, special correspondent of Moscow, kimkihy@donga.com