Posted on Mon, Nov. 11, 2002
World Renews Anti-Terror Fight
SONYA ROSS
Associated Press
WASHINGTON - Using a bomb, a plan and a crowded nightclub in Bali, al-Qaida operatives gave Indonesia and Australia a rude awakening to terrorism. The lesson was much the same for Russia when Chechen separatists brought explosives into a Moscow theater and took the audience hostage.
Yemen, chock-full of suspected al-Qaida and long uncomfortable with terrorism investigations, helped bring about a CIA missile strike that killed six militants, including a top al-Qaida organizer said to be planning new attacks on Western targets in Yemen.
Many countries felt the sting when the Sept. 11, 2001 attacks claimed by al-Qaida killed thousands - including some of their citizens - in the United States.
But it took the recent spate of smaller-scale, deadly attacks for them to see that Osama bin Laden's network is truly a threat in their own back yards.
"Whilst (terrorism) needs to be addressed at source in places such as Afghanistan, we nevertheless have to also attack it where it's been realized," Australian Defense Minister Robert Hill said after talks in Washington last week. "This is, you know, brought home to us in the most stark and terrible way."
Indonesia certainly saw the light. After nearly 200 people, about 90 of them Australians, died in the Bali nightclub, Indonesian officials stopped denying that a significant Islamic terrorist threat existed in their country, and President Megawati Sukarnoputri announced tighter anti-terror measures.
Bruce Hoffman, head of terrorist research at Rand Corp., a private research group, said countries now are more vigilant of tape-recorded threats from al-Qaida's second in command, Ayman al-Zawahri.
In the recording, al-Zawahri warned U.S. allies to get out of the Muslim world and referred specifically to Germany and France, making it clear to other countries that al-Qaida is "perfectly content to enmesh the citizens of other nations in their struggle," Hoffman said.
Germany, which rooted out al-Qaida clusters and, in a rare move, joined an international military campaign by sending soldiers to Afghanistan, stepped up its counter-terror activity after 11 Germans died in the bombing of a Tunisian synagogue last April by a group linked to al-Qaida.
German Foreign Minister Joschka Fischer, in Washington recently to repair a rift over Iraq, discussed cooperation on terrorism as well with his U.S. counterpart, Colin Powell.
"On our agenda, the war against terror is top priority number one," Fischer said. "This is a new totalitarianism, and there is no possibility to negotiate with Osama bin Laden or similar guys."
France, too, has elevated its anti-terror profile after an al-Qaida-linked group blew up a bus in Pakistan in May, killing 11 French citizens, and when a French oil tanker was rammed near a port in Yemen by a boat packed with explosives - an attack similar to the USS Cole bombing pinned on al-Qaida that killed 17 American sailors.
After Australia was hit hard by the carnage in Bali, authorities immediately began a door-to-door hunt in Sydney for members of Jemaah Islamiyah, a group also believed to have ties to al-Qaida. The government declared Jemaah Islamiyah a terrorist organization, given its ambitions to create an Islamic superstate across Asia and northern Australia.
"We're learning more about the interrelationship between those networks ... and others out of the region, in particular from the Middle East," Hill said. "And the more that we learn, the more we appreciate the extent of the challenge we face."
The message was driven home for Russia after Chechen rebels took an entire theater audience hostage in Moscow, a siege that ended when Russian forces pumped in knockout gas and seized the building. In the end, 128 hostages and about 41 captors died.
Without offering evidence, the Russian Foreign Ministry said al-Qaida was involved in the theater plot. President Vladimir Putin promised to give the Russian military broad power to act "in all places where the terrorists, the organizers of these crimes or their ideological or financial sponsors are located."
U.S. officials view the new vigilance as a good thing, and hoped it would bode well for the overall fight against al-Qaida.
"Too often in the past, with the fading memories of a terrible terrorist attack, the focus on permanent improvements in cooperation has faded," Francis X. Taylor, counterterrorism coordinator at the State Department, said in a speech to the National Defense University on Oct. 23. "We cannot let that happen again."
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