A lesson from Cameroon

Since the outbreak of war in Gaza I’ve been meaning to write something revisiting the question of how to apply the term “terrorism” (you can read some discussions from past years here, here and here). It became a matter for debate last year when media organisations took different views on whether to describe Hamas and its fighters as “terrorists”.

Briefly, my view is that while I have no doubt that Hamas is guilty of terrorism, I am uneasy about describing it without qualification as a terrorist organisation, because I think that obscures the basic symmetry between it and the Israeli government. Instead of thinking of what’s going on as a government combating a terrorist group, it makes more sense to me to think of a war between a state and a quasi-state actor, both of them guilty of war crimes.

But we’ll come back to that question another day. The point of this post is to draw attention to an example from a different and much less well-publicised spot, which throws light on the problem that we’ve got into when thinking about terrorism.

The place is Cameroon, in equatorial Africa, which is beset by conflict between its French-speaking majority and English-speaking minority. (For some background, read this Al-Jazeera report on its last election, and this BBC obituary for the leader of the English-speaking community.) The roots of the conflict, as is usual in Africa, are colonial, but Tania Zeissig, writing for the Australian Institute of International Affairs, describes how it has been exacerbated by the government’s designation of its opponents as “terrorists”:

The disproportionate response to the protests – notably through the use of the anti-terrorism law – catalysed the violent “Anglophone crisis” in Cameroon. As a consequence, it eliminated opportunities for peaceful solutions to the conflict. Public opinion in the Anglophone regions hardened, and initially modest requests for administrative reforms, such as the protection of the common-law tradition and English-speaking schools, turned into calls for outright secession and the formation of an independent state called Ambazonia.

And as she explains, the tools for this repression were in part a gift from the developed world. United Nations Security Council resolution 1373, adopted in 2001 in the wake of the 11 September terrorist attacks, requires countries to legislate against terrorism, and the international community has repeatedly turned a blind eye to repressive governments using those laws against peaceful dissent.

In Zeissig’s words, this “created the context under which the Cameroonian government could eliminate the Anglophone self-determination movement, by framing its repression as counterterrorism” – an example, as she puts it, “of the spread of international norms for illiberal purposes.” The terminology biases the response: protest can be met be redress of grievances, but “terrorism”, we are told, has to be met by force.

The label thus becomes self-fulfilling. Dissidents resort to force because other avenues are closed off, and measures that have been justified by the need to reduce violence end up producing more of it.

Go read the whole thing, it’s well worth it. You might even find there are some lessons in it for the Middle East.