The United Nations' next General Assembly will begin work almost at a time that the United States will mark the first anniversary of the Sept 11 attacks against the World Trade Center in New York and the Pentagon in Washington.

The assembly will be asked to debate the issue of terrorism and propose an international treaty to deal with it.

All bets are that the assembly will, once again, stumble over the problem of how to define terrorism.

The issue has been debated by numerous think tanks and international gatherings in the past few months. Earlier this year a conference of foreign ministers from Islamic countries, meeting in Kuala Lumpur, decided to throw in the towel after it failed to define terrorism.

The European Union has also failed to come up with a definition acceptable to all its members. And, as far as we could make out from sources, the summit of the eight most industrialized nations, the G-8, scheduled to convene in Canada later this month, also faces the same stumbling block.

Over the past few months, this writer has attended half-a-dozen meetings of experts trying to solve the puzzle and find a definition of terrorism that most people, if not absolutely everyone, might accept. From what we have seen and heard, however, it is clear that no such agreement is possible — at least for the moment.

There are several reasons for this.

The first is that the contemporary world automatically assumes that every definition contains an element of ethical judgement. Such an assumption would have surprised Aristotle, the father of definitions, who knew that describing things as he found them was a cold, almost clinical, act that implied no moral evaluation whatsoever.

Province of ethics

Such evaluation was the province of ethics, an entirely different category. Aristotle would first describe a pair of black eyes and then assess their beauty in the realm of aesthetics. More importantly, he would first establish whether a proposition was true or not before telling us whether he agreed it with it or not. Facts were sacred while opinion was free.

Today, however, people assert whatever fantasy they like in the name of freedom of opinion and/or pluralism.

The second reason is that the dialectics of subject-object relationship is perverted in this case. Let us explain. Take war as an example. Both he who initiates it and he who is its victim agree on what it is. Both call it war. The initiator may also call it: just war, war of resistance or use any other adjective that he deems fit for his own purposes. The same is true of the victim. Both, however, agree, that what they are involved in is war. That fact made international agreement on a definition of war possible and, in time, helped codify its rules.

The same thing could be said of theft. The thief may well justify his act on whatever grounds: he did it out of poverty or revenge or wanted to take from the rich and give to the poor etc. But he does not deny that taking someone else's property illegally is theft.

No common ground

In the case of terrorism, however, there is no common definitional ground between the perpetrator and the victim. The victim, if he stays alive, shouts that he has been struck by terrorism. The perpetrator, if he has the courage of admitting his deed, boasts that he is doing something else: waging holy war, for example.

This was not always the case.

Until recently, terror was recognized and understood, though with distaste by many, as a fact of human life. Homer knew it well and described it in the Iliad whose hero, Achilles, bears the nickname "the terror".

The leaders of the French Revolution in 1793 took pride in describing their policy as The Great Terror. Robespierre and Saint Just had no qualms about being called "terrorists." The French national anthem, La Marseillaise, contains several couplets that preach terrorism, especially against counter revolutionaries and foreigners.

The Russian Narodniks were proud of calling themselves "terrorists" while anarchists, from Prince Kropotkin to the vagabond Nechaev, praised terrorism as "the highest form of revolutionary action." Some of Dostoevski's heroes vacillate between terrorism and Christianity as alternative paths to salvation.

In 1905, Heydar Amoghli, a pioneer of communism in Iran, called his secret organization "The Terror Committee". Its members were called "terrorist brothers."

Gavril Princip, the Serbian nationalist who assassinated Franz Josef, the Austrian crown prince, in Sarajevo in 1914, took pride calling himself " terrorist".

Spreading terror

The Bolshevik leader Lenin did not shy away from preaching terrorism as a means of furthering his revolution. His colleague and rival Trotsky authored the notorious "Edict on the Hostages" which made it legal for the revolutionary regime to kidnap the children and wives of czarist government officials and to assassinate them as a means of spreading terror.

In the 1940s and 1950s, the Fedayeen Islam group in Iran openly spoke of using "terror in the service of the holy cause."

The problem is that those who conduct acts of terror today refuse to be described as terrorists. This is because terrorism has not only lost its revolutionary luster but has been universally recognized as a barbarous form of political violence.

There is, of course, no chance that terrorism will ever regain the romantic aura that it once enjoyed. Thus, there is little possibility that those who use terrorism will ever acknowledge their deeds in such terms. As long as no one is ready to admit that he is a terrorist, no one will be able to impose a universal definition of terrorism.

So what is the way out?

Universally acceptable

We could, of course, shrug our shoulders and admit that in a world that asks "what is the definition of a definition" there is little chance of defining terrorism in universally acceptable terms. After all, there are many facts of life that we cannot define in such terms. For example, we all know what stupidity is but will never agree on its exact definition.

Or we could approach terrorism as a method, a form of action, and refrain from even the slightest hint of ethical judgment when proposing a definition.

Such an approach could provide us with a possible definition: terrorism is any act or series of violent acts against civilians designed to persuade a part or the whole of a community or a group of communities to do something that the terrorists like or to stop doing something that the terrorists do not like.

On the basis of such a definition, what the perpetrators of the Sept. 11 attacks did was terrorism.

Once the method has been defined, the international community could then debate whether or not to legitimise and codify it or declare it a crime and combat it. One wonders what Aristotle would have said in this debate. — GVNN/Arab News