Violent propaganda

One practical response to terrorism that has often been successful is for governments of the people targeted by terrorists to negotiate with the terrorists and enter into talks to try to resolve some of the perceived grievances.For example this worked quite well in bringing about a cessation of republican violence by the IRA. In that case, the government entered into secret negotiations that were never revealed to the public until they had reached fairly late stages, and the results were excellent.Life is definitely looking brighter for both Northern-Irish catholics and the citizens of mainland UK, despite frequent setbacks.MickThis message has been edited by mick, 05-03-2005 12:14 PM

Disagree all you like, Tal, but the numbers speak for themselves.Secret negotiations between the British government and the IRA began in 1993/1994.Number of deaths related to N.I. sectarian violence in the three years before the start of negotiations: 339Number of deaths related to N.I. sectarian violence in the last three years: 24Data from Answers - The Most Trusted Place for Answering Life's QuestionsSo, over a decade of negotiations, we got a 93% reduction in the number of deaths.As I said, the numbers speak for themselves. Perhaps a 93% reduction doesn't mean much to somebody like Secretary of State Lawrence Eagleburger, but it means a lot to me.

thanks for this, contracycle beat me to it and gave a reasonable answer to this.Just to confirm, John Hume isn't a representative of the British government. The negotiations with the British government started with John Major.As for the numbers, you are right i miscalculated. It took the years from 1990-1993 rather than 1991-1993. But if you calculate the difference between deaths in 1990-3 (inclusive) and deaths in 2001-2004 (inclusive) you get an approximate decline of 88-89%, which is still good!On a more general point, negotiations with terrorists are often demonized by politicians in public, but just carried out by those same politicians in secret. Sometimes it is even done openly. For example Israel is always calling the PLO a terrorist organization, but has formalised means of negotiation. Same goes for various more-or-less violent guerrilla groups such as FARC, Shining Path, Zapatista, etc, who are all labelled terrorists by the respective governments.I would be very surprised if the US government and many European governments didn't have informal channels of contact with the fundamentalist groups in Saudi Arabia, which will end up as negotiation sooner or later.