Introduction

Terrorism’s peculiar power to involve-to terrify-has been frequently noted, but it is of such paramount importance that the subject deserves a fresh look. The power of terrorism is its ability to frighten-to induce people to change the way they live their lives and to produce governmental responses that are disproportionate to the actual degree of danger posed by terrorists. Terrorists have been active since the first century of the Common Era; while the current wave of religiously motivated terrorists which is causing such widespread slaughter around the world stands out from its predecessors in scope, the number of casualties it has produced, and the possible duration of its violence. The central focus of this book is a small but vitally important group of movements which I argue constitute a distinct wave of modern terrorism. The book’s title refers to David Rapoport’s theoretical work, “Modern Terror: The Four Waves,”1 while the sub-head of the title detailing Fifth-Wave theory, “The New Tribalism,” refers to the fervid dream that links together the vastly different groups who compose this wave. This study began with a collection of the anomalies that are not well apprehended through the lens of Rapoport’s Four Waves theory. Only gradually did it become apparent that a Fifth Wave may have already begun. Fifth-Wave movements were born in previous waves of terror. They have undergone a period of radicalization, having become disillusioned with the terrorist zeitgeist that gave them birth. Turning inward, they have become particularistic, localistic, and centered on the purification of the nation through the perfection of a race or tribal group. For Fifth-Wave movements, the guiding dream is to create a new world-a utopian society to be realized in this lifetime. The new society would be populated by new men and new women, revolutionary beings uncontaminated by any semblance of the old world. To achieve the dream in a single human lifetime, killing on a massive scale is not only condoned, it is a desired means to a glorious end. After a time, such wholesale slaughter ceases to have meaning to the killers or message content to their various audiences. It simply becomes a way of life. Fifth-Wave terrorism is ultimately about children. Children must be produced and at an early age isolated from existing society. The movements with which

this work is concerned are small and, at least until they achieve power, isolated from society with its support networks of home, family, and community. Such an existence-the life of insurgent camps always on the move or underground terrorist factions hunted relentlessly by civil authorities-is hardly conducive to the procreation of children in sufficient numbers for the creation of a new society. A wave that centers on children must of biological necessity focus its violence on women. For this reason, to the logic of self-genocide is added the use of rape, not only as a multifaceted weapon of terror, but as a practical means to produce the children needed to build the new society. As this suggests, the study of the Fifth Wave is not for the squeamish. This book will argue that, under a given set of conditions and through the vision of charismatic leaders, the movements upon which we will focus took root, radicalized, and became convinced that the rapid creation of a utopian society was possible. Once catalyzed, such a dream may be expected to outlive the roughly forty-year cycle which Rapoport posits for a wave to crest and recede. This is made possible by the unique-and uniquely isolated-nature of Fifth-Wave movements. A wave so focused on children and women is intended to be multigenerational, and as such, if allowed to survive it can take root and go on for a very long time indeed. The forty-year cycle and the appearance of a new wave while the current religious wave of terrorism has yet to crest require some thought. I contend that Rapoport’s model is convincing but somewhat static in that it does not account for the protean nature of terrorist movements once catalyzed. It wonderfully maps the ocean, to use Rapoport’s aquatic metaphor, but it does not well account for the swirls and eddies that lurk beneath its surface. Movements radicalize and deradicalize, and on occasion, they turn inward. Fifth-Wave groups have done precisely this. They may of necessity maintain regional or international contacts and patterns of alliance, but they have ceased to identify with the wave whose ideology or theology once fired them. Fifth-Wave movements, while not in direct contact with or even manifesting great interest in each others’ doings, have sufficient family resemblances to form a coherent pattern, identifiable as a wave of apocalyptic violence contemporaneous with the ongoing Fourth Wave of terrorism. The Fifth Wave may or may not fit precisely the forty-year pattern suggested by Rapoport’s model. This study will argue that the Khmer Rouge was the progenitor of the Fifth Wave. With their victory and the formation of government, the Khmer Rouge graduated from terrorism to regime terror and so left the purview of Fifth-Wave theory, save that the genocidal nature of the regime suggests that, should other Fifth-Wave movements come to power, genocide would be the logical outcome. With their 1979 defeat at the hands of the invading Vietnamese, there was a lull in the development of the Fifth Wave, which only fully reemerged in the 1990s, with its epicenter in Africa. No claim is made that the Khmer Rouge served as a model or inspiration for Fifth-Wave groups in any way. Rather, the Khmer Rouge is credited as being the first of the Fifth Wave simply because Fifth-Wave groups, within their own cultural contexts, so closely

follow the pattern set by the Khmer Rouge. If this observation is correct, the Fifth Wave was born in 1963 when the nucleus of the breakaway faction of the Cambodian Communist Party (CPK) that would become the Khmer Rouge fled into the jungles in the wake of Prince Norodom Sihanouk’s anti-communist crackdown.2 1963 was more than forty years ago, and the Fifth Wave shows no signs of abating. The choice of the Khmer Rouge as the prototype of Fifth-Wave terrorists as opposed to, say, the Turkish military regime responsible for the first case of modern genocide-that of the Armenians in 1915-or the Chinese communist government responsible for the massive dislocation and death in the wake of its three signature events (the Hundred Flowers Campaign, the Great Leap Forward, and the Cultural Revolution), all of which resemble Fifth-Wave terrorism, requires some explanation. The same questions may arise from the exclusion of the German National Socialist Workers Party and the Nazi state that followed (1932-1945). The answer begins with the need for definitional rigor in terrorism studies. Terrorism by definition is oppositional, the use of force actual or implied in pursuit of a political, social, or religious objective.3 Terrorism is a tactic intended to engender an atmosphere of existential fear. Regimes can engage in terror as well. They can terrorize their own populations and they can, given the power and the will, terrorize other nations, regions, or the entire globe. For instance, the attempted genocide of the Armenians took place at the hands of the regime headed by the Committee for Union and Progress (CUP, more popularly known as the “Young Turks”). They came to power as the result of a successful military coup against the Ottoman sultans. They did not practice terrorism as a prelude to their seizure of power. Moreover, they were on the whole modernizers seeking to rescue the collapsing Ottoman Empire by adopting elements of a modern Western society, which stands in stark contrast to the genocidal violence unleashed against the Armenians.4 The slaughter was inexcusable; it was also exceptional. The aftermath of World War I brought an end to even the fiction of an Ottoman Empire. The triumvirate of Young Turk leaders were put aside in favor of Kamel Mustafa-the man who as Attaturk would lay the foundations of modern Turkey as a secular, (somewhat) Western-style democracy-and regime violence would be turned to smaller-scale massacres of the Kurds and to the internecine political bloodletting of the ‘Dirty War’ of the 1980s.5 There is nothing in the Turkish case that would fit into the pattern of Fifth-Wave terrorism. Similarly, the case of Nazi Germany does not fit the definition of terrorism used by this book, and still less could it be analyzed in the context of Fifth-Wave terrorism. The German National Socialist Workers Party (NSDP), led to power by Adolf Hitler, came to power through democratic means. As a parliamentary party, it did not engage in terrorism. The NSDP’s pre-state paramilitary formation, the Sturmabteilung (SA or Stormtroopers), were not modern terrorists as the word is defined by scholars today.6 Rather, they were street thugs-a rather dissolute band of true-believers who engaged in the immemorial European

tradition of demonstrating ‘control of the neighborhood streets’ by a gang, a political party, or a private army.7 Again, without an element of rebel terror, the example does not fit into the Fifth-Wave concept. The Chinese case comes closer to the Fifth-Wave paradigm. The activities of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP)—and in particular the Cultural Revolution-was an important influence on the Khmer Rouge.8 However, the Chinese Communists under Mao came to power through a rural insurgency. They were not terrorists, and terrorism was not a tactic that played a major role in the Party’s rise to power. The 1956 Hundred Flowers Campaign has had many interpretations, and was arguably the precursor to the Great Leap Forward. The experiment-never repeated by the CCP-removed the lid on intellectual debate and thus on criticism of the Party and its leadership.9 Under the now famous slogan: “Let a hundred flowers bloom; let a hundred schools of thought contend,” the Party unleashed a torrent of criticism that soon needed to be savagely repressed, although this was done with little actual bloodshed.10 The next phase in the Maoists’ attempt to reform China was the Great Leap Forward (1958-1962), the mass industrialization campaign intended to provide a model of peasant-based industrialization that would be more attractive to the developing world than the Soviet model. It was a catastrophe, and some thirtymillion Chinese are believed to have died in the resulting famine.11 Although the number of dead is astonishing, what is missing is intentionality. A disastrous attempt to make a new economy does not equate to scheme to remake the human race. Finally, the Maoists implemented the Chinese Cultural Revolution, which was one of the signal events of the twentieth century. They sent untold numbers of urbanites, intellectuals, and students to the countryside to ‘learn from the peasants.’ The Cultural Revolution’s signature slogan, “Criticize Confucius, Criticize Lin Biao,” intended as an element of an intra-Party struggle, unleashed a thoroughgoing attack on ‘Confucian culture’ which lies at the very heart of the conservative fabric of China.12 The result was chaos-teachers displaced by students, constituted authority by young Red Guards, and production by politics. Chinese development was upended for a generation, and the death toll from all this is incalculable. The Cultural Revolution is seen by one and all today as a signal failure:13 yet, although it would be inspirational to Fifth-Wave terrorist groups, it cannot be categorized as itself part of the Fifth Wave. As the Chinese case suggests, the borders of what does and does not constitute Fifth-Wave terror are not always clear. The conflict in the former Yugoslavia is a grey area case in point. Were Serb militias acting as instruments of state power, or did the dissolution of the Yugoslav federation hammered together by Tito bring an effective end to ‘Yugoslavia?’ Was that nation under Milosevic still a state as that term is conventionally understood?14 Certainly the composition of Serb militias-popular forces composed of men not formerly connected with the Yugoslav state-argues for their inclusion as Fifth-Wave actors. Yet the authority of a centralized state remained, and the militias seem to have acted to a

great degree under the authority of that state and its military. Were Serb actions therefore the products of terror or terrorism? Were they the actions of a state, or the oppositional actions of a sub-state organization? Or were they both? The same question must be asked of the Croatians-themselves no strangers to civilian atrocities. If the legitimacy of the Yugoslavian government, albeit a government effectively ruling only Serbia and Montenegro at the time of the conflict, is in question, how much less legitimacy could be accorded to the Croatian state, which did not even exist until 1991? Easy answers have never been possible in the Balkans, and much is yet to be learned about the events of the Yugoslavian Civil War. Given the uncertainty, we will elect to take the easy road and leave the questions open to future research. A final definitional note is in order. Although in the real world the concepts tend to have considerable overlap, the distinction between insurgency and terrorism is important to maintain. According to Major Eric N. Nyberg, USMC:

The official Department of Defense definition of insurgency is stated in JCS Pub 1 as, “An organized movement aimed at the overthrow of a constituted government through the use of subversion and armed conflict.” This definition is expanded by the description of an insurgency provided in FM 100-20, Military Operations in Low Intensity Conflict: (4: 2-0)

An insurgency is an organized, armed political struggle whose goal may be the seizure of power through revolutionary takeover and replacement of the existing government. In some cases, however, an insurgency’s goals may be more limited. For example, the insurgency may intend to break away from government control and establish an autonomous state within traditional ethnic or religious territorial bounds. The insurgency may also only intend to extract limited political concessions unattainable through less violent means.