ABSTRACT
Figure 44.1 Armed intervention to produce regime change 741
Emergence of terrorism in the 1990s
After the attacks on the American and French barracks in Beirut in 1983 and on aircraft over Lockerbie and Niger in 1988 and 1989, further attacks were carried out in the 1990s against mainly American targets, such as the World Trade Center in New York (1993), the US military barracks in Saudi Arabia (1996), the American embassies in Nairobi and Dar es Salaam (1998) and the USS Cole (2000). Osama Bin Laden, who was in Afghanistan and had established camps there to train a new kind of international terrorist, was held responsible for the embassy bombings in Africa. The terrorists, motivated by radical Islamic beliefs, carried out attacks using explosives and other deadly weapons and did not care who their victims were, including the hundreds of Africans who died in the bombings in Kenya and Tanzania. The US retaliated for the African bombings by firing rockets at Bin Laden’s camp in Afghanistan, but without success, and the Taliban government ignored US extradition requests. In 1994 the UN cited terrorist attacks as a threat to international peace and security. The UN General Assembly, which had established an ad hoc committee to study the issue, adopted a resolution in 1997 stating that terrorism was a violation of the right to life, liberty and security. It was no more than a declaration: 97 states voted in favour, 57 abstained. In December 1998 the UN called on the Taliban to stop providing sanctuary for terrorists and condoning training camps within its territory. The Security Council repeated this demand in 1999, requested the extradition of Bin Laden and imposed sanctions on Afghanistan for a year. The relationship
between the UN and the Taliban was already on a bad footing due to the suppression of women in Afghanistan and violence against local UN offices, while the UNHCR was assisting the nearly four million Afghan refugees in Pakistan, Iran and elsewhere. This relationship deteriorated further when the Taliban decided to destroy statues in Afghanistan. UNESCO was unable to stop the regime blowing up two towering Buddha statues in Bamiyan province in early 2001.
