Guerrilla Warfare

by Walter Laqueur

  The shelling of one country from the territory of another is certainly a warlike action; whether it can be defined as guerrilla warfare is a moot point. But the most controversial aspect of the Palestinians' activities were those carried out in third countries — the killing, for instance, of members of the Israeli Olympic team in Munich in 1972, the hijacking of airplanes, most of them not belonging to Israel, the dispatch of letterbombs, and other gambits such as the attacks against foreign ambassadors in Khartoum. It looked — and has so been argued — as though the Palestinians had simply found by trial and error that there were better means than the traditional ones of guerrilla warfare for furthering their cause, that publicity was the vital weapon, that what counted beyond all else in the last resort was to keep the Palestine issue alive. However widely condemned, all these outrages were given enormous notoriety. It is nevertheless unlikely that this strategy would have worked but for the growing dependence of the industrialized countries on Arab oil. There were far more kidnappings in Brazil but it led the urban terrorists nowhere. The Palestinians, however, had powerful allies and benefited from exceptionally auspicious international circumstances. Militarily, they failed, but as the Algerian example had demonstrated, military failure per se meant nothing. Politically the Palestinians succeeded; they were recognized by many member states of the United Nations and an assortment of other international organizations besides.

  The splits within the Palestinian resistance did not bring any immediate harm to the common cause. More serious were the longterm effects of the terrorist operations. These stiffened Israeli resistance, made a dialogue between Israelis and Palestinians virtually impossible and, in addition, hampered any attempt to work out any unified Palestinian policy for the future. A policy aimed at the destruction of the Jewish state might have conceivably worked in the pre-atomic age, but with the development of the means of mass destruction the rules of the game had changed. If Fatah and the other Palestinian organizations had little to fear directly from the nuclearization of the conflict, this was not so with regard to Israel's Arab neighbors, and without their support the Palestinians could not continue their struggle in the long run. Worse yet, in the case of a nuclear attack against Israel, the Arab residents of that country were as likely to perish as its Jewish citizens. Further, there was a growing discrepancy between Palestinian theory and practice. Much of the fighting against Israel was done by others. If other guerrilla movements throughout history never had enough money, the Palestinians, thanks to the oil windfall, had almost too much of it.41 The abundance of funds made it possible to engage in various kinds of operations, military and propagandistic both, beyond the reach of other, less affluent guerrilla movements. At the same time a surfeit of money bred corruption; guerrillas must be lean and hungry, a condition which exposure to life in Hilton hotels did nothing to encourage.

  While Fatah proclaimed resoundingly that the shame of the defeat was to be washed away by the mass struggle of the Palestinian people, it became only too manifest after 1973 that not the armed assaults, let alone the masses, but the profits of the oil-producing states had brought about the change in Palestinian fortunes. It could be argued that whether the Arab masses did or did not in fact participate in the striving against the Zionist enemy was beside the point, all that mattered, again, was the result. It is unlikely, however, that a Guevara or a Fanon would have approved such a rationalization; they would have held that a people that owed its national liberation to financial manipulations could scarcely be accounted free.

  The Israelis tended to belittle the role of the Palestinians, and the fact that there was so much "guerrilla by proxy," that is, terrorist acts committed by Japanese, French or Latin American mercenaries, only strengthened their contempt for the military qualities of their opponents. There is no denying that in contrast to other guerrillas, rural and urban, the Palestinians usually avoided clashing with the Israeli security forces and directed almost all their attacks against the civilian population. But all this does not change the fact that the Palestinian organizations were by no means totally ineffective, and that individual infiltrators did show courage; realizing that they could not conduct guerrilla warfare along conventional lines, they had to look for other means to harass the enemy even if this approach led them beyond guerrillaism and even urban terror, however liberally these terms are interpreted.

  If the ups and downs of Palestinian resistance point up the overriding significance of foreign help, the fate of the Kurds only accents that importance the more. The Iraqi Kurds, who constitute about twenty percent of the population of the country, fought for their autonomy from 1960 to 1970. They had taken up arms on many previous occasions but never for so long a period. The Iraqi army was fought to a standstill by the Pesh Merga in the hills of Kurdistan despite their numerical superiority and the fact that the Kurds had only light arms; it was only during the last year of the war that the Kurds acquired some anti-aircraft guns. The Kurdish war also proves that a mastery of guerrilla doctrine is not really of decisive import; their leader Mulla Mustafa Barazani had in all probability never read a single manual on the subject, he and his men simply knew all there was to know about it by instinct. There was far more fighting, and many more casualties in the war in Kurdistan than in many, much better-publicised guerrilla wars, including the Palestine-Israel conflict. But it never attracted much attention, perhaps because the Kurds failed to appreciate the great strategic importance of oil and did not attack the Kirkuk oilfields. When the war was renewed in 1974 the Kurds were defeated with relative ease, the international situation having changed in their disfavor. Up to 1970 the attitude of the Soviet Union had been one of friendly neutrality. But with the emergence of a pro-Soviet dictatorship in Baghdad, the Kurdish struggle no longer served any useful purpose from the Soviet point of view, and the Iraqi army, supplied and trained by the Russians, was now able to cope with the problems of mountain warfare. Furthermore, Iran, which had hitherto provided arms and supplies to the Kurds, closed its border, the Shah fearing that an escalation of hostilities with the Baghdad regime, and indirectly with the Soviet Union, might endanger his regime; the stakes in the game had suddenly become higher. Thus Kurdish resistance collapsed, not because Pesh Merga was fighting any less bravely but because, to quote an old Kurdish proverb, "Kurds have no friends."42

  The Eritrean Liberation Front (ELF), on the other hand, did have friends. Founded in Cairo in 1958, this separatist organization launched in 1961 a terrorist campaign which, until 1975, was on a relatively small scale. There was certainly much less fighting in Ethiopia than in Kurdistan, and for years the ELF had no more than a few hundred active members. It had, however, strong backing in the Arab world, particularly in Syria, and it had the political support of the Muslim states in Africa. It was well supplied with arms and money. Thus, in the course of a decade, a minor army came into being, and as Ethiopia faced a major domestic crisis, the ELF could stake its claims with much greater vigor.43

  A third example of the decisive impact of outside help is PFLOAG (People's Front for the Liberation of Oman and the Arab Gulf). Established as the Dhofar Liberation Front in 1965 by nationalist opponents of the Sultan of Oman and active in Dhofar province, it was taken over by "scientific socialists" three years later. Although the rebels at no time numbered many more than a thousand, the sultan had only twenty-five hundred men at his disposal up to 1970, altogether insufficient on any count to crush the insurgents. Later the sultan's small army was reinforced by British advisers and Iranian and Jordanian troops. The headquarters of PFLOAG were located in South Yemen, which served also as a sanctuary, the main supplier as well as the fountainhead of ideological inspiration. The Chinese and the Soviets competed for a stake in this interesting attempt to apply Marxism-Leninism (or Leninism-Maoism) in conditions varying between those of the stone age and the feudal era; Chinese influence was on the decline after 1970. PFLO (the AG was subsequently dropped) was the most antireligious of all Arab extremist movements, but t
his did not deter Colonel Ghadafi from providing financial assistance any more than it did the Iraqis from proffering help. Seldom in guerrilla history has such a small war in such a remote country attracted so many foreign powers. Bussian artillery operated by Chinese-trained guerrillas in South Yemen territory shelled Iranian forces engaged in counterinsurgency operations on Oman territory. The original initiators of the revolt had invoked their belief in Allah and pan-Arabism, but they were bitterly criticized by the professionals who took over the leadership from them in 1968 for having chosen "the mistaken path of spontaneous action under a leadership incapable of leading armed struggle."44

  Attempts to launch guerrilla warfare in Turkey and Iran in the 1960s were, on the whole, unsuccessful. The Iranian peasant was too conservative and the Shah's agrarian reform had to a certain extent taken the wind out of the sails of the revolutionaries. "Armed confrontation will start in towns and their suburbs," wrote Farahani, "as the Iranian peasantry with its rustic environment is not conducive to revolutionary preparedness. 45 The Iranian revolutionaries were split into several factions (Maoists, Siahkal, and the National Liberation Movement). One of the peculiar features of the Iranian resistance is the collaboration between the extreme left and the (Shi'ite) religious fundamentalist sectarians (NLM) who, led by ulema, established a little guerrilla army of their own.46 This political alliance dates back two decades and is based on opposition, albeit for different reasons, to the Shah's reforms.47

  Guerrilla warfare in Turkey was similarly impeded by internal dissent. Various small sects that would emerge from time to time engaged in kidnappings or assassination, but there was no coordination between them. Most of them derived from Dev Gene, the Federation of the Revolutionary Youth of Turkey, a roof organization for an assortment of radical groups.48 They all favored armed struggle, but some were Maoists tending toward rural guerrilla warfare and the creation of a Vietnam situation in Turkey, others called for a second Turkish war of independence. Some wanted to infiltrate the Turkish armed forces and to conquer them from within; others, on the contrary, looked for a confrontation with the army. Yet for all that rural Anatolia with its backwardness and abject poverty should have been fertile soil indeed for the recruitment of guerrillas, the students of Ankara and Istanbul failed to gain any substantial foothold outside the universities.

  Guerrilla warfare in the Middle East was most successful in the very place in which it seemed most unlikely. At the height of the 1950s Cyprus insurgency, twenty-eight thousand British soldiers were chasing some two hundred and fifty terrorists on an island of half a million inhabitants. The leader of EOKA was an old man by military standards; Grivas, a native of Cyprus, an ex-officer of the Greek army, was fifty-seven when the campaign started. He had some support from this and that influential politician in Greece, but the Athens government was far from enthusiastic about his venture and on several occasions threatened him and demanded that he stop it. Archbishop Makarios, the political leader of the Greek Cypriots, was also initially opposed to Grivas's move; he would much have preferred a campaign of sabotage, and (according to Grivas), the throwing from time to time of a few hand grenades into Turkish mobs, just to teach them a lesson.49 A year after the outbreak of the rebellion, however, Makarios was to declare that the terrorist operations had been more effective than seventy-five years of "paper war." Grivas had the Cypriot Communists against him, the strongest single party on the island; early on they revealed in their manifestos the real identity of "Dighenis," Grivas's pseudonym. That the Turkish minority saw in EOKA a mortal enemy scarcely needs saying. International public opinion did not support EOKA; the Communist bloc, the Chinese, the Third World countries, all the traditional sympathizers of guerrilla movements showed a lack of interest, and quite often downright hostility. But despite all these handicaps, Grivas succeeded in a three-year campaign (from ι April 1955 to Christmas 1958) in ousting the British from the island, which led to the declaration of Cypriot independence. The British suffered relatively few losses, but since Britain was reconciled to liquidating the remnants of its empire anyway and since it found the task of policing a rebellious island too burdensome, not much force was necessary to persuade Whitehall to sur render.50 The long-term results of the Grivas campaign were nonetheless disastrous, for victory in 1958 was followed by tragedy in 1974. The EOKA campaign had sharpened the old conflict between Cypriot Greeks and Turks. Eventually the Turks invaded Cyprus and the country was de facto partitioned. Grivas's old partner and antagonist, Makarios, bore an equal measure of responsibility for these tragic developments, for he had shown no greater willingness than Grivas to work for an accommodation with the Turkish minority.

  Liberating Africa

  Power was transferred in a more or less orderly fashion by the colonial administration to the new rulers in most African countries. There were exceptions, such as in the Congo, and guerrilla warfare occurred in the Portuguese colonies. In addition, there was a good deal of internal fighting in the postindependence period; some of it was tribal in character, or separatist (Sudan, Nigeria, Chad, Eritrea), elsewhere it was a conflict between various contenders for power. Not all these opposition movements were strikingly effective (the Nigerian Sawaba or the Senegalese AIP), but in other cases, as in Biafra and the Congo, the internal feuds were much more bloody than the anticolonial guerrilla wars themselves. In contrast to Latin America, China and Southeast Asia, the African guerrilla leaders hardly ever lived and fought with their troops; their headquarters were almost invariably in some neighboring country. The anticolonial guerrilla movements were usually split; in almost every country there were two or more such groups battling each other even more fiercely than they fought the common enemy; their "mass basis" was in essence tribal rather than national. The Algerian P'LN and the Vietnamese Communists also had to face competition early on in their struggle, but they destroyed their opponents and thus were able to monopolize the field. In Africa, on the other hand, the splits persisted in many instances, and this affected both the character and the course of the guerrilla war.

  The Mau Mau revolt in 1952 was the first of the postwar insurrections. Dating back in origin to the 1920s, it was led by educated members of the Kikuyu tribe. They complained, not without justification, that some of their best land had been taken away from them; they resented the fact that there was no secular education and that female circumcision had been banned. In a solemn oath, the members of Mau Mau swore never to sell land to a European or an Asian, not to smoke foreign cigarettes or drink foreign beer, never to sleep with a prostitute and to behave in general as a patriot and a decent citizen.51 Considering the relatively small number of people involved and that it was geographically restricted to a part of the country, the Mau Mau revolt was quite bloody; more than eleven thousand Kikuyu (but fewer than a hundred Europeans) were killed. The revolt failed, but within a matter of only a few years the British departed and Kenya became independent. The survivors of the Mau Mau land army were given a hero's welcome, but after that a determined effort was made to erase Mau Mau from Kenya's public memory.52 It was not that anyone doubted that the Mau Mau had made a contribution to Kenya's independence, but many of their practices had been repugnant in the extreme. Above all, the massacres perpetrated by the Mau Mau against Kikuyu loyalists (as in the Lari massacre), and members of other tribes, were divisive and did not augur well for the future of a country in which a variety of tribes would have to live peacefully side by side. The next major rebellions to occur, in Angola in March 1963 and in the Congo in 1964, were also basically tribal in nature. While Europeans were killed, the number of blacks of other tribes, and of mestizos and assimilados who came to grief was far greater.53

  After concluding a trip of African capitals in 1963, Chou En-lai observed that the prospects for revolution in Africa were excellent. Events in the suceeding years did not quite bear out his prediction. True, a great number of liberation movements came into being and were duly registered on the payrolls of the African Liberation Com
mittee, the coordinating body of the OAU. They would publish victory communiques from nonexistent war fronts and celebrate the establishment of liberated and semiliberated zones; the Mozambique Frelimo had a particularly bad record, but others were not far behind.54 As in so many other cases, they would more often clash with each other than with the declared enemy. To some extent this was the result of old tribal feuds which made the formation of national movements difficult. Thus SWAPO was essentially an Ovambo organization (despite all disclaimers), and the UPA and FLNA had their power base in the Bakongo tribe. Existing dissension was fanned by Sino-Soviet rivalry for influence in the continent. At one time or another almost all African liberation movements split into a pro-Soviet and a pro-Chinese wing, beginning with the first of the "modern" (i.e., quasi-Maoist) guerrillas such as the Camerounian UPC which, founded in 1947, started armed struggle in 1956. Lastly, the conflicting ambitions of leading personalities often collided. The list of leaders of African liberation movements assassinated by political or personal rivals (sometimes with a little help from the colonial powers) makes depressing reading. It includes some of the most gifted leaders, such as Amilcar Cabral (of PAIGC) and Eduardo Mondlane (of Frelimo). Some guerrilla movements practiced almost constant internal "purges" (Fre limo again was one of the worst offenders). The sad events in Angola in 1975 brought into the limelight a state of affairs that had existed, on a smaller scale, for many years previously. Least affected by internal disputes and tribal rivalries was PAIGC in Guine-Bissau, headed by Amilcar Cabral, a talented leader, about whom more below.55 But in Guine as well, after a decade of fighting, a sympathetic observer noted that "a clear-cut military victory that would expel the colonial forces would ... be a miracle."56 Another historian of the African liberation movements, writing in 1971, prophesied victory over the Portuguese not before the 1990s.57