New York / Ottawa, 31 May 2018: At a time when extremism and mass atrocity crimes appear to be on the rise, national governments, international and regional organizations are struggling to protect populations from grave human rights abuses. Motivated by the need to address these challenges, Parliamentarians for Global Action, in partnership with The Montreal Institute for Genocide and Human Rights Studies (MIGS) at Concordia University and The Stanley Foundation, organized the Milan Forum for Parliamentary Action in Preventing Violent Extremism and mass Atrocities on 27-28 November 2017 in Milan Italy.
The Milan Forum sought to bring together parliamentarians, civil society members and experts from around the globe to educate, sensitize and mobilize legislators, and encourage them to adopt effective policies to protect civilians from mass atrocities and confront the ideology of violent extremism. Participants acknowledged that extremist ideologies are being used to justify mass atrocity crimes against civilians and that the threat needs to be confronted in a holistic and multidimensional way, not just through governments and the military.
Parliamentarians concluded the Milan Forum by adopting the Milan Plan of Action on Preventing Violent Extremism and Mass Atrocities, which recognizes the threat posed by violent extremism and presents a set of concrete legislative and political strategies that parliamentarians can take to prevent mass atrocity crimes and combat violent extremism, and protect populations from the gravest violations of human rights.
This handbook should be seen as both complementary to the Milan Forum and a product written in large part based on the discussions that took place.
Violent extremism/terrorism and mass atrocities – at times the two threats are one and the same – can happen anywhere.
Those inspired by ideas to engage in serious violence or hatred for identified groups of people based on race, religion, sexuality and gender have carried out acts of terrorism and mass violence for decades if not centuries. The underlying ideas have changed over time but the results are the same: deaths, injuries, atrocities on a grand scale, physical damages and trauma. Societies have great interest in preventing these acts and in intervening before individuals become violent extremists.
Many terrorist groups are little different than those who engage in genocidal acts. Terrorist organizations such as Islamic State1 (IS) are genocidal if we take their messaging and propaganda as indicative of their actual goals: an end to democracy, pluralism, diversity and multiculturalism through the violent imposition of a religious mono-culture, which translates into a totalitarian organization of society.
Terrorists are not fans of debate and discussion: as Al Qaeda founder Abdallah Azzam once said “Jihad and the rifle alone: no negotiations, no conferences, no discussions”.
Some terrorist groups also target children in their campaigns of violence. In some instances, children are forced to join groups as child soldiers or as sex slaves/domestic servants (e.g. Nigeria’s Boko Haram). In others, children are targeted for killing (e.g. the Taliban in Afghanistan which has not only killed children but forced the closing of schools).
In many cases violent extremists have increasingly engaged in the destruction of UNESCO cultural heritage sites in an effort to erase the identity of other groups. In recent years extremists have destroyed ancient Sufi mosques and libraries in Timbuktu, Mali, while IS members attempted to destroy the ancient city of Palmyra in Syria.
Even the United Nations has been directly targeted by extremist groups. The UN’s main office in Iraq was deliberately attacked in 2003, with scores of people killed, including including Special Representative in Iraq Sérgio Vieira de Mello. The UN’s office in Algiers, Algeria, was then attacked in 2007. The UN’s office in Abjua. Nigeria, was attacked in in 2011 with similar casualty rates. In present day Mali, UN peacekeepers have come under direct attacks by extremist groups.
While terrorism and atrocities are not new phenomena, it is useful to discuss the particular brand of terrorism that is both predominant today and also closely tied to acts of mass violence. Taking the last 150 years as a framework, the US scholar David Rapoport identified four major ‘waves’ of terrorism: the anarchist wave (from the mid- to late-19th century into the 1920s), the anti-colonial wave (in the post WWI period to the 1960s), the new-left wave (1960s to the 1990s) and the current religious wave (1979 to the present). Each wave had its own characteristics and level of lethality: in the anarchist wave alone, a Russian Tsar, a Spanish Prime Minister, French and US presidents, and Portuguese and Italian kings were killed. Many also consider the assassination of AustroHungarian Archduke Ferdinand, the act that led to the outbreak of WW1, as ‘propaganda of the deed’, the anarchists’ modus operandi.
We are in the era of the fourth, or religious, wave of terrorism. It is characterized by mass casualty attacks (most notably 9/11) and is often associated with what is known as ‘Islamist extremism’, although there are also Buddhist, Christian, Hindu, Jewish, and Sikh religious extremist groups as well (the single largest act of terrorism prior to 9/11 was the bombing of an Air India flight in 1985 plotted by Canadabased Sikh terrorists – the first crimes against humanity case before the permanent International Criminal Court in 2005 regarded the atrocities committed by the Lord’s Resistance Army leader, Mr. Joseph Kony of Northern Uganda, who described himself as the son of Jesus Christ). It is important to acknowledge that not all terrorism in the latter stages of the 20th and early part of the 21st centuries is religious in nature. Even if past waves have peaked there are still individuals and groups that adhere to the philosophies and ideologies of earlier ones. For instance, in 1995 the anti-government conspiracy theorist Timothy McVeigh killed 168 people when he placed a truck bomb outside a federal building in Oklahoma City.
Nevertheless, the current wave is not only the most deadly today but by far the most recognizable and the one that has received the most attention, ranging from military and law enforcement/security intelligence agencies, to efforts to prevent radicalisation to violence at one end, to the de-radicalization of former terrorists at the other. In this light, this handbook will focus exclusively at preventing violent Islamist extremism, although the best practices identified here may be applicable to other forms of violent extremism.
