A growing role for regional organisations in fighting global terror

As we link our various international efforts against terrorism, one of the most important challenges international, regional, and sub-regional organisations face is co-ordinating actions to avoid duplication and enhance collective effectiveness.

Since the establishment of the UN Security Council’s Counter-Terrorism Committee in 2001, progress has been made on this front. At the same time, regional organisations like the OSCE, in undertaking region-specific initiatives or other actions that complement global counter-terrorism objectives, are helping to shape an evolving, global counter-terrorism framework.

Though overlap in our collective efforts is inevitable, greater co-ordination of our respective efforts is bearing substantive results. Counter-terrorism specialists and generalists are meeting more frequently in a wide range of forums. They are establishing both informal and formal networks that are speeding and strengthening collaboration between international, regional and sub-regional organisations, leveraging comparative advantages.

But while avoiding overlap is a continuing priority, the more critical challenge for the international community is to identify the vulnerabilities — and to address them — in our ongoing counter-terrorism work. As organisations more actively respond to the counter-terrorism needs of their respective national constituencies through co-ordinated action, these gaps are being closed.

We have witnessed over the last year a broadening of terrorist attacks, including those against major civilian targets in Russia, Spain, Turkey and Uzbekistan — all OSCE participating States.

Looking at global casualty and incident statistics over the past two decades, experts see a worsening rather than improving world trend particularly as attacks have become more lethal. The September hostage-taking and ensuing violence in Beslan resulted in more than 350 deaths and hundreds injured.

The March attacks in Madrid killed 200 and injured more than a thousand others. Although suicide bombers were not used in all recent attacks, one cannot ignore the linkage between the increasing number of suicide bombings and the increasing number of civilians killed and injured, particularly in this decade.

Suicide terrorism is not a new phenomenon, but it has clearly expanded since 2001 and spread even to regions where such tactics were previously absent. According to a recent NATO study, suicide bombings quadrupled from the decade of the 80s to the 90s, and further increased over five times from the decade of the 90s to the first three years of this decade (2001-2003).