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7 `USUAL SUSPECTS' IN TERRORISM LINEUP

SAME NATIONS FILL OUT NEW U.S. REPORT ON GLOBAL VILLAINS; EXPERTS SEE ROOM FOR MORE

By John Diamond
Washington Bureau
May 2, 2000

WASHINGTON -- When it comes to the annual U.S. list of nations that sponsor terrorism, the approach at the State Department follows the famous order by Claude Rains in "Casablanca": Round up the usual suspects.

Despite what the department says has been a decadelong trend of declining support for terrorism by foreign states, the same seven countries--Cuba, Iran, Iraq, Libya, North Korea, Sudan and Syria--make the list year-in, year-out.

They are there again this year in the State Department's annual "Patterns of Global Terrorism" report, released Monday.

Meanwhile on the Indian subcontinent, identified by the State Department as the emerging locus of global terrorist activity, neither Afghanistan, Pakistan nor India are on the list. Also missing is Lebanon, another major terrorist haven, according to the State Department's own report.

Pakistan worries Washington because of its close connections to the Taliban, the fundamentalist Muslim faction that controls Afghanistan, and because of terrorists in the Kashmir region, which is disputed between Pakistan and India.

But Pakistan also has cooperated with U.S. intelligence and law enforcement on extraditing suspected terrorists, and the United States is concerned that adding Pakistan to the list of state sponsors of terrorism would cut short that support.

Afghanistan remains off the list on a technicality: The United States does not recognize the Taliban-controlled government. Putting Afghanistan on the list would constitute a form of recognition Washington is not prepared to give.

The list has remained unchanged since Sudan joined the club in 1993. Indeed, Syria and Libya have been listed since 1979, when the United States issued its first list of state sponsors of terrorism.

"The United States has a long memory and will not simply expunge a terrorist's record because time has passed," the State Department says in its report. "The states that choose to harbor terrorists are similar to accomplices who provide shelter for criminals."

Nations on the list of terrorist sponsors suffer an array of unilateral U.S. trade and travel sanctions. But, with the possible exception of oil-rich Libya, the listed states are relatively poor, so the United States sacrifices little by banning trade.

Nor has the unchanging nature of the list prevented the Clinton administration from making overtures of various kinds. In March, Secretary of State Madeleine Albright moved to establish friendlier relations with Iran. North Korea has received millions of dollars in U.S.-sponsored famine relief and is in line to receive even more extensive support in exchange for abandoning its nuclear arms program.

A team of State Department travel safety specialists went to Libya recently to assess the possibility of lifting travel restrictions to that country. And the opening this week of the trial of two Libyan defendants in the 1988 Pan Am Flight 103 bombing could lead the way to an easing of tension between the two countries.

Meanwhile, President Clinton speaks regularly with Syrian leader Hafez Assad, and it is widely assumed that the United States would remove Syria from the terrorism list if Damascus reaches a peace accord with Israel.

"It is evidently the case that the list is more than a little arbitrary," said John Pike of the Federation of American Scientists, a Washington-based group that follows national security issues. "I have some difficulty figuring out what the State Department list is in terms of either how you get on the list or how you get off."

Specifically, Pike says India and Pakistan should be on the list because of their tacit support for terrorist activity in the Kashmir region. But Washington regards both countries as friendly.

India last year established a counterterrorism working group with Washington, while Pakistan has cooperated on some investigations of international terrorism. Diplomatic relations with the two archenemies is such that Washington could not easily list one country and not the other.

The State Department vehemently opposed establishment of the list of state sponsors of terrorism in the late-1970s, when Congress passed the law requiring one.

David Tucker, a professor at the Naval Post Graduate School in Monterey, Calif., said the State Department made many of the arguments against the list that critics of the agency cite today.

"Many people alleged that this list will be a political list and not a genuine list of state sponsors," Tucker said. "State argued that it will limit our flexibility and cause embarrassment. That's in fact what it does."

None of the State Department's concerns about the list was evident at a news briefing Monday. Albright said the whole point of the list is to draw attention to the countries the U.S. identifies.

"For the past several years, the list of state sponsors of terror has gone unchanged, but that doesn't mean it is unchangeable," Albright said. "Governments that would like to see their names removed know exactly what they must do: Stop supporting, financing or planning terrorist acts and stop harboring or interfering with the pursuit and prosecution of those who commit them."

But the report itself indicates that "some countries on the list have reduced dramatically their direct support of terrorism over the past years."

In Cuba, North Korea, Sudan and Syria, the main problem appears to be providing "safe haven" to terrorists rather than active sponsorship of terrorist acts. For North Korea, the main issue mentioned is the continued presence on North Korean soil of Japanese communists who carried out a hijacking in 1970.

Ambassador Michael Sheehan, the State Department's counterterrorism coordinator, said he has told North Korean officials they can get their country off the list if they are willing to take "key steps" to renounce terrorism. But he conceded that "from my analysis, North Korea did not have important links to terrorist organizations now."

Britain, which saw Pan Am 103 crash on Scottish soil, reopened diplomatic ties with Libya last year. The Clinton administration, pressured by families of the victims of the airline bombing, is holding off any improvement of relations with Libya until after it sees whether the Libyan government fully cooperates with the upcoming trial and pays reparations to the families.

Despite Washington's efforts to improve ties, Iran is identified in the report as "the most active state sponsor of terrorism" through the activities of various state institutions, including the Revolutionary Guard Corps and the Ministry of Intelligence and Security, which has planned and carried out bombings against Iranian dissidents abroad.

Iraq's place on the list has long seemed tied to U.S.-Iraqi relations. Iraq was on the list from 1979 to 1982 and was dropped when Iraq was fighting Iran. After Iraq invaded Kuwait in 1990, the State Department returned Iraq to the list, where it has remained since.

In many ways the worldwide terrorism picture is brightening, according to the report.

The number of deaths due to terrorism fell sharply because of the absence of any mass-casualty attacks.

In 1999, 233 people were killed, 5 of them American, and 706 wounded. The year before there were 741 killed, a dozen Americans, and 5,952 wounded.

The number of terrorist incidents rose to 392 last year from 274 in 1998, mostly because of an increase in non-lethal incidents in Turkey after the arrest of radical Kurdish leader Abdullah Ocalan, according to the report.