Исследовательская работа по английскому языку по теме: “Fighting terrorism”

Муниципальное бюджетное общеобразовательное учреждение

Донская средняя общеобразовательная школа

Зерноградского района

имени генерала армии Лелюшенко Д.Д.

Исследовательская работа

 по английскому языку

по теме:

“Fighting terrorism”

подготовлена

обучающейся 11 класс

Тестова Яна 17лет

руководитель

учитель английского языка

Медведева Виктория Николаевна

Contents

1) Introduction  ……………………………………………………3

2) Terrorism in Russia …………………………………………….3                              

3) Terrorism In the USA ………………………………………….5

4) World Terrorism ……………………………………………….6

5) Literature………………………………………………………13

Introduction

There are so many problems in the modern world, such as global warming, environmental issues, shortage of natural resources, earthquakes, floods and other disasters. But one of the most dangerous of all is terrorism. It is a huge threat to all mankind. There were many terrorists, but the most dangerous was leader of Al-Qaidas. It was Osama Ben Laden. He harmed to world. Now, Terrorism is the most dangerous thing for our life.

Today we hear more and more news on TV about terrorist attacks. All magazines and newspapers write about this problem. Each year different countries face terrorism. A lot of people suffer from terroristic acts. Some die, some get wounded, others lose their loved ones. In certain countries people are even scared to go to the cinemas, theatres, concerts, supermarkets, and other crowded places. I think that people who become terrorists have no values in life. Most attacks take place because of misunderstanding. While some countries are in war with each other, their civilians suffer.

The word «terrorism» is controversial. Definitions of «terrorism» generally involve some or all of the following: 1) a terrorist act is generally unlawful; 2) it is violent and may be life threatening; 3) the violence is politically motivated; 4) the direct targets are civilians; 5) the direct targets may not be the main targets; 6) the main targets may be one or more nation-states, governments, or societies; or a political, ethnic, or religious group, or an industry or commercial operation, within those societies; 7) the objective is usually to frighten the main targets; 8) there may or may not be a claim of responsibility.

Terrorism in Russia

Terrorism also occurs on basis of religious matters. It is especially sad when children become the target of terrorists. Russia has been the target of far more terrorist attacks than the United States has. Most of these have stemmed from the conflict in Chechnya-including the hijacking of a Russian airliner in Saudi Arabia in March 2001 and the hijacking of a commercial bus with 40 passengers in July 2001. Perhaps the most dramatic attacks were four apartment bombings in Moscow and other Russian cities during August and September 1999, which killed nearly 300 civilians. Putin, then Russia's prime minister under the ailing President Boris Yeltsin, blamed these bombings on Chechen rebels and reinvaded the breakaway republic. At least 41 people, including 17 children, were also killed in May 2002 when terrorists bombed a military parade in the southwestern town of Kaspiisk — an attack that the Russian government also blamed on Chechen extremists.

Another unexpected attack took place in Moscow in the musical theatre “Nord-Ost”. It happened in 2002 and shocked Russian population as well as people all around the world.  In October 2002, Chechen terrorists seized some 700 hostages in a Moscow theater. Russian special forces launched a commando raid, pumping an aerosol form of the powerful narcotic Fentanyl into the theater to disable the hostage-takers. The drug killed more than 110 hostages.

And  today we speak  about blood event in Beslan too.  There was on September 1st 2004 such attack in south part of Russia, in Beslan. It was a terrible tragedy for the families of these school children and for the whole country. Terakt is frightened because it unpredict. In few instants life is divided on two unconnecting parts   before and after.  It occurred about 9 hours in the morning, some of children perceived it as a bad dream and it seemed impossible: the truck entered the school yard, out of it the armed people in the masks jumped out. They began to shoot at air and to force crowd into the school.

The great Russian poet Alexander Pushkin once wrote with bitterness that "the only European in Russia is the government." And this despite how he suffered at the hands of the tsar's government and especially the tsar's censorship. I recalled the genius' paradoxical phrase when — a few days after the anti-Caucasian bacchanalia in the press— Prime Minister Vladimir Putin announced, "We can't confuse the bandits who are operating on the territory of Chechnya with the Chechen people, who are also their victims." A war against terror must not be turned into terror against the people. We lost the Chechen war of 1994-96 precisely because from the very beginning:                                                                                                          

— with the massive, senseless bombing of Grozny

— the war was turned against the people, leading to the deaths of tens of thousands of civilians. We won the August war in Dagestan precisely because it was fought in the people's defense.

The great Russian civilization cannot roll down the path to the destruction of an entire ethnicity, no matter how difficult the last 100 years of relations with this ethnicity have been. Here, the matter is not world public opinion. As concerns world public opinion, we wouldn't have any trouble at all.

Terrorism In the USA

The USA suffered from a series of terroristic attacks. The largest of all happened on September 11th 2001 in New York City. The two huge skyscrapers were demolished and thousands of people died. On September 11, 2001, the United States was attacked by terrorists connected with the radical Islamist group, Al Qaeda. Four commercial airliners were hijacked, to be used as missiles in the destruction of American monuments and American lives. Both towers of the World Trade Center in New York were destroyed, and the Pentagon in Washington, DC, was severely damaged. Almost three thousand lives were lost. On September 11 the terrorists did not attack  armed forces, but the American people as such. This is truly an unprecedented crime.                                                                                                                                      Exactly one week before the first anniversary of the September 11 attacks, President George  Bush has declared that dark day in US history "Patriot Day," in honor of those killed.

The more than 3,000 people who died in the attacks in New York, Pennsylvania and outside Washington "will forever hold a cherished place in our hearts and in the history of our nation," Bush declared in a statement yesterday.                                                       "We will not forget the events of that terrible morning, nor will we forget how Americans responded in New York City, at the Pentagon and in the skies over Pennsylvania -with heroism and selflessness, with compassion and courage and with prayer and hope," he said.

In response to the September 11, 2001 attacks, political leaders from Europe, North America, Asia, and the Middle East have placed the phenomenon of terrorism within the context of a global struggle against systems of government perceived by those accused of using terrorist tactics as harmful to their interests. Acts of terrorism can be carried out by individuals or groups. The most common image of terrorism is that it is carried out by small and secretive cells, highly motivated to serve a particular cause. Terrorists often seek to demoralize and paralyze their enemy with fear, using their acts as a form of blackmail to apply pressure on governments to achieve goals the terrorists could not achieve by other means.

Recent developments have seen a divergence in social and political responses to terrorism between the United States and Western Europe. The September 11, 2001 attacks were carried out by foreigners who entered the country for that purpose, on behalf of a foreign organization, operating from bases in a remote country. Western European countries, on the other hand, are now confronted with a domestic terrorism based within a domestic religious minority, some recent immigrants, but many native-born citizens.

World Terrorism

In the right of Russia the terrorism is defined as ideology of violence and the practicing of impact on public consciousness, on decision-making by public authorities, local governments or the international organizations, the population connected with intimidation and/or other forms of illegal violent acts In the right of the USA — as the premeditated, politically motivated violence made against the peace population or objects by subnational groups or podpolno by acting agents, usually with the purpose to affect mood of society.

Terrorism expert A. P. Schmid of the United Nations Office for Drug Control and Crime Prevention has proposed a short legal definition for use by the UN, namely that an act of terrorism is «the peacetime equivalent of a war crime». The words «terrorism» and «terror» originally referred to methods employed by regimes to control their own populations through fear, a tactic seen in totalitarian regimes such as Nazi Germany and Soviet Russia. The current use of the term relies more on the example of the 19th-century revolutionaries who used the technique of assassination, particularly the anarchists and Narodniks (populists) in Tsarist Russia, whose most notable action was the assassination of Alexander II.

At a time when the United States is obsessed with more exotic threats like bioterror, cyberteiror and agroterror, these incidents in Russia and Dagestan underscore how terrorists can still achieve their dual aim of fear and intimidation through conventional means and traditional methods: using bombs to blow things up. This has important implications for counterterrorism preparedness. As fanatical and irrational as terrorists often appear, they remain conservative operationally.

In other respects, too, the string of deadly explosions that has convulsed Russia is not without precedent. Nor can it be written off as some isolated phenomenon inspired by recondite historical enmities. Rather, the bombings conform to a pattern of terrorism evident throughout the 1990s: The most heinous and lethal attacks, those directed against civilians, go unclaimed. This development contrasts with the modus operandi of the first generation of modern terrorists who surfaced during the 1970s and 1980s. They not only proudly claimed credit for particularly bloody attacks, but generally issued detailed communiqués explaining precisely why they had carried out their operations.

 А large number of terrorist attacks have gone unclaimed. According to a Rand report published in 1985, upward of 60 percent of international terrorist incidents recorded between 1980-82, and 39 percent of those that occurred in the 1970s, were never claimed. The most deadly terrorist incidents of the 1990s have never been credibly claimed, much less explained or justified as terrorist acts once were.                                                                                                                    Among these are: the series of car and truck bombings that rocked Bombay in 1993, killing 317 persons; the huge truck bomb that destroyed a Jewish community center in Buenos Aires, Argentina, in 1994, killing 86; the truck bomb that demolished the Alfred P. Murrah Federal Building in Oklahoma City, leaving 168 dead in 1995; the series of bombings in Paris that occurred the same year between July and October and left eight dead and 200 wounded; and last summer's bombings of the U.S. embassies in Kenya and Tanzania, in which 224 persons perished and thousands more were wounded. The 1988 in-flight bombing of Pan Am 103, in which 270 persons perished, is an especially notorious example.

Although two alleged Libyan government intelligence operatives were identified and accused of placing the suitcase containing the bomb that eventually found its way onto the plane, no believable claim of responsibility has ever been issued. That terrorists today do not feel as driven to take credit for their acts may be related to their belief that their message, whatever it may be, is still reaching its intended audience. As the renowned terrorism expert Walter Laqueur has observed, "If terrorism is propaganda by the deed, the success of a terrorist campaign depends decisively on the amount of publicity it receives." In this respect, terrorists are still getting all the publicity they crave, but they are manipulating and exploiting it in different ways. By maintaining their anonymity, terrorists may believe they are better able to capitalize on fear and alarm. Attacks perpetrated by enigmatic, unseen and unknown assailants may thus be deliberately designed to foment greater insecurity and panic in the target audience. In this way, the terrorists’ ability to portray themselves as being able to strike whenever and wherever they please, while highlighting the government's inability to protect potential targets, is appreciably heightened. The terrorists appear stronger, the government weak and powerless to stop the mayhem.

Terrorists have long sought to embarrass governments and undermine public confidence in their leaders. Even when they issue no claim, the perpetrators may believe they are still effectively harming their enemy and achieving their ultimate objective. They may also be confident that even if their message is not clearly understood, the suspicion aroused by even an anonymous attack is sufficient reward in itself. The current situation in Russia illuminates the challenges faced by other countries confronted with terrorist threats. The potentially corrosive effects of fear and uncertainty on civil liberties and constitutional safeguards are already evident: Russian authorities and the Russian public have singled out Chechen, Dagestani, Ingush and other swarthy, dark-haired immigrants from the Caucasus. Discriminated against in the best of times, they have been subjected to withering scrutiny despite assurances from President Boris Yeltsin that no one ethnic group or people would be targeted for attention.

The ease with which Russia has been thrown into panic by a handful of men using entirely conventional terrorist weapons and tactics suggests that terrorists can still ably achieve their objectives of fear and intimidation without having to resort to more exotic weaponry or futuristic tactics.

Among the most effective counter-terrorism methods recently developed and used in the world, are deradicalization educational programs employing former terrorist leaders, detection and elimination of sources of material and financial support of terroristic groups, international cooperation and exchange of data concerning terroristic groups and individual terrorists, development of internal and international law-enforcement techniques of combating and preventing terroristic acts, information campaigns among the population concerning how to behave and what to do in case of terroristic menace.

Effective countering of terrorism is possible, but this affectivity requires certain efforts and expenses on implementing measures listed above. International cooperation in aspects of data exchange, counter-terroristic activity in the media and Internet, and cooperative trainings of counter-terroristic squads of different countries. Future anti-terrorism efforts should be focused primarily on measures for early detection and preliminary neutralization of terroristic forces.

Main danger of most religious terroristic groups and organizations is their unshakable faith and conviction for their means are justified by the “noble purpose” of liberation of their nation or holy war against those who do not share their religious beliefs. This conviction may provide very strong motivations for terroristic actions and even self-destructing acts of suicide bombers.

But these radical beliefs are not necessary shared by the most part of terrorists countrymen, who aren’t sharing religious fanaticism or ideological devotion of radicals. Regular people want to live in peace and safety regardless of their beliefs. And the tactics of terrorism, though may be very effective in short-run periods, in the long-run conditions, especially when faced with no diversified international counter efforts, will lead only to exhaustion of the nation and gradual rejection of terrorists by the society.

Why do people resort to such violent acts as bombing, assassinations, and hi-jacking? How do individuals and organizations justify these acts of terror? These acts can be described as terrorist actions. Terrorism is a growing international problem and an excellent example of the strain theory. People feel strain when they are exposed to cultural goals that they are unable to obtain because they do not have access to culturally approved means of achieving those goals (Kendall, 1998) and so turn to acts of terrorism. During the last twenty years, new terrorist groups have sprung up al lover the world. Governments have had little success in their attempts to resolve issues in which terrorism is used.

A major problem in discussing terrorism is establishing a generally accepted definition. Terrorism can be described as the unlawful use of fear or force to achieve certain political, economical, or social aims. Because it is so hard to define, organizations like the United Nations have had great difficulty drawing up policies against terrorism.

A single individual, a certain group, or even governments may commit terrorist actions. Most terrorists, unlike criminals, claim to be dedicated to higher causes, and do not believe in personal gain. The methods used in terrorism include threats, bombings, and the destruction of property, kidnapping, the taking of hostages, executions, and assassinations.

There are many reasons why political groups attempt to bring about radical change through terrorism. People are often frustrated with their position in society. They may in some way feel persecuted or oppressed because or their race, religion, or they feel exploited by a government. Any group that uses terrorist actions have very complex and powerful reasons to engage in those activities.

The use of terror to achieve goals is not a new idea in history. One early terrorist group, the assassins, flourished in the 12th and 13th centuries. The assassins used murder to dispose of their enemies, and their name has come to be used for one who kills for political or religious reasons. Government terrorism dates at least from immediately after the French Revolution, in 1789. During this period, known as the “Reign of Terror,” the French Revolutionary executed thousands of its citizens who were considered enemies of its rule.

Individuals or groups who seek national independence have committed acts of terrorism. One such act was the assassination of the archduke of France in 1914 (Compton s Encyclopedia, 1998). The assassination had sought to win Bosnia form Austrian rule, but failed and led to the outbreak of World War I.

Kings and government officials are often the targets of terrorism. Members of a terrorist group that wanted to overthrow the government assassinated Czar Alexander of Russia in 1881. Other famous people who were assassinated because of their beliefs were Martin Luther King Jr., and Pope John Paul II, who was shot, but survived.                                                                                                                            While many groups have engaged in terrorism throughout history, the Anarchist political groups in the 19th century are most remembered. These groups were especially strong in Italy, France, Spain, and the United Sates, but their roots lie within the Russian peoples will movement. Anarchists believe that by nature people are good, and that in the right circumstances people can leave in peace. They oppose all centralized state and think it is an oppressive force that prevents people from cooperating with one another.

Modern Terrorism retains some elements of terrorism in the past. At the same time it differs because it has a wider extent in many of its methods. Today, terrorism poses a threat to innocent people, and is a serious threat to democratic forms of government. One of the characteristics of modern terrorists is their practice of taking hostages in order to force their demands upon a particular government. If demands are not met, the hostages face the threat of death. Hi-jacking commercial airlines and holding their passengers and crews hostage has become a favored method among terrorist today. Many people believe that terrorism became global in its extent in the late 1960 s. In 1970 over 300 acts of terrorism were recorded worldwide. By 1979the number of terrorist incidents for one year increased to 3,700.

Politically unstable countries offer frequent opportunities for terrorism. Lebanon, which has been torn by years of Civil War, has been the sight of numerous terrorist attacks.

In addition to terrorist groups, governments today also engage in terrorism. Countries sometimes use terrorism as a substitute for traditional warfare by providing money, training, and weapons to terrorist groups whose activities serve their national aims. Governments may also plan and carry out terrorist actions themselves, although they usually deny responsibility for them.

It is unlikely that we will ever see and end to terrorism. Terrorists are not born, but created by issues of today develop into the conflicts of tomorrow.                                                  I think that terrorism is not just a problem, it’s a global disaster. People should unite  it together!

Literature

1)Terrorism: A Very Short Introduction, 2014, Charles Townshend.

2) Newspaper “English language”, 2014/6.

3) http://engtexts.ru/fighting_terrorism.php.