#5
Vremya MN
October 30, 2002
TERRORISTS WILL BE HANDLED CONCEPTUALLY
Putin reconsiders principles of national security
Author: Viktor Litovkin
[from WPS Monitoring Agency, www.wps.ru/e_index.html]

PRESIDENT VLADIMIR PUTIN HAS ORDERED THE SECURITY MINISTERS TO REWRITE THE NATIONAL SECURITY CONCEPT, FOCUSING ON METHODS OF COMBATING TERRORISM. HOWEVER, MANY EXPERTS CONSIDER THAT TERRORISM CANNOT BE DEFEATED BY USING FORCE, UNLESS THE SYSTEMIC POLITICAL, ECONOMIC, AND SOCIAL PROBLEMS ARE ADDRESSED

On Tuesday, President Vladimir Putin met with security ministers. According to the president's press secretary Alexei Gromov, the president and the ministers "discussed some aspects of national security related to combating terrorism."

Defense Minister Sergei Ivanov explained later that the president had told security ministers to elaborate a new concept of the country's national security because the terror threat to Russia is increasing. According to the minister, this concept should take into account not only direct perpetrators of terror acts but also their accomplices, encouragers, and subsidizers. This apparently extends the sphere of acceptable involvement of arms and other radical methods against those who have chosen top gain their political or military aims by means of terrorism.

It is clear that Sergei Ivanov was entrusted with working out a new security concept because he used to work at the Security Council when the current national security concept was elaborated there. The current concept includes a large number of security tasks but insufficiently describes conditions and methods of combating international and internal terrorism. Now this drawback should be eliminated urgently.

Alteration of the national security concept will inevitably involve improvement of other basic state documents, e.g. the military doctrine that also does not have any concrete indications regarding involvement of arms against terrorists. The Army and the Navy have never fulfilled such tasks and do not have any means or skills for fulfilling them. Military regulations do not have the term "terrorist" at all. Now it is necessary to insert all these terms and methods and teach servicemen to conduct military operations by new methods. Besides, it is necessary to change the psychology of the military. Bomb strikes, attacks, besieging the enemy, and other such tasks should retrieve to the background. It is necessary to master methods of guarding important objects, intelligence, prevention of terror acts. It is difficult for the military to master these skills at least because they are not used to thinking of having as few victims among peaceful civilians as possible.

Changing of the concept of the national security and the military doctrine will caused the necessity of alteration of other standard acts, including amendments to the laws on defense and on the status of a serviceman. These and other such laws should be coordinated with the international humanitarian and military laws. It is unacceptable that military troops should conduct military activities against terrorists in a federal subject of the Russian Federation without any legal grounds for this except for presidential decrees and the government's regulations. Neither of these documents has the status of a law. Probably now, after the turn of the military authorities of the Russian Federation toward the anti-terror fight, this situation will change and Russia will enter the legal field of combating international terrorism.

However, many experts consider that terrorism cannot be defeated by methods involving force. Such methods will not do any good until the systemic political, economic, and social problems generating new suicide bombers are solved.

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