Fear Moves East: Terror Targets the Pacific Rim

Although the brutal military junta in Rangoon has many enemies, the Burmese embassy in Bangkok was lightly guarded, as usual. On October 1, 1999, the typical two sentries protected the embassy, which local intelligence had identified as one of the missions in Bangkok most at risk of attack. One guard left the premises. While he was gone, five armed men stormed the embassy. They were linked with anti-Rangoon groups, God's Army and the Vigorous Burmese Student Warriors. The anti-Rangoon insurgents took 32 hostages, triggering a protracted crisis that was resolved only when Thailand flew the hostage-takers to a hiding spot along the Burmese-Thai border and released them there, unharmed. Three months later, fighters affiliated with the same groups seized a hospital in western Thailand and held more than 700 people hostage for two days.

The Burmese embassy siege is both instructive and foreboding. It is but one example of the burgeoning terrorist threat in East Asia. Globalization in the Asia-Pacific region has included not only the opening of economies and polities but also the development and spread of pernicious ideologies, organizations, and tactics.

Socioeconomic liberalization in East Asia, defined here as the region spanning from Burma to Fiji, has intensified the marginalization of some groups while breaking down controls on these marginalized and potentially extremist sectors of society. Given Asia's increasingly porous borders and rapidly improving communications, transport, and information infrastructure, these extremists now are able to develop closer political and financial links with militants, arms suppliers, drug dealers, and other shadowy forces in South Asia and the Middle East. There, terror kingpins such as Osama bin Laden have recognized and rewarded the abilities of East Asian radicals to wreak havoc.

This mix of socioeconomic marginalization, loosening political controls, and vanishing borders has created a time bomb in East Asia. Terrorist attacks have been on the rise since 1990 and, as the Burmese embassy fiasco illustrates, East Asia is poorly prepared to counter this threat. Barring significant changes in the way East Asian nations individually and collectively battle militant groups, the Pacific Rim will become terrorism's next bloody battleground.

A Safe Place

Terrorism was not unheard of in East Asia before the 1990s. Insurgents fighting for a Muslim state in the southern Philippines, such as the Moro National Liberation Front (MNLF), were using terrorist tactics well before the end of the Cold War. In the late 1970s and early 1980s, separatists in southern Thailand, such as the Pattani United Liberation Organization, planted bombs in Bangkok and in the south of the country. Pariah nation North Korea allegedly funded several terrorist attacks in the region, including the 1983 Rangoon bombing of South Korean president Chun Doo Hwan's traveling party, in which 17 people were killed.

Yet until recently, East Asia suffered fewer terrorist attacks than Europe or the Middle East. Unlike the Middle East, where many terrorist groups loosely collaborated to fight Israel, Asia had no unifying enemy that militants could agree to hate. Unlike Western Europe, where democratic values and relatively open immigration policies gave militants room to operate, centralized rule in China, Indonesia, and other East Asian states suffocated ethnic conflict and largely prevented individuals and groups with grudges from using terror to achieve their aims. In one case, Tibetan separatist insurgents trained by the U.S. Central Intelligence Agency waged a low-intensity war against the Chinese government in western China. Yet the Tibetans were no match for China's internal security forces, which cracked down on the separatists and essentially destroyed their armed movement.

Even in more open East Asian states, traditional hierarchical social structures and norms of conformity hindered the development of radical groups. Although the intense social pressure to conform in Japan and South Korea probably alienated some Japanese and Koreans, this pseudo-authoritarian social culture also made it difficult for people moving against the cultural grain to gain critical masses of supporters--whether performance artists...