Modern Insurgencies and Counter-Insurgencies by Beckett Ian Beckett Ian F

Author:Beckett, Ian, Beckett, Ian F.
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781134553945
Publisher: Taylor and Francis

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THE TRANSITION TO URBAN INSURGENCY

Marxists had long regarded an urban proletariat as the true basis for insurrection, but the success of Mao Tse-tung’s principles of rural revolutionary war in China proved immensely seductive after 1945. However, there had been some recourse to urban terror by the Irgun and LEHI against the British in Palestine between 1945 and 1947. The trend continued with EOKA’s campaign against the British on Cyprus between 1955 and 1959; with that by the Front de Libération Nationale (National Liberation Front, FLN), against the French in Algeria between 1954 and 1962; with that by the Fuerzas Armadas de Liberación Nacional (Armed Forces of National Liberation, FALN), in Venezuela between 1963 and 1965; and that against the British in Aden from December 1963 to November 1967. Indeed, the leader of EOKA, George Grivas, wrote an account of his campaign in 1964, Guerrilla Warfare and EOKA’s Struggle, which offered significant pointers to future urban guerrillas, although he had intended it as a kind of primer for Western governments faced with communist insurgency.

Although the disastrous outcome of urban action for the FLN in Algiers in 1957 and for FALN in Venezuela should have served warning of its inherent dangers for the guerrilla, urban guerrilla warfare was increasingly attractive. This was particularly so in Latin America, where the failure of the foco theory of rural revolutionary warfare associated with Che Guevara, and emanating primarily from Fidel Castro’s success on Cuba between 1956 and 1959, played a significant role in shifting revolutionary action to the cities. In view of the failure, in turn, of urban guerrilla warfare in Latin America, Castro was to argue that the city was ‘the graveyard’ of the revolutionary.

While there was much substance in Castro’s dictum, however, urban guerrilla warfare still proved a difficult challenge for security forces, particularly in liberal democracies. Total repression was not generally a practicable option for liberal democracies, which had to find other more politically acceptable responses to the threat posed by urban insurgency. Begin in Palestine had calculated that the British would not be willing to resort to total repression and, in many respects, Cyprus and Aden posed similar difficulties. Indeed, while it tends to be said that the British have been the most successful exponents of counter-insurgency since 1945, both Cyprus and Aden were among the comparative failures, although primarily for reasons beyond the control of the security forces. Similarly, Algeria was ultimately a failure for the French army, whose new doctrine of guerre révolutionnaire resulted in an institutional politicisation threatening the stability of the French state itself. In less democratic states, urban guerrilla warfare did not prove as potent and was more easily suppressed, since there was not the same self-imposed restraint on the part of the security forces.

Turning first to the British experience of urban action, Cyprus was a part of the Ottoman Empire when occupied in 1878 as a base for British operations against any Russian invasion of Turkey. It was then formally annexed by Britain in 1914

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