Those of us whose work concerns the conflict in Northern Ireland, especially in the days before the peace process there, have become somewhat hardened to turning on the television and learning of another terrorist outrage. We do not need to be told that those are real people in the burning building, that is real blood on the pavement, another child has just lost a parent or a parent a child, and that some of the people involved may be people we know. Yet none of that prepared me for the shock and horror of what happened in America on 11th September. Indeed, it may be that daily familiarity with man¼s inhumanity to man makes it harder rather than easier to numb the reality of those cataclysmic events.

Although nothing on so terrible a scale and with such international repercussions has ever happened in relation to the Northern Ireland conflict, working on the protection and promotion of human rights there has brought me face to face with the war against terrorism. I believe there are lessons to be drawn from the Northern Ireland experience which apply to terrorism everywhere.

The first and possibly hardest lesson is that terrorists are not mindless and they are not usually mad, however evil they or the effects of their actions may be. They have an agenda, and when they carry out indiscriminate attacks on non-combatants they do so because they know that, however grisly the means, it will deliver their message in a language that will be heard and, ultimately, will be understood. If those of us who reject the use of such indiscriminate violence, however strongly we may feel about a particular cause, do not analyse the terrorists¼ message, we will never be able to eradicate terrorism by force alone. At best, as has happened in Northern Ireland, we may be able to contain it.

Secondly, it is vital in dealing with terrorism to refrain from acts of terror ourselves. This is a lesson the Israelis have yet to learn. It is a lesson that has been learned only partially in Northern Ireland. The army¼s firing on unarmed demonstrators against internment without trial in Derry in 1972 did not become known as Bloody Sunday by accident. It deepened the conflict and recruited young men to the ranks of the IRA who might otherwise never have joined.

Thirdly, repression does not suppress terrorism, it fuels it. Whenever there is an appalling act of terrorism, such as the bombing of Omagh in 1998, politicians come under tremendous pressure to do something about terrorism. In a democratic society the answer is often, as it was after Omagh, to pass ever more draconian laws against terrorism.

In the past thirty years in Northern Ireland we have seen

• the removal of trial by jury for serious crimes such as murder, arson and hijacking;
• a lower standard of proof for terrorist crimes;
• the undermining of the right not to incriminate oneself;
• limited access to legal advice; and
• many other inroads into the due process rights of those accused of terrorism.

There is no evidence that this has made it any easier to convict terrorists, still less that it has prevented terrorism.

On the other hand, there is evidence that the erosion of the right to a fair trial has led to miscarriages of justice. The creation of martyrs is grist to the mill of the terrorist recruiting sergeants.

There is a fundamental objection to depriving any category of criminals, whether it is terrorists or rapists, of due process rights. To do so is to suggest that people should be tried not because of what they have done, but because of their reason for doing it. Irish republicans¼ desire for a united Ireland and loyalists¼ desire to remain in the United Kingdom are both perfectly respectable intellectual positions to adopt; it is their terrorist methods that are unacceptable.

The suicide bombers who wrecked the World Trade Center and the Pentagon were, presumably, fundamentalist Muslims. No civilised person thinks that therefore Islam is responsible for their actions. What they believed is irrelevant, in the sense that although it may explain what they did it can never excuse it. They committed the most serious crimes, and if they can be apprehended they should certainly stand trial, but we damage our own democracy if we do not offer them a fair trial on the same terms as any other criminal. We also enhance their standing in the eyes of those who approve of their actions.

Fourthly, demonisation of terrorists is unhelpful. Their acts may be despicable, but unless we recognise the humanity of those who carry out such acts, we are in danger of diminishing our own humanity. My organisation seeks to promote, as does the British government, the abolition of the death penalty. Those of us who are opposed to capital punishment cannot allow our revulsion against what happened in America to cause us to abandon our principles.

I know that there are those who will think that those of us who work in, and care about, human rights are wishy-washy liberals whose bleeding heart approach is inadequate to deal with life¼s tough decisions. Some even believe that we provide a safe harbour for terrorists. On the contrary, respect for everyone¼s human rights, without exception, is often a harder position to sustain than the simpler solutions invoked by anger and revenge.

The war against terrorism is the war against ignorance, poverty, racism and injustice, because those are the conditions in which terrorism gains ground. The struggle to achieve a world in which man¼s humanity gains the ascendancy over our inhumanity is far from over. It is about to be put to one of the severest tests it has ever faced. Unless our response is just and proportionate, there is a severe danger that we will lose the war against terrorism, whatever the physical outcome, because we will have done the terrorists¼ work for them, by undermining our own democracy and values. It is never difficult to make a bad situation worse, the trick is to make the world a better place.

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JANE WINTER is the Director of British Irish RIGHTS WATCH, an independent non-governmental organisation that monitors the human rights dimension of the conflict and the peace process in Northern Ireland. Its services are available to anyone whose human rights have been affected by the conflict, regardless of religious, political or community affiliations, and the organisation takes no position on the eventual constitutional outcome of the peace process. This is Ms. Winter's first article for The World's Magazine.