The seminar, “Global Terrorism: Assessment from Russia, China and Germany,” was organized by the Area Study Centre for Russia, China and Central Asia at Peshawar University in collaboration with the Hanns Seidel Foundation of Germany, on 1 September 2005. The first guest speaker, Rolf Tophoven from the Institute of Terrorism Research and Security Policy, Essen, Germany, while quoting German intelligence sources, disclosed that the al-Qaeda network of Osama bin Laden had its cells in sixty countries of the world. In Germany alone, he continued, there were 31,000 sympathizers of Osama bin Laden of whom 500 were to be considered extremely dangerous. There were, he said, up to 10,000 active supporters of Al-Qaeda in the United Kingdom. The militants have expanded their operational bases in Europe during the past two years.

Talking about the modus operandi of al-Qaeda, the German scholar said, the old Al-Qaeda no longer has control of the global cadres and cell networks any longer. The organization has become decentralized and its members are eschewing communication with each other in order to avoid being identified. In this context, he said not to fully agreed with the view that Pakistan has completely, both vertically and horizontally, destroyed al-Qaeda’s communication network.

Rolf Tophoven said al-Qaeda is like a cancer, and if you remove one cell, metastases grow back somewhere else, and that it is extremely difficult to determine the structure of al-Qaeda. The potential of al-Qaeda, he added, had been underestimated. It is necessary to send the message that Al-Qaeda and its associated groups are not Quranic organizations, and they represent a corrupted view of Islam by misinterpreting the Qur’an and other texts. On the other hand, it is necessary to solve the actual conflicts in Afghanistan, Chechnya, Iraq and the Israeli-Palestinian conflict which all contribute to recruiting.

Alexander Nikitin, President of the Russian Political Science Association and Director of the Center for Political and International Studies, MGIMO University, Russia, identified three kinds of terrorism: traditional criminal terrorism, revolutionary terrorism and political terrorism. In his view, religious terrorism is the reincarnation of political terrorism. The Russian scholar talked at length on ‘International Legal Instruments for the Fight against Terrorism and Consequences of Anti-Terrorist Campaigns for International Relations.” The legal basis for tackling terrorism in its new manifestations remains inadequate. No new major comprehensive conventions have been adopted. Existing conventions and treaties on terrorism were formulated in the pre-9/11 era, and are difficult to implement to new types of terrorism. Nikitin further stated that the anti-terror campaign was used by certain big powers as a cover for achieving pragmatic geopolitical, strategic, and economic goals of their own which have nothing in common with the war on terror. After four years of \"response\" to the initial 9/11 attacks, he assessed that the Western community expressed a clear preference to deal with the symptoms, terrorism, rather than with it roots and causes, i.e. social problems. He explained that the international community does not undertake any coordinated actions to improve social or economic situation in conflict areas.

Chinese scholar Dr. Fang Jinying, Deputy Director of the Centre for Ethnic and Religious Studies in Beijing in her paper on ‘The International Terrorist Threat to Chinese Security’ said that the security concept in China had gone through a change since 2004. She said that only from the late 1990s did China regard ethnic separatism, religious extremism, and international terrorism as three evil forces, posing threats to national, regional and global security. She identified terrorists’ threat to Chinese working abroad, foreigners working within China, and a potential terrorist-related security risk to the Olympic Games to be held in Beijing in 2008.

Dr. Fang singled out the Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region of China as the area sending signals of terrorism in the recent past. She declared the Islamic Party of Liberation (Hizb-ut-Tahrir al-Islami) in the region as the most significant terrorist organization. She said that the Chinese government was fully vigilant to such threats and was making all efforts at local, regional and international levels to quell terrorism.

British scholar Dr. James Dingley of the University of Ulster discussed the causes of global terrorism. One has to be cautious while talking about terrorism, he argued, because all governments have vested interests in the matter. After 9/11, Americans have a vested interests in the war on terrorism, and nobody is criticizing their conceptualization of terrorism and uncritical acceptance of this conceptualization has its own danger. “You look at Islam in way you don’t look at Christianity. The terrorist is, he said, the exact opposite of the psychopath. To understand the origin and causes of terrorism, we should keep in mind the rational, economic and psychological levels of the terrorist. Terrorists face tremendous pressures and give their lives for a cause. Modernization processes makes the key players of traditional society redundant, and we find the terrorist campaign effective where modernization processes have actually started to hit traditional society. Most of the terrorists come from a lower middle class background.

Dr. Azmat Hayat Khan, Director of the Area Study Centre for Russia, China and Central Asia at Peshawar University highlighted the academic and scholastic activities of the ASC in the promotion of knowledge, current and current affairs. He also brought to the light the complex and subjective nature of terrorism. The discussion was moderated by Dr. Andrei Reich, Representative of the Hanns Seidel Foundation in Islamabad. The Vice Chancellor of Peshawar University, Lt. Gen. (retd) Mumtaz Gul chaired the gathering and shed light on the changing perceptions on the concepts of freedom fighters and terrorists. That said, he concluded that everyone deplored and condemned the tragic killing of innocent civilians on 9/11 in New York.