WASHINGTON?As the United States moves beyond blocking funds of Osama bin Laden’s network to include other terrorist groups, America’s most important bloc of allies is being less aggressive.
The European Union has frozen assets of just two of 28 groups on a U.S. list of non al Qaeda organizations. Out of the dozens of individuals on Washington’s list of suspected terrorists, the EU targeted eight.
U.S. targets left off Europe’s list, published in December, includes the PKK Kurdish rebels threatening Turkey, the Shining Path group in Peru and the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia.
In a 15-nation bloc that often doesn’t see eye to eye with each other, some EU members cited a lack of evidence that groups were terrorists, legal concerns and a hesitance to support governments with dubious human-rights records, according to diplomats who spoke on condition of anonymity.
Europe has embraced other anti-terrorism measures with impressive speed since the Sept. 11 terror attacks. But their limited fund-blocking response underscores how hard it is for the United States to build consensus for cracking down on armed groups, terrorist experts say.
The Bush administration has welcomed the world’s anti terrorism cooperation since Sept. 11, noting that 149 countries had frozen more than $104 million in assets of groups and individuals that America has tied to terrorism.
But as the United States added non-al Qaeda groups to its financial blacklist in the past six months, agreement from allies on concerted action was harder to come by.
“In those few cases where the United States has taken action and our friends and allies have not, we are working internationally on several fronts to encourage other blocking countries to take action as well,” said Tasia Scolinos, spokeswoman for the U.S. Treasury’s Office of Foreign Assets Control, the primary agency charged with freezing terrorist assets.
Despite 15 different legal systems and sets of traditions, the EU has made big strides since Sept. 11 to implement an EU-wide arrest warrant, craft a common definition of terrorism and mandate minimum penalties for those convicted of terrorist crimes.
And individual nations are free to act on their own. Britain went after assets of many more U.S.-listed non-al Qaeda groups, including Japanese cult Aum Shinrikyo and IRA dissidents known as the Real IRA.
But such individual actions won’t bring Europe-wide opinion closer to Washington’s over who is a terrorist.
The differences were highlighted in December when President Bush froze the assets of Hamas and closed the offices of a Texas-based foundation that allegedly helped finance the militant Palestinian group.
The EU responded later that month, drawing a distinction between Hamas’ military wing and its political leaders by blocking the funds of the Hamas “terrorist wing.” The EU went after the Palestinian Islamic Jihad but did not include Hezbollah on its list, although it blocked funds of several individuals tied to the Lebanese-based organization.
Some note the social welfare work of groups such as Hamas, which sponsors suicide bombings against Israelis, and also provides charitable aid and education to impoverished Palestinians.
Most surprising in the EU’s response to the war on terrorism however, was that it did not seize assets of any Europe-based groups, even though it identified 11 of them?including Spain’s Basque ETA, Ireland’s Real IRA and the Greece’s November 17 group?as terrorist.