UNITED NATIONS (AP) – The UN counterterrorism chief warned on Tuesday that terrorists are exploiting the COVID-19 pandemic and calling for new “violent extremist groups with racial, ethnic and political motivation”.
Vladimir Voronkov spoke at the UN Security Council’s 20th anniversary celebration of the fundamental resolution to combat terrorism adopted after the 9/11 attacks in the United States – and six days after a violent attack on the US Capitol by a pro-mob crowd. Trump.
He said that over the past two decades, “the threat of terrorism has persisted, evolved and spread”.
Al Qaeda, responsible for the 9/11 attacks that killed nearly 3,000 people in 90 countries, is still resilient despite the loss of several leaders, Voronkov said. The Islamic State extremist group, which lost its self-declared caliphate in Iraq and Syria, still carries out attacks in both countries “and seeks to restore a capacity for external operations”.
Voronkov, who heads the UN Counter-Terrorism Office, said the terrorists sought to exploit the COVID-19 crisis, “taking advantage of the peak of polarization and hate speech amplified by the pandemic”.
Terrorists quickly adapted to the exploitation of cyberspace and new technologies, connecting with organized crime figures and finding normative, human and technical gaps in countries, he said.
“Their tactics are attractive to new groups across the ideological spectrum, including violent extremist groups with racial, ethnic and political motivation,” said Voronkov.
UN Assistant Secretary General Michele Coninsx considered the Security Council’s adoption of the United States-sponsored anti-terrorism resolution on September 28, 2001, “a seminal moment in which the council and the international community recognized the seriousness of the threat posed for transnational terrorism. “
The resolution ordered all countries to criminalize the financing of terrorist acts and to ban recruitment, travel and safe havens for everyone involved.
It also established a Committee to Combat Terrorism to monitor the implementation of the resolution. Coninsx heads the committee’s Executive Board, which was created in 2004 to assess how the 193 UN member countries are implementing measures against terrorism, recommend ways to address gaps, facilitate technical assistance and analyze trends in counterterrorism.
In recent years, said Coninsx, Islamic State affiliates have sprung up in many places, including South Asia, Southeast Asia and several regions in Africa – the Sahel, the Lake Chad Basin and the south and east of the continent.
“The proliferation of far-right terrorism is also a cause for growing concern,” she said, adding that it includes racially and ethnicly motivated violence.
Britain’s Minister of State for Foreign Affairs, James Cleverly, called for more attention to “the misuse of social media and other new technologies by terrorists” and the long-term impact of COVID-19 on the “dynamics of terrorism” .
More specifically, Estonian Defense Minister Juri Luik warned: “We are facing complex new security challenges, such as cyber and hybrid threats and drone capabilities that increase the real threat from terrorists to civilian populations and our men and women in operations and missions around the world. “
Irish Foreign Minister Simon Coveney welcomed the committee’s efforts to assess the impact of the pandemic and emphasized that “dealing with the evolving threat of violent extremism and politically motivated terrorism, especially the growing number of far-right attacks, is part of our responsibility, too. “
US Vice Ambassador Richard Mills made no mention of the attack on the Capitol, but said that “the United States takes the threat of racially or ethnicly motivated terrorist attacks very seriously and we continue to take steps to combat this specific form of terrorism”.
“Last year, for the first time, the State Department designated a white supremacy group as a Specially Designated Global Terrorist,” he said.
Mills also voiced an opinion on the dispute between Western board members and Russia and China over the importance of human rights in combating terrorism.
It all started with Britain pointing to China’s “severe and disproportionate measures” against the Uighur Muslim minority as an example of anti-terrorism measures being used “to justify blatant violations of human rights and oppression”.
He said the detention of up to 1.8 million people in Xinjiang by Beijing without trial and other well-documented measures runs counter to China’s obligations under international human rights law and the Security Council’s requirement that anti-terrorism measures comply with those obligations.
Chinese ambassador Zhang Jun dismissed Cleverly’s comments as “baseless attacks”, calling them “purely political motivations”, without a basis for the facts.
“As a victim of terrorism, China has taken resolute measures to firmly fight terrorism and extremism,” said Zhang. “Our action is reasonable, based on the law and in line with prevailing practice in the countries of the region.” He added that his actions protect the rights of minorities.
Without naming China, Mills said the United States “will continue to oppose the actions of certain countries to engage in the mass detention of religious minorities and members of other minorities, to engage in repressive surveillance and mass data collection. and use coercive population control like sterilization and abortion. ”
Russian ambassador Vassily Nebenzia called the terrorist threat one of the “biggest challenges” today. But he said the Security Council and its counter-terrorism committee operations put “extra attention to the rights aspects of countering terrorism at the expense of priority security-related tasks”.