UNITED NATIONS (AP) – The UN counter-terrorism chief warned on Tuesday that terrorists are exploiting the COVID-19 pandemic and are calling on new “racially, ethnically and politically motivated violent extremist groups”.
Vladimir Voronkov spoke on the 20th anniversary of the UN Security Council on the pivotal resolution to fight terrorism passed after the September 11 attacks on the United States – and six days after a violent attack on the Capitol by a pro-Trump. gang.
He said that over the past two decades “the threat of terrorism has persisted, evolved and spread”.
Al-Qaeda, which was responsible for the September 11 attacks that killed nearly 3,000 people from 90 countries, remains resilient despite the loss of numerous leaders, Voronkov said. The Islamic State extremist group, which has lost its self-proclaimed caliphate in Iraq and Syria, continues to carry out attacks in the two countries “trying to restore capacity for external operations.”
Voronkov, who heads the UN Counter-Terrorism Office, said terrorists have been trying to exploit the COVID-19 crisis, “riding the crests of polarization and hate speech amplified by the pandemic.”
Terrorists have quickly adapted to exploiting cyberspace and new technologies, linked to organized crime figures, and discovered regulatory, human and technical gaps in countries, he said.
“Their tactics are attractive to new groups across the ideological spectrum, including racially, ethnically and politically motivated violent extremist groups,” Voronkov said.
Assistant UN Secretary-General Michele Coninsx called the Security Council’s approval of the US-backed anti-terrorism resolution on September 28, 2001 “a seminal moment when the Council and the international community recognized the seriousness of the threat from transnational terrorism. “
The resolution ordered all countries to criminalize the financing of terrorist acts and to ban recruitment, travel and safe havens for all involved.
It has also established a Counter-Terrorism Committee to monitor the implementation of the resolution. Coninsx heads the executive directorate of the commission, established in 2004 to assess how the 193 member states of the UN implement anti-terrorism measures, recommend ways to address gaps, enable technical assistance and analyze anti-terrorism trends.
In recent years, Coninsx said, affiliate members of the Islamic State have sprung up in many places, including South Asia, Southeast Asia and several regions of Africa – the Sahel, Lake Chad, and the south and east of the continent.
“The proliferation of far-right terrorism is also of growing concern,” she said, adding that there was racially and ethnically motivated violence, among other things.
James Cleverly, the UK Secretary of State, urged more attention to “terrorist abuse of social media and other new technologies” and the longer-term impact of COVID-19 on “the terrorism dynamics”.
More specifically, Estonian Defense Minister Juri Liège warned: “We are facing new complex security challenges such as cyber and hybrid threats and capabilities such as drones that address the real threat of terrorists to the civilian population and our men and women in operations and missions around the world. enlarge the world. “
Irish Foreign Minister Simon Coveney welcomed the committee’s efforts to assess the impact of the pandemic and stressed that “addressing the evolving threat from politically motivated violent extremism and terrorism, in particular the growing number of far-right attacks, is part of the is our responsibility, “too.”
US Deputy Ambassador Richard Mills made no mention of the attack on the Capitol, but said: “The United States takes the threat of racially or ethnically motivated terrorist attacks very seriously, and we continue to take action to address that particular form of terrorism. fight terrorism. “
“Last year, the State Department first designated a white supremacist group as a Specially Designated Global Terrorist,” he said.
Mills also weighed in on the dispute between the Western members of the council and Russia and China over the importance of human rights in the fight against terrorism.
It started with Britain’s Cleverly pointing to China’s “harsh and disproportionate measures” against the Muslim minority Uyghurs as an example of counter-terrorism measures used “to justify blatant human rights violations and oppression.”
He said Beijing’s detention of up to 1.8 million people in Xinjiang without trial and other well-documented measures violates China’s obligations under international human rights law and the Security Council’s demand that counter-terrorism measures comply with those obligations.
Chinese Ambassador Zhang Jun dismissed Cleverly’s comments as “baseless attacks” and called them “purely politically motivated” without any basis in fact.
“As a victim of terrorism, China has taken decisive action to vigorously combat terrorism and extremism,” said Zhang. “Our action is reasonable, based on the law and in line with the prevailing practice of countries in the region.” He added that his actions protect the rights of minorities.
Without mentioning China, Mills said the United States “will continue to object to the actions of certain countries to engage in mass detention of religious minorities and members of other minorities, engage in repressive surveillance and mass data collection,” and to use compulsive population control such as forced sterilization and abortion. “
Russian Ambassador Vassily Nebenzia called the terrorist threat one of the “greatest challenges” of the moment. But he said the Security Council and its counter-terrorism committee “pay extra attention to rights aspects of counter-terrorism operations at the expense of priority security tasks.”