Corsica: an insurgency that killed itself
The insurgency on Corsica, the French Meditterean island, rarely appears in the English language media and this short article explains a lot:
Quote:
There was a group of capable people, but they killed each other": The Corsican struggle forty years on
Link:https://www.opendemocracy.net/can-eu...-other-corsica
At one point even after 9/11 it was Europe's hotspot for nationalist violence, which included large numbers of French-owned buildings being torched.
Quote:
Broadly, the armed struggle lost its potential for three reasons. First, and somewhat paradoxically, because the movement gained increasing popularity in the 1980s it
struggled to organise and sustain itself....Secondly, the clandestine nationalist movement over the years lost touch with the people it aimed to mobilise in its struggle for independence.
Finally, fratricidal war in the 1990s completed the armed movement’s downfall. Violence was no longer a means to struggle for independence aimed at state infrastructure, but rather a mere tool for private justice and the settling of scores. This came as a direct result of the state’s above-mentioned policy of division, leading every group to claim that it was the
entitled spokesperson vis-à-vis the state.
Corsica appears in a dozen threads; I expect previous posts are mainly in this thread on France, terrorism & CT:http://council.smallwarsjournal.com/...ad.php?t=15299
The more I read this article the more I thought the same factors ended the Provisional IRA's armed struggle.
