Simulation puts students in the shoes of terrorists

With the foreign minister of Androland on the phone, the U.S. president fretting anxiously in the Oval Office and five hostages awaiting their fates in the next room, the terrorist Committee for National Struggle had to think fast.

Fortunately, this time the terrorists were not a real-life threat, but instead a group of International Relations students engaged in a terrorist crisis role-playing simulation.

The game, which took place last night at Williams Hall, was run by the International Relations Department in conjunction with the Sigma Iota Rho Honor Society for International Relations and the International Relations Undergraduate Student Association.

Students played the roles of U.S. government officials, journalists, hostages and terrorists, while international relations professors Bruce Newsome and Frank Plantain acted as intermediaries relaying messages between the groups by telephone.

The groups were attempting to resolve a crisis involving a deeply rooted conflict between two imaginary Middle Eastern states. The terrorist organization had taken the American hostages in an attempt to gain United States and international recognition for their cause and to obtain the release of political prisoners.

As the bargaining proceeded, students seemed to step further into character, even into the somewhat alien role of terrorists.

"We have nothing against [the hostages] personally," said College senior Ben Plantain, in the role of a terrorist leader. "But that does not mean in any way that we are not willing to kill these people and die for our cause.... We want to emphasize that we are willing to die and we will take as many people with us as need be."

In the role of a nationalist in a country suffering under American foreign policy, College senior Alexis Roach found that she had to advocate a perspective that opposed the typical American view on U.S. interaction abroad.

"They preach about sovereignty and human rights, when they are in fact violating every principle that they stand for," said Roach while in her role.

Some students said they applied their post-Sept. 11 experiences to the simulation, making it more relevant to their own lives. Newsome, who organized the simulation, said that the events of the past two months have sparked a surge of interest in issues surrounding terrorism -- and the department has organized several activities in response.

"We've had the game for years but we've never been able to run it because we've never been able to get enough people," Newsome said. "Obviously September 11 created more of an incentive for students to participate. It's generally very difficult to get students to sit around for four hours outside of the classroom."

Although the terrorism simulation is relevant to current events, it was actually designed decades ago.

"The author of the game was the U.S. ambassador to Iran in 1980, when that embassy was taken over by Iranian students during the revolution," Newsome said, referring to Ambassador Moorehead Kennedy -- who, along with his staff of 51 Americans, was held hostage for 444 days before being released.

"When he was released he came back to the states and created an institute dedicated to educating Americans on foreign policy, and this game was one of those ways in which he hoped to educate the American public," he added.

Although the game was designed for about 40 participants, only around 20 students were present for the simulation. But with each student receiving an individual character with a particular biography and often divergent mission statements, many said it seemed crowded enough.

And though the scale and the stakes were minute in comparison to real foreign policy negotiations, many of the same phenomena occurred even in the simulation.

Newsome noted that during the three-hour simulation, almost all the groups took at least an hour to begin negotiations.

One "point I was trying to make was how difficult it is to get foreign policy rolling -- for you as a group to come to a consensus and then to get the ball rolling," Newsome told students. "There is a lethargy at the beginning... [of much foreign diplomacy], which is sort of publicly unacceptable."

Those who were involved in running the event said they hoped that students would leave with a better understanding both of how the unique viewpoints of each side plays into foreign policy and of how negotiations work.

"It provided people with different perspectives and gave them different insights into terrorist attacks that they wouldn't ordinarily have, had they not had the opportunity to participate on a firsthand basis," said College senior Megan Thomas, the president of Sigma Iota Rho.

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