Wilson Johwa
19 September 2007
Johannesburg — A MULTIPLICITY of tourist sites and the forthcoming 2010 Soccer World Cup make southern Africa vulnerable to terrorist attacks, warns the Institute for Security Studies (ISS).
While attention has been on the Horn of Africa and the Maghreb, where some of the continent's most prominent terrorist attacks have taken place, southern African states should be concerned.
That is the opinion of the ISS in a paper that was the basis for discussion of the United Nations (UN) global counterterrorism strategy. The paper was written jointly with the US-based Centre on Global Counter-Terrorism Co-operation.
"The possibility for international terrorism is always there and we need to start adopting a proactive approach," Anneli Botha, a senior researcher at the ISS , said at a meeting on the UN's counterterrorism plan for the region.
Kurt Shillinger, head of the Security and Terrorism in Africa project at the South African Institute of International Affairs, said: "2010 is an obvious opportunity, but that would be true of any major sporting event."
He said the South African intelligence community had the capacity to monitor movements and events in the country and the region.
"The question would be if they did get intelligence on something, how would they act on it?"
Individuals in SA have been implicated in global terrorism. Khalfan Khamis Mohamed, a Tanzanian living in Cape Town, was held after the 1998 US embassy bombings in Kenya and Tanzania. Haroon Rashid Aswat, a British citizen who lived in Johannesburg, was held and accused of telephoning suspects in the London bombing of July 2005.
More recently, two South African cousins were named as international terror suspects by the UN Security Council for allegedly having links with Osama bin Laden's al-Qaeda and the deposed Taliban in Afghanistan.
Shillinger said although SA had anti-terrorism legislation, it preferred not to use it for fear of aligning itself with the US-led "war on terror", and provoking a backlash from its Muslim community.
"Terrorists, like anybody engaged in any kind of commerce, need functional infrastructure," he said. "The pitfalls of state weakness may come to outweigh the benefits when it comes to the logistics of executing a terror attack."
In an assessment of counterterrorism in Africa four months ago, the US state department said despite the Zimbabwe government's "self-imposed isolation on most diplomatic issues", local intelligence and crime investigation agencies were responsive to US needs in the "war on terror".
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