ANC cadres were called ‘terrorists’ too

A Kenyan vendor selling a copy of a newspaper featuring an article on its front page on the alleged involvement of a British woman Samantha Lewthwaite in the Westgate mall terror attack in Nairobi. File photo: Dai Kurokawa

A Kenyan vendor selling a copy of a newspaper featuring an article on its front page on the alleged involvement of a British woman Samantha Lewthwaite in the Westgate mall terror attack in Nairobi. File photo: Dai Kurokawa

Published Mar 3, 2015

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It is no surprise that the South African government is non-committal on the “war on terror”, reports Ivor Powell.

Cape Town - The ANC government’s policy on what the developed West characterises as a “global war on terror” might have been crafted by the three proverbial monkeys, frozen in postures that will have them respectively seeing no evil, hearing no evil, speaking no evil.

Mostly it works: though the country has been a stopping off point for jihadists of every stripe, South Africa’s perceived neutrality has meant the country has yet to figure as a target for credibly attested militant actions whether taken to the point of execution or still in the planning stages.

In truth, though, it is hardly surprising that South Africa should have been thus non-committal on the question of Islamic jihad and resisted the gung-ho blandishments of the US and its European allies in this regard.

After all, less than 10 years before it came to power, the ANC’s own cadres had been routinely described as “terrorists” in the mainstream media, its freedom struggle designated under various Republican administrations in the US as communist radicalism.

So, too, many of the organisations and leaders dubbed “terrorist” by the US and its allies in the West – the Palestinian Liberation Organisation and the Libyan regime of Muammar Gaddafi, for instance – had been comrades in the trenches and, in some cases, sponsors of the ANC’s liberation struggle.

Never one to back off on moral truth-telling, Nelson Mandela felt moved on more than one occasion to make just this point to his White House counterpart, memorably declaring to a bemused Bill Clinton that anybody who expected him to denounce old comrades like Yasser Arafat could go and “jump in the swimming pool”.

It should also be remembered that then, as now, the leadership of the ANC included several religiously observant, and in some cases radicalised Muslims in its number. Such leaders, along with crusading Jews like former Intelligence minister Ronnie Kasrils, tended to be well informed and, in some cases, highly sensitised to the depredations wrought by Europe, the US and most particularly its traditional proxy, the state of Israel, in the Middle East – and the emergence of Islamic militancy in response to these.

At least from some viewpoints – however distasteful the methods and strategies employed by the likes of al-Qaeda – what was playing out on the global stage was arguably to be understood in the context of a revolutionary struggle of the third world to throw off the yoke of neo-colonialist oppression and of exploitation by the all-powerful first world.

In short, it was the kind of terrain where angels and more generally, the canny, would fear to tread; the fight was simply not of the sort you wanted to get involved in unless you had no option. Put a different way, the issue of Islamic militancy was something to be politically managed, rather than managed by law enforcement and intelligence agencies, and it was applied as a virtual mantra that unless the security or the commonwealth of South Africa was at risk, the less South African involvement there was the better.

Even before the apocalyptic events of September 11, 2001, that commitment to proto-Swiss inaction was put to the test.

US intelligence tracked down Khalfan Khamis Mohamed, a key figure in the 1998 jihadist bombing of the country’s embassy in Mombasa, Kenya, to a fast food joint on the Cape Flats. Arrested, in line with diplomatic protocols by the South African authorities, Mohamed was (in what was the first of several, often controversial “renditions”) handed over to US law enforcement and later sentenced to life imprisonment in an American jail.

And that was that. Nothing apparently flowed from any investigation by the South Africans into just how Mohamed, fugitive from international justice, ended up in South Africa under a false identity. Nor into his apparent sponsorship by the owners/ managers of the fast food outlet in question.

Indeed, it was left to the Americans to debrief the owner of the burger joint after calling him as a witness in the New York trial of Mohamed – where apparently a deal was struck whereby he provided further information.

This same template was to be used by the government of South Africa on several occasions as time went on. Thus a network controlled by a Jordanian-born Cape Town-based cleric allegedly connected with Abu Musab al-Zaqarwi – the supermilitant leader of al-Qaeda in Iraq, forerunner to Islamic State – was secretly deported to Jordan and other Middle Eastern states in the early 2000s. And… well, whatever happened to the members of the network did not happen here.

More controversially, if only because the story was reported in the media, the Pakistani-born but formerly London-based Islamic militant Khalid Rashid was picked up in Johannesburg then rendered by charter flight to Pakistan in 2005, after being arrested – on the basis, apparently of intelligence provided by the UK’s MI6 – at his CD and DVD stall in Mayfair, Johannesburg.

What was lacking in relation to the detention of these and other jihadists was a full debriefing of the suspects by the host authorities – and a lack of systematic follow up on information gleaned in whatever debriefings followed their rendition.

The impression one gets, surveying cases like these, is of almost unseemly haste in moving the problem on – and something like a willed reluctance on the part of South Africa’s intelligence agencies, to tackle the issue of jihad either proactively or, if the documents released are anything to go by, even through careful analysis of the likely implications of intelligence received.

That of the so-called White Widow, Samantha Lewthwaite aka (as gleaned from the stolen passport she used in South Africa) Natalie Faye Webb, is a case in point. The widow of Germaine Lindsay, one of the “7/7” bombers – who targeted the London public transport system in a co-ordinated series of suicide attacks in 2005 – Lewthwaite lived in South Africa between 2009 and 2011 before ending up in Kenya.

In Kenya she allegedly went on to play a key logistical role in the militant grouping Al-Shabaab’s massacre of shoppers at Nairobi’s Westgate Mall in September 2013.

What emerges from Lewthwaite’s story – and this is the point – is that while in South Africa, working at Crown Pies in Johannesburg, she was in contact with a network of East African militants connected with al-Shabaab and, indeed, al-Qaeda itself.

The al-Shabaab militants, whose members had likewise based their conspiratorial operations in the overwhelmingly Muslim Mayfair/Fordsburg neighbourhoods in Johannesburg, seemed to move in and out of the country at will and without hindrance, and with a well-oiled machinery of funding and in kind support.

Indeed, according to the UK’s Daily Mail, Lewthwaite had washed up in South Africa in the first place on the advice of British cleric Abdullah al-Faisal, whom she visited in prison in Worcestershire. She was, according to the Mail, in search of a “young, handsome and devout Muslim” to marry, when introduced into the Johannesburg networks. Later, according to the Mail, she duly became espoused with Kenyan national and al-Shabaab militant, Fahmi Jamal Salim, in Johannesburg before leaving the country on yet another false passport in 2011, ahead of the Westgate Mall massacre, in which she allegedly played a role in logistics and planning.

Also in evidence in Johannesburg was al-Shabaab and formerly al-Qaeda in Afghanistan militant Fazul Mohammed, finally slain while carrying a South African passport in a roadblock in Mogadishu in 2011.

Much of the above appears to be registered, as far as one can make out, in the blacked out bits in one of the State Security Agency (SSA) spy cables posted by Al Jazeera.

It remains, however, a source of some surprise if not consternation that the intelligence gleaned through international investigations into the Westgate massacre and into al-Shabaab, in general, has not resulted in visible action either on the part of the South African law enforcement authorities or, if the leaks are representative, on the part of the country’s not inconsiderable intelligence apparatus.

Indeed, there has been a price to pay for the laissez faire.

In the late 1990s and the first decade of the new millennium, it was commonplace for al-Qaeda militants to travel on the – at the time – benignly accepted passport of the rainbow nation of Mandela and Desmond Tutu.

It was equally commonplace for investigating authorities to discover stashes of South African passports – authentic though fraudulently issued – among their private effects.

In the end, though, after warning repeatedly that it would be forced to do so, the foreign community was forced to follow through, degrading the South African identity document and introducing often punitive visa restrictions.

Lapses in intelligence also seem to attend on the SSA in relation to an alleged paramilitary training camp based in the last decade at a farm near Port Elizabeth. While frequently alluded to in the spy cables, the camp and its alleged connections with al-Qaeda and jihad in the Middle East have yet to be properly assessed or acted upon.

One of the documents in the spy cables cache notes that the central figure in the training regime in question was at one point arrested in Sri Lanka for the attempted murder of a secular poet, but later released.

The spooks should have known better. While the arrest did in fact happen, it was not in Sri Lanka but Bangladesh.

So, too, the release of the South African jihadist cleric – as became clear with the subsequent leaking of covert materials in the Bangladeshi press – came about only after his conviction and, allegedly, with the payment of significant bribes and other smoke-and-mirrors-type interventions.

That the SSA didn’t get this even basically right powerfully suggests that not much investigation was done. You can get the story on the internet.

But more than this, as the representative of a friendly government in good standing, you can liaise with agency counterparts in the country concerned. Indeed, it would appear from the outside to have been negligent to have failed to pursue such avenues of inquiry.

Here we see in stark relief the shortcomings of South Africa’s see-no-evil approach to the knotty problem of jihadism – and with al-Shabaab one side of Africa and Boko Haram on the other seeming able to operate freely inside the country’s borders, the stakes could be rising dramatically as time marches militantly on.

* Ivor Powell is a senior specialist writer for Independent Media.

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