A police intelligence document behind the recent hysteria over South Africa’s ‘Islamic extremist threat’ is anything but intelligent, writes Ann Eveleth
The leaked police “working document” at the centre of a row between police and Beeld newspaper is the work of old-order police spies who don’t know the difference between Muslims and Hindus.
Leaked to the press in the wake of Cape Town’s People Against Gangsterism and Drugs (Pagad) uprising, and believed to have formed the basis of initial briefings to the Ministry of Safety and Security and the Western Cape government, the report lists the Tamil Elam Support Movement as one of South Africa’s “Muslim extremist/ fundamentalist organisations”.
The document also erroneously lists two African National Congress MPs — one a communist party member — as part of the movement’s “structures”.
The movement comprises a group of Tamil- speaking South Africans who want to raise support for Sri Lankan Tamils. Hindu is the predominant religion of the Tamil- speaking community, and Tamil-speaking Muslims are virtually non-existent in South Africa.
ANC MP and SACP member Yunus Carrim and KwaZulu-Natal MP Yusuf Bhamjee this week slammed the report’s allegations that they formed part of the movement’s “structures” and that they had told a December 1995 meeting of the group that some local Tamils “are prepared to undergo a military type of training to enable them to help the Tamils in Sri Lanka”.
Carrim and Bhamjee said the meeting had comprised “members of our constituency”, and its thrust was a decision to approach President Nelson Mandela to help seek a negotiated settlement in Sri Lanka’s civil war.
Carrim said the report raised “serious questions about the quality of our intelligence. The most mimimum rudimentary work hasn’t been done.”
Confronted with the apparent innacuracy of the report from his unit, Internal Security Division Commissioner Leonard Radu said: “You don’t know what (Carrim and Bhamjee) are doing in their evenings”.
He said the document was “not a report, but a document prepared to give training to the people who will run [new police intelligence desks probing religious extremism].”
University of the Western Cape religious expert Farid Esack said the questionnaire and “guidelines for handlers” at the back of the report suggested almost any Muslim could be seen as a suspect.
Slating the report as “the work of a very dumb Afrikaner”, Esack said: “This is a manifestation of the swart gevaar, the rooi gevaar, the gut-level instinctual fear of a rural Afrikaner. It’s like in the 1950s and 1960s when they saw a communist under every bush and even Helen Suzman was a communist. Now they see a Muslim version of communism.”
He pointed out some of the inaccuracies in the report, which include:
* Africa has the largest Muslim population. Esack said Asia has a much larger Muslim population.
* South Africa has a “large number” of Muslims. Esack said Muslims account for only 1,32% of South Africans.
* Hizbullah originated in Iran, and its South African support base is centred in the Western Cape, Gauteng and KwaZulu- Natal. Esack said Hizbullah originated in Lebanon, and is “too busy waging its own struggle to worry about Africa”.
He pointed to a contradiction in the report on when Hizbullah was formed in South Africa. The report says it was formed in the “latter half” of 1994, but also states that it opposed the April 1994 elections.
Esack said he knows only “one man who claims to be South African Hizbullah, and he is even considered a joke by Qibla”.
* The leader of the organisation Qibla is advocate Samuel Jappie. Esack said Jappie is not an advocate and is “an avowed secularist — he doesn’t even pray on Fridays”.
* Qibla received military training from Pakistan and its members had participated in the Lebanon conflict. Esack said these claims are “bollocks”.
* Rachis Ormar heads the Islamic Unity Convention’s “military base” in Cape Town. Esack said he knew of no such Muslim, and he hoped the report was not referring to Rashid Omar, who “is the most progressive Muslim in South Africa”. Omar is a former Muslim Youth Movement president and was the first imam to allow women to preach in a South African mosque.
Esack said the report also shows an ignorance of broader South African politics. It refers to the Pan Africanist Congress as a “black concious [sic] movement”.
“It lumps together deeply religious people who have nothing to do with fundamentalism with people who are disillusioned with the PAC.”
The report claims “Qibla members who are aligned to black conscious movements like the PAC” frequent training camps of the Foundation for Islamic Tarbiyyah. The Tarbiyyah is, in fact, a conservative group which began providing self-defence training to Muslims in in the run-up to the 1994 elections.
It also claims the Port Elizabeth Malabar mosque under Muslim “priest” AS Desai is the “most active” in the Unity Convention’s “military defence structures”. This, other Muslim observers pointed out, despite the fact that Desai is virulently anti-Iranian, while the Unity Convention is seen to be sympathetic to Iran.
Esack de-scribed Desai as “the personification of Is-lamic traditionalism. He leads the Majlis Ul Ulama, the AWB [Afrikaner Weerstandsbeweging] of Muslims: they are worried about protecting their mothers and daughters from the kaffirs.”
National Intelligence Agency co-ordinator Mo Shaik said the agency is aware the document is a “poor effort” which reflects the need for transformation of the intelligence agencies.
The Mpumalanga attorney general’s office subpoenaed Beeld this month on behalf of the police after the newspaper published a story emanating from the report. The police are seeking the origins of the leak.
National SAPS spokes-person Director Reg Crewe said this week he understood the subpoena against Beeld is still valid, as it follows “separate circumstances” from those which led to the Western Cape subpoenas against several newspapers and news agencies in connection with the recent Pagad march.