Police have blamed the usual suspect, Pagad, but seem no closer to preventing a spate of festive season bombings in Cape Town, reports Marianne Merten
Sunday’s bomb blast in Camps Bay again casts doubt over the state’s ability to deal with terrorism by a handful of people in Cape Town, despite having spent millions of rands on Operation Good Hope and other special campaigns over the past three years.
Officials in the Western Cape administration and security agencies were warned earlier this month of a possible resurgence of bombings in the Peninsula over the tourist season.
This emerged weeks ago during a regular briefing to the joint meeting of civil society organisations, government departments and police and army officials. But Safety and Security Secretariat head Melvin Joshua says: “That’s something I can’t comment on.”
Several highly placed sources say information was gathered towards the end of October which indicated a group of young people, possibly associated with anti-drug vigilantes People against Gangsterism and Drugs (Pagad), but not necessarily under its control, were planning terror activities.
The warning was issued just three months after the anti-urban terror campaign Operation Good Hope was scaled down by half in anticipation of the end of its lifespan in mid-December. Police authorities believed the threat had been significantly reduced by the arrest of and refusal of bail to key Pagad members linked to bombings, drive-by shootings and the manufacture of pipe bombs.
Yet the blast at St Elmo’s pizzeria, which injured at least 48 people, caught everyone off guard in respect of the timing. It came at the start of the local tourism season on a warm, sunny day and the target was a popular holiday spot frequented by families.
The speedy involvement this week of the national ministers of safety and security, and intelligence, National Director of Public Prosecutions Bulelani Ngcuka and outgoing National Police Commissioner George Fivaz has overtaken the provincial efforts to a large extent.
The Camps Bay probe is headed and controlled by an inspector from Pretoria, who has spent the past year in Cape Town attached to the special investigation directorate into organised crime (IDOC) – one of the groups amalgamated into the elite crimebusters, the Scorpions, under Ngcuka’s authority.
The inspector is supposed to receive the co-operation of the investigators attached to the crimes against the state unit, who have been taking statements from witnesses this week. But the Cape investigators are grumbling.
The crimes against the state unit is co- ordinated at national level under the serious violent crimes component and headed in the Western Cape by Director Leonard Knipe. Over the past two years he has hand-picked several of his former murder and robbery unit colleagues, who initially were known as the Pagad investigators.
Yet the group has always maintained a distance from Operation Good Hope. Up until two weeks ago the unit remained in their murder and robbery offices several kilometres away from the operation’s Bishop Lavis headquarters.
Structurally, Operation Good Hope has been flawed from the start. It never had its own intelligence gathering capacity. Instead it had to rely on provincial intelligence structures fragmented by infighting. Similarly the campaign never had any investigative capacity. Instead Knipe is working in close liaison with the Scorpions which recently started its own investigations.
Operation Good Hope has a new command structure with daily meetings between the various participants and a mobile intervention force seconded from the public order police reporting directly to the operation’s head. But the focus on tourist areas in white Cape Town means its visible policing role on the Cape Flats will be stopped – leaving in the lurch areas like Manenberg, where a gang war has claimed at least nine lives in the past six weeks.
Reports of successes over the past few months have been focused on arrests related to drugs, illegal firearms and possession of stolen cars and property. Its staff could not supply complete statistics, but a report covering the period of November 9 to 25 says 354 people were arrested.
These figures are reminiscent of Operation Recoil, an anti-crime campaign launched ahead of the festive season in 1997 at a time of frequent pipe-bomb attacks. Initially only envisaged to last for three months, it stayed in place until Operation Good Hope replaced it. Although some 40 000 people were arrested for various offences ranging from murder to theft, Operation Recoil failed to stem attacks.
Operation Good Hope has been criticised from various quarters since its inception in January as being largely ineffective and little more than a visible public policing effort. Chevening Fellow at the University of Leicester’s Scarman Centre for the Study of Public Order, Eldred de Klerk, says the operation has failed to include communities in effective crime prevention. Nor has it used the capacity of grassroots police officers.
“Local officers continue to feel that it is a special ops and they are only pawns in its execution or delivery. The true tragedy though is how community resources and intelligence have not been used optimally. Again, the community has been viewed and treated as poor relations in all these police operations,” De Klerk says.
In the wake of the bombing of Sea Point’s popular gay Blah Bar earlier this month and the Camps Bay blast, the initial reaction has been to point the finger to the anti-drug vigilantes Pagad whether directly or through thinly veiled references.
As in the bombing of Planet Hollywood at the end of August last year, the explosions at Central Cape Town police station and three other stations in the greater Cape Town area, no one from Pagad has as yet been arrested or charged.
According to Operation Good Hope, urban terrorism is directly linked to the anti- drug vigilantes. Gang wars, and Cape Town’s mafia underworld of protection rackets, extortion, prostitution and drug trafficking, even though they undermines the authority of the state, are not included and are passed on to other policing units. However, if Pagad members are involved in car hijacking or intimidation, this falls under the definition of urban terror.
“Pagad in all its guises has effectively become the latest policing, media and intelligence services ‘folk devil’. If Pagad is known for throwing or placing pipe bombs, then any pipe-bombing will be threaded back to them,” De Klerk says.
“The amount of resources committed to arresting the spate of urban violence which has besieged our city and its people needs to deliver a suspect and, if we are lucky, a conviction. Lining up the usual suspects is far too common a police response to a situation they feel forced to react to.”
There is little dispute that the latest bombing is an act of terrorism. What baffles many is the fact that no one seems to want to claim responsibility. Says Institute for Security Studies Cape director Peter Gastrow: “The only reason could be that if they announce their motive, 99,9% of South Africans would climb down their throats with wrath.”
Police attempts to infiltrate the group have backfired as informants were exposed by other officers. And earlier attempts by Muslim scholars to brief investigators on the ideology and customs of Islam have been arrogantly rejected.
In the wake of the St Elmo’s blast, Operation Good Hope has been given a new lease of life – at least until April . This has pushed into the background doubts raised over the way money has been spent.
In April the Mail & Guardian reported that only a third of the R7,5-million budget for the period between January and March had been spent. It was paid out for buying tyres, repairing vehicles from other provinces, bodyguards and overtime claims.Now the books of Operation Good Hope are again under scrutiny as irregularities in the spending of millions of rands for the special campaign are suspected.