The largest ever United Nations gathering takes place in South Africa just days before the first anniversary of the September 11 terrorist attacks in the United States.
South Africa’s intelligence authority said it has encountered no ”direct threat” to the world’s second Earth Summit or to any of the dignitaries due to attend proceedings from August 26 to September 4.
Nevertheless the country plans to stage a massive security operation that will ensure the safety of an estimated 50 000 guests, including about 100 heads of government. No planes will be allowed to fly within a three-mile radius above the conference centre.
Several bodyguards and military escorts have been assigned to each world leader in attendance. South Africa’s own ”Swat” team will be on standby to intervene in possible hostage situations or attacks on VIPs.
Independent military analysts cannot seem to agree on whether or not the southern African nation is really a safe location when it comes to international terrorist activity.
Africa was hailed as the safest continent after September 11, since only ten percent of attacks last year could be classified as international acts of terror.
But few can forget the terrorist bombings of the American embassies in Kenya and Tanzania on August 7 1998 that killed 224 people and injured thousands more.
One of the suspects, a Tanzanian Islamic militant with links to terrorist mastermind Osama bin Laden, chose to hide in the southern city of Cape Town thereafter.
Eleven right-wingers, Afrikaners involved in a plot to overthrow the Pretoria government, were also charged with treason in August while more were due to be detained.
”In Africa now international terror attacks amount mostly to the murder of foreign tourists, hostage taking and kidnappings by rebels or criminals,” said Professor Mike Hough of the Pretoria-based Institute for Strategic Studies.
In recent years South Africa has experienced domestic terror attacks such as the 1998 bombing of the Planet Hollywood restaurant on the Cape Town waterfront that killed one person and injured 26.
There is no certainty that a summit of this nature in an African country would not present an ideal opportunity for another attack on the scale of September 11, said military analyst Henri Boshoff.
The date of the summit was changed amid international fears of another terror attack one year after September 11 2001.
There appears to be wide agreement that a terror of a different kind, a high level of crime, poses a huge risk to any gathering in South Africa, especially one taking place in Johannesburg.
In Gauteng province that includes Johannesburg and Pretoria, the usual ratio of police to people is one officer for every 370. With additional officers and reservists being deployed during the summit, the latter will drop dramatically. Violent crime appear to continue unabated with two separate violent attacks on Johannesburg shopping malls within three days in which a shopper and a security guard were killed.
A heavy contingent of defence force personnel and special police disaster and reaction units plan to patrol the summit.
The estimated 20 000 UN delegates have been assured of their safety in and around the convention centre in the plush northern Johannesburg suburb of Sandton.
Some 20 000 officers will be out in force on the streets of Sandton and its immediate surrounds and at the venue south of the city where tens of thousands will attend a parallel civil society forum.
But, the promise by police authorities that the country’s bustling violent crime capital Johannesburg will be virtually crime-free has been met with scepticism and ridicule. Embassies have warned staff not to venture out on the streets at night when ordinary South Africans usually refuse to stop cars at street lights for fear of being hijacked.
Locals exposed daily to reports of violent murders, robberies and rapes fear that a concentration of police personnel near summit venues could leave them vulnerable.
Many will continue to seek refuge behind the security walls and electric fences that line suburbs like Sandton rather than rely on the South African police force, known for its brutality under apartheid but considered ineffective today. – Sapa-DPA