Jury out on al-Qaeda presence
2007-02-02 21:38
Johannesburg - The Docrat cousins were leading a seemingly normal life in South Africa (SA) - one a cleric at a rural mosque, the other a dentist with a neighbourhood practice in the country's financial capital.
Then they popped up as suspects on Washington's al-Qaeda radar screens and set off alarm bells from the United States (US) to Pretoria about a country seldom associated with Osama bin Laden or radical Islam.
Had al-Qaeda's powerful ideology spread to SA, where rampant crime, inequality left by apartheid and the 2010 Soccer World Cup are hot issues, not possible militant cells?
Dentist Junaid Docrat and his businessman and cleric cousin Farhad deny US allegations they financed and recruited for al-Qaeda and accuse Washington of mounting a witchhunt of Muslims.
Some security experts say SA's townships have no resemblance to the Arab slums where Osama bin Laden's message is said to appeal to frustrated, unemployed young men increasingly resentful of their US-backed, authoritarian governments.
Others dismiss the argument that poverty, widespread in SA, has driven Muslims into al-Qaeda's embrace.
After all, they say, many relatively wealthy educated people became al-Qaeda operatives, like the ones who turned planes into suicide missiles in the September 11 attacks on the US.
SA under US scrutiny
Whatever the case, SA has come under Washington's scrutiny and the Docrats have landed on the US treasury department's list of al-Qaeda supporters. Their US-linked assets - if they have any - will be frozen.
Magnus Ranstorp, of the Swedish National Defence College, said it was unlikely al-Qaeda had become a major concern in SA.
But he did not rule out a presence.
"It is likely that they are only on the periphery," he said.
US officials maintain al-Qaeda operatives are active in Somalia, Sudan and North Africa, and say fundraising for the group has become a serious worry in SA, Nigeria and the Saharan region.
But SA's 600 000-strong minority Muslim community is an overwhelmingly moderate group in one of the continent's most stable and richest countries.
So why would al-Qaeda invest time recruiting in a country where there is no obvious breeding ground for radical Islam, while waging raging holy wars against the powerful US military and its allies in Iraq and Afghanistan and churning out internet calls for Jihad throughout the world.
Some analysts say al-Qaeda supporters from countries like Pakistan may have passed through SA, engaged locals and used the country as a back door to Western targets.
Nicholas Pratt, of the George C Marshall European Centre for Security Studies, said al-Qaeda would look to SA?s diverse Muslim community for practical reasons.