The role of crime in financing terrorism usually doesn’t get enough attention from the general public and even from policy makers, except when the crime involves drugs. Opium exports from Afghanistan and both opium and hashish from Lebanon are known to play a major role in paying for the local terrorist infrastructures in both countries, and in neither case have international efforts succeeded in reducing the flow of funds. Piracy on the high seas also gets good headlines: both in the Horn of Africa and in the area around Indonesia and Malaysia, terrorist groups take over cargo ships in order to steal their loads and use the proceeds of their sale to keep the groups in funds: the London ’Daily Telegraph’ ran an article in November, ’UK to attack Al-Qa’eda pirates,’ describing the threat to international shipping posed by terrorist groups, in which I was also quoted.
But a news item today serves to draw renewed attention to how more ’conventional’ crime can often be the financial mainstay of important terrorist activity. The Associated Press reported from Paris that the Moroccan authorities had rolled up a local terrorist network, with links to Al Qa’eda, that planned to assassinate Moroccan cabinet ministers, army officers and members of the Jewish community. And, perhaps unusually for initial reports on this kind of success in foiling a terrorist plot, the Moroccan news agency MAP was already quoted as reporting that the network’s funds had come mainly from crimes committed in Europe, in particular the heist of an armoured truck in Luxembourg in 2000 that netted $26.5 million, and the theft of gold jewellery in Belgium that was melted down by a goldsmith who belonged to the group. In many ways, these are reminiscent of the crimes that provided much of the financing for the Irish Republican Army’s terrorist campaign.
The Belgian connection shouldn’t come as a surprise to anyone familiar with the country. Brussels has a large Moroccan immigrant community that according to some reports is responsible for a lot of the organised crime in the country, which is one of the wealthiest in the world and therefore an excellent target for thieves. But the question needs to be asked whether the Belgian financial institutions and the national financial intelligence and counter-terrorism units are doing a good enough job in tracing suspicious financial transactions. It’s not only a question of defending Moroccan interests, important though they are: the last wave of terrorism there, in 2003, killed 45 people during a wave of bombings in Casablanca that targetted a Jewish community centre, a hotel and a restaurant. Brussels is the home of two of the most iconic targets for jihadi terrorists in the entire Western world: NATO headquarters and the main institutions of the European Union. Maybe if Belgian-born Georges Simenon had set his character Inspector Maigret in Brussels instead of Paris, the Belgian police would be more inspired to ensure that local crime wasn’t going to pay for future terrorism on their patch.
It should definitely be a priority to get to the source of these actions and cut out their funding for destruction.
Posted by: Harrington Brooks | March 14, 2008 at 01:05