Africa's Deadly Game

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Sport and terrorism

A deadly game

Jan 11th 2010 | JOHANNESBURGFrom Economist.com

A lethal attack casts a shadow over Africa's biggest football tournament AFP

A DEADLY terrorist attack on Togo’s national football team, in Angola for the Africa Cup of Nations, has left Danny Jordaan as sick as a dog. “There’s no way this can have an impact on the 2010 World Cup,” the head of South Africa’s organising committee for the event, said. But his agitation belied his fears. Just when Mr Jordaan thought the doubters about South Africa’s suitability to host the globe’s greatest sporting tournament had been silenced, new questions are being raised.

The Togolese footballers were ambushed by a dozen heavily armed separatist guerrillas as they travelled by bus from Congo-Brazzaville, where they had been training, to the neighbouring oil-rich Angolan province of Cabinda two days before the tournament, hosted by Angola, kicked off on Sunday January 10th. Three people—the team’s assistant coach, their spokesman and their Angolan driver—were killed. Another nine members of Togo's party were wounded including Togo’s reserve goalkeeper. He was airlifted to a hospital in Johannesburg after being shot in the back. His condition is said to be stable.

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The Front for the Liberation of the Enclave of Cabinda (FLEC) has claimed responsibility for the attack, threatening more if Angola and Confederation of African Football persisted in holding tournament matches in the disputed province. The group, which was “at war” with Angola, had warned the CAF not to hold any games in Cabinda, Rodrigues Mingas, the FLEC’s secretary-general said. But Angola had refused to listen. “Weapons will continue to talk,” he said, claiming the self-declared Federal State of Cabinda had 50,000 armed security forces. “This is our home, and it’s time Angola understood that.”

Cabinda, an area some 8,000 square kilometres separated from the rest of Angola by a narrow strip of the Democratic Republic of Congo, is home to some of the world’s richest offshore oil fields. The province’s output of about 1m barrels of crude a day accounts for more than half Angola’s total output. The country, ravaged by 27 years of civil war that ended in 2002, vies with Nigeria as Africa’s biggest oil producer. Some analysts believe Cabinda’s onshore potential, as yet unexplored because of continuing unrest, could be even bigger.

Separatists have been demanding independence for the province ever since Angola gained its independence from Portugal in 1975. They claim that Cabinda’s estimated 400,000 inhabitants are quite different ethnically and culturally from the Angolans, as well as being geographically separate. They have also been subjected to repeated atrocities at the hands of the Angolan security forces. But the former Organisation of African Unity, now the African Union, has always turned a deaf ear to their pleas, fearing any redrawing of Africa’s colonial borders would encourage separatism elsewhere on the continent.

Despite Mr Mingas’s warning of further attacks, the CAF and the Angolan government have decided to maintain the Nations Cup matches due to be held in the province’s eponymous capital city. Togo has pulled its team out, even though Mr Mingas said its footballers were not deliberately targeted. But it may rejoin the tournament later. The three other countries due to play in Cabinda—Côte d’Ivoire, Ghana and Burkina Faso—have all agreed to stay on after assurances from the Angolans of reinforced protection.

Around the world, however, people are again wondering if Africa is safe. Mr Jordaan and South Africa’s president, Jacob Zuma, attended the opening match—a thrilling 4-4 draw between the hosts and Mali—on Sunday in Luanda, the Angolan capital. They may protest that where that attack took place is thousands of kilometres away and that Angola bears little comparison to their own better-prepared and more sophisticated country. But the assault on the Togolese team, coming so soon after last year’s horrific attack on the Sri Lankan cricket team in Pakistan, in which eight people died, is bound to fuel fears that international sporting events are particularly vulnerable to terrorist groups hoping for global publicity.

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