(Page 1 of 22) - Terrorist Financing and Government Response in East Africa authored by Piombo, Jessica.

ESSICA

IOMBO

“Terrorist Financing and Government Response in East Africa”

Paper presented at the 2005 Annual Meeting of the American Political Science

Association, Washington, DC, August 31 – September 4, 2005.

and

Draft Chapter for Terrorist Financing and State Responses in Comparative

Perspective, eds. Harold Trinkunas and Geanne Giraldo

January 31, 2005.

Please do not cite without permission.

Terrorist activities in Africa vary greatly between regions. There are regional

patterns to the nature of the groups, the ways in which they organize, their theater of
operations, and they way that they finance themselves. East Africa has been the site of
the most intense terrorist activities and has been the hardest-hit by terrorist strikes in
recent years: in 1998 the US Embassies in Dar es Salaam (Tanzania) and Nairobi (Kenya)
were bombed, killing a handful of US citizens and hundreds of Kenyans and Tanzanians.
In 2001, a popular tourist destination in Kenya, the port city of Mombasa, witnessed two
further terrorist attacks, this time in the form of coordinated and simultaneous attacks on
a resort popular with Western tourists and an El Al aircraft departing from the Mombasa
airport. Not only has the region been home to major terrorist incidents, at one point it was
the home to the center of the Al Qaeda organization itself: after being expelled from
Saudi Arabia, Osama Bin Laden moved to Sudan (1991 to 1996). During this time, bin
Laden established training camps for Al Qaeda in the remote desert areas of Sudan and
established a network of business ties that exist to this day. Sudan and Somalia have both
served as training grounds and transit routes for Al Qaeda, and the operatives who
attacked the embassies in Kenya and Tanzania were closely linked to cells in Sudan and
Somalia. The evidence of Al Qaeda activities in the region was strong enough for
President Clinton to order strikes against a Sudanese chemical factory owned by an
associate of Bin Laden, thought to be producing the precursors to chemical weapons, in
the wake of the 19998 embassy bombings.

Conditions of statelessness, porous borders,

and large Muslim communities further render this region critically important when
studying terrorist finance in Africa. Transnational terrorist organizations may exist in
other parts of Africa, yet East Africa has been the only site of major attacks in the past 10
years.

This paper focuses on the nature of transnational terrorist financing in East Africa,

and it examines the responses of area governments to combat terrorist finance. I will
make the argument that patterns of terrorist finance (TF) in East Africa may have been
less affected by the post- 9/11 global war on terror than in other areas of the world. In the
wake of the 9/11 strikes, the global emphasis on combating terrorism by “tracing the
money trail” meant the large-scale adaptation of existing anti-money laundering (AML)

The views expressed in this paper are the author’s own and do not reflect the official position or policy of

the government of the United States.

See The 9/11 Commission Report: Final Report of the National Commission on Terrorist Attacks Upon

the United States – Authorized Report, WW Norton & Co., 2004, p. 116, for more information.