(Page 2 of 22) - Terrorist Financing and Government Response in East Africa authored by Piombo, Jessica.

regimes to serve as counter-terrorist finance (CTF) weapons. This forced groups to shift
out of formal and into informal sectors.

In contrast, many of the efforts to fight terrorism and terrorist finance in East

Africa came in the wake of the 1998 embassy bombings in Kenya and Tanzania. Most of
the efforts to explicitly counter terrorist finance in the East African region involved the
creation of AML regimes after 1998 and their adaptation into CTF regimes post 9/11.
This represents a shift in emphasis and scope, rather than a new effort altogether. Yet
these efforts that focus on combating traditional forms of terrorist finance, modifying
AML into CTF institutions, have been legislated in only a handful of East African
countries, and even in the ones in which there are laws on the books, implementation is
scarce.

Yet CTF measures that focus on formal and informal banking institutions,

however, will not effectively target the nature of terrorist financing in this region.
Moreover, the primary emphasis in anti-terror campaigns in the region takes the form,
rightly I will argue, of capacity building measures for local police and security forces,
rather than through vigorous CTF regimes. Capacity building measures, not usually
considered a form of CTF, are, in actuality, more suited to countering the nature of
terrorist financing in this region than are other, more traditional forms of combating
terrorist financiers. Ultimately, the analysis of terrorist finance and efforts to combat it
must recognize that the manner of financing used in the East African region was already
decentralized and focused within informal transfer mechanisms before 9/11, and that
there are compelling reasons why area governments either are reluctant to create strong
AML and CTF regimes, or are unwilling to devote scarce resources to efforts to combat
terrorist finance. Therefore, the real fight against terrorist finance in the region needs to
center on capacity building of police and security forces that will effectively police
borders and control illicit activities such as smuggling, arms transfers, and trafficking in
humans. Not only will such efforts yield more concrete results by targeting the problem
of terrorist finance more accurately, but area governments will cooperate more in the
implantation of the policies, further enhancing their effectiveness.

Terrorist Finance in East Africa: The Nature of the Threat

Before turning explicitly to terrorist finance, we need to understand the terrain

that is being covered. First of all, when discussing the nature of the terrorist threat in
Africa, the first thing that must be considered is the massive territorial scale of the area.
All of the United States, Western Europe and China could fit within the geographical
confines of the African continent. There are over 50 countries in the Sub-Saharan region
alone. “East Africa” spans Sudan, Ethiopia, Eritrea, Djibouti, Somalia, Kenya, Tanzania
and Uganda. To provide more scale: the entire eastern seaboard of the continental United
States, from Maine to the top of Florida, could fit within the territory of Somalia alone.
Most of the time, terrorist analysts discuss the Horn of Africa, a region that encompasses
Eritrea, Djibouti, Ethiopia, Sudan and Somalia. The point, which cannot be over-
emphasized, is that this is a vast area in which we are tracking and combating terrorist
activities and finance, even when considering just East Africa or the Horn of Africa.

The geographical spread creates situations that make it difficult for states to

control their territories and people. Not only are the distances vast, they often span wide
areas of desert, which historically have been populated by nomadic peoples. There are
centuries-old patterns of human migration that are both difficult to track and to control,