Tag: terrorism

UTA772 Memorial on Google Maps

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Caught sight of this one while getting the car washed after the dirt roads of Agulhas had had their wicked way with it.

Here’s the background:

On Tuesday, 19 September 1989 the McDonnell Douglas DC-10 aircraft registered N54629 took off from N’Djamena International Airport at 13:13. 46 minutes later, at its cruising altitude of 10,700 metres (35,100 ft), a bomb explosion caused UTA Flight 772 to break up over the Sahara Desert near the towns of Bilma and Ténéré in Niger. All 155 passengers and 15 crew members died.

That’s less than a year after the Lockerbie bombing, but I don’t even recall hearing about this. I’m looking at you, Western-centric Media.

Here’s the wikimapia link, so that you can go and see the actual memorial, which is fairly amazing in itself, but what makes it even more incredible is the story behind the memorial:

The memorial was built mostly by hand and uses dark stones to create a 200-foot diameter circle. The Ténéré region is one of the most inaccessible places on the planet. The stones were trucked to the site from over 70 kilometers away.

The amazing thing is that because the location is so remote, even 18 years after the crash, much of the wreckage was still to be found at the crash site. Part of the starboard wing makes up the monolith at the north tip of the memorial.

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An extraordinary tribute to those who died, but one which only a handful of people will ever actually see.

Duncan White gets it right

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I don’t often reproduce other people’s work in full on here, but after I wrote this, it was nice to see that I’m not the only person feeling that way. Here’s Duncan White in the UK’s Sunday Telegraph

It is wrong to equate Angola with South Africa after Togo attack

It was grimly predictable. No sooner had the first reports of the shooting in Cabinda begun to filter through than South Africa’s ability to host a safe World Cup was called into question

What a laughable leap of logic, what reactionary racist rubbish.

It seems almost insulting to have to make the distinction between what happened in Angola and the security situation in South Africa but with banal parallels being so blithely drawn, the organisers of the World Cup have had to defend themselves. This is ludicrous.

It seems there was a lack of communication between Caf, African football’s governing body, and the Togolese federation about the team’s movement. At least, that’s what the political buck-passing indicates. The terrorists did not have any problems locating the Togolese convoy. Caf needs to prove they did not underestimate the dangers Cabinda presented when scheduling games there and that they had appropriate security measures in place. But, ultimately, it is impossible to prevent acts of terrorism taking place.

Since Munich in 1972, sport has been the target of terrorist attacks. After the Sri Lanka cricket team were fired on in Lahore last year, Arsène Wenger predicted that international sports events would increasingly become the target of terrorists. He has been proved right.

The infuriating flaw is when people equate an act of terrorism with a wider sense of African danger. There it is, the creeping stereotype about the “dark continent” and its propensity for violence. Shouldn’t we take the World Cup back to safe old Europe?

Terrorist attacks occur everywhere. We had one in the United Kingdom on Friday when a bomb went off under the car of a police officer in Northern Ireland. Yet because this attack happened in Africa, it gets translated into a general continental problem, rather than one relating to a specific exclave of a specific country.

Angola and South Africa are miles apart. Quite literally: the capital Luanda is 1,500 miles from Johannesburg, the distance between London and Moscow. Angola only emerged from a brutal 27-year civil war in 2002 and while it has enjoyed huge economic growth in the last eight years, it still bears the scars. It has the highest infant mortality rate in the world and the second-highest death rate in the world. The median age is 18.

South Africa is vastly more developed and has a track record of hosting major international events, especially sporting events. As Danny Jordaan, the chief executive of the 2010 World Cup, has pointed out, a war in Kosovo did not mean the German World Cup was called into jeopardy.

South Africa has its problems, especially the rate of violent crime. During the Confederations Cup last summer, you felt many people waiting for something serious to go wrong. Nothing did. The job of ensuring the World Cup passes with as few incidents as possible is a big one. Let’s not burden South Africa with the responsibility for Cabindan terrorism too.

Brilliantly put. One has to wonder why the local news fails to notice this sort of article in the international press, but readily and happily reproduce bigoted, negative rubbish.

Thanks to my Dad for the heads up.

Tenuous terrorism charges

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Now I know that terrorism versus civil liberties is a contentious issue and all, but I firmly believe that prevention is better than cure. And so, where there are reasonable grounds for suspicion that a terrorist act is going to take place, I would much prefer to see it nipped in the bud. Certainly that rather than some sort of rucksack- related Tube massacre and the security services telling us “Oh yeah – we kind of thought that was going to happen”.

That doesn’t mean that I am in favour of all the new laws which have recently been brought in in the UK by a struggling ZaNu-labour Government, though. The whole 42-days detention is a little OTT as far as I’m concerned. But of course, with the changing face of the terrorist threat over the past few years, some tightening up and realigning of the laws was certainly necessary.

But have these laws got a little bit daft now? Nothing so simple as “murder” or “rape” – two men in Blackburn have been charged (and here I quote):

…with possession of an article in circumstances which give rise to a reasonable suspicion that possession is for a purpose connected with the commission, preparation or instigation of an act of terrorism.

…over a plot (which didn’t exist) to assassinate Gordon Brown. Bit of a mouthful, hey? I wonder if the officer who read the suspects their rights had to have a little crib sheet to make sure he got it right.

OK. Enough of that. I am going to go and switch the kettle on in circumstances where the heating of water together with the possession of dark brown powder may give rise to a reasonable chance of preparation and inbibing of a pleasant morning beverage.