profile events to create a platform for political expression is an acceptable practice. When the world ignores one's plight, any stage can qualify for grabbing attention. When those who feel their cause is being ignored target totally innocent human beings as a means of spreading the word, they not only criminalize their actions but they turn the opinions of those they hope to sway in their favor completely against them. The attack on the Togo football team in the Cabinda province of Angola is not simply criminal but shockingly inhumane and stupidly counterproductive. Cabinda separatists were thought to have been pacified and no longer of significance in the province. The Angolan government, hosting the African Cup of Nations this year as something of a coming-out party after years of civil war having finally come to an end, scheduled events in the province as a sign of calm that it apparently believed prevailed in the area. Cabinda, of course, was hardly, if at all, known to the outside world. It is, however, quite significant as it is home to nearly half of Angola's oil reserves, the source, no doubt, of the tension in the area. Following the attack, the secretary-general of the Front for the Liberation of the State of Cabinda (FLEC) spoke from Paris, threatening more acts of violence if games in the Cup of Nations continue. “We have planned other actions across the territory,” claimed Rodrigues Minges from Paris. “The country is at war and anything can happen.” That the country is at war clearly comes as a surprise to Luanda where the central government obviously believed it was ruling over a unified nation. Instead, it now finds that there is an internal group willing to commit acts of terrorism against foreign nationals who have set foot in the country in order to play football. And nothing else. FLEC has, at one fell swoop, discredited itself in the eyes of both Africa and the rest of the world. It deserves no safe harbor in France or anywhere else in the world. __
