RIYADH, 19 August — Naif Arab Academy for Security Sciences has announced that it will organize a conference on security and development in the Arab world and its impact on social life from Sept. 24 to 26.
Representatives of the ministries of interior, labor and social affairs, administrators of planning and development, legal experts and university professors will participate in the conference.
It is one of the several international conferences organized by the Riyadh-based academy to highlight issues correlating security and development in the Arab world. Besides the security concerns stemming from drug trafficking and unemployment — themes of previous seminars at the academy — the conference will deal with threats and issues related to Internet security.
Experts attending a recent banking security conference in Dubai said future threats to local banks will come from hackers in the region.
“E-banking has become a determinant for the success of any financial institution in the Middle East. Now as skill levels here grow, the threat of hacking is increasing from within the region as much as from abroad. It is estimated that 60-70 percent of hacking incidents originate within the compromised organization,” Moustapha Sarhank, president of Internet Security Systems, told the Dubai conference.
Another major area of concern to this region is drug trafficking. According to the United Nations Fund for Drug Abuse Control in Vienna, measures to combat drug trafficking cost the international community more than $600 billion every year. This includes the cost of operations to control the menace as well as the treatement and rehabilitation of drug addicts.
It is for this reason that the International Criminal Police Organization (Interpol) has drawn up plans to link up the Arab world through a network of agencies for combatting the growing problem of drug trafficking in the region. Interpol will play an active role by placing its expertise at the disposal of the drug-control authorities in the region. It will also have close interaction with Naif Academy in this regard.
The problem of unemployment, which according to official figures stands at 20 percent, needs to be addressed. How unemployment could become a security risk came to the fore through the gruesome murder of the Khoja family in December last year, when Jalal Othman Khoja shot 11 members of his family in a fit of rage. It later transpired that Khoja, who was fired from his job, had become a drug addict.
At the other end of the spectrum is the risk posed by expatriates when they turn to illegal activities to make a fast buck.
The confessions of the three Britons to the bomb blasts in Riyadh and Alkhobar underline the other dimension of crime arising from the presence of expatriates who constitute 22.4 percent of the Saudi population. While it would be naive to draw any general conclusions from the expatriate factor, it could certainly be one of the areas of concern raised at the upcoming conference.
