Overseas posts get wake-up call

By JULIE MIDDLETON

New Zealand professionals working overseas, and their bosses, have had good reason to be nervous as September 11 approached - terrorists like making use of anniversaries.

Friday brought evidence: a 25-year-old man and a 23-year-old woman were arrested in a village near the German university town of Heidelberg, their flat littered with evidence that they planned a September 11 bomb attack.

"Terrorists do tend to go for anniversaries - it's a typical tactic," says Marcus McRitchie, the regional security director, Asia Pacific, of rapid-response assistance company International SOS.

He is in Auckland and Wellington this week to brief businesses on how attitudes to staff security have changed since last September.

Safety has centred his working life for years. Singapore-based McRitchie is a former Australian Special Air Service major, and was once the operations officer of its counter-terrorism squadron.

One of his jobs there was contingency planning for the evacuation of Australian nationals overseas, work he carries on in the civilian world for industries as diverse as engineering, education, aviation and mining.

International SOS, established in 1974 and privately owned, has 60 offices around the world and 6000 clients. Locals include Sealord Group, ANZ Banking Group and Glidepath.

But not all clients are giants: some companies, such as engineering consultancies, may have as few as six staff.

However, all get SOS International's 24-hour, multilingual advice on planning for and sending staff overseas, and on-the-ground assistance in times of trouble. That includes routine and emergency medical advice: of the 3000-odd SOS staff worldwide, about 300 are doctors.

But it's mass evacuations, says McRitchie, that have made SOS "famous". For example, he co-ordinated the evacuation of 4000 people from riot-rocked Indonesia in May 1998, just before President Suharto was forced to step aside, and 200 from Borneo a year later when Australian involvement in East Timor rebounded on foreigners there.

Last year, 12,000 people worldwide were evacuated by SOS, mostly for medical reasons. September 11 did not influence those figures unduly, says McRitchie, but those evacuated because of the attacks left mainly from Pakistan, Indonesia and the Philippines.

One fashion retailer, which lost seven staff in one of the suicide planes, sent its 50 traumatised European staff based in New York to their home countries via bus and then chartered plane from Montreal - American airspace was closed. The return trip brought back eight grieving Americans.

The attacks were a rude wake-up call to companies that had been sending people overseas for years without doing much prior homework, seeing security plans as a "soft", no-return expense.

McRitchie says risk assessments need to be done long before a staff member leaves town, looking at the frequency and possible severity of risk - from pickpocketing in the street to politically inspired rioting - and its likely impact on the workers and the business.

Companies need crisis management and evacuation plans in case the worst happens, and every plan needs to be reviewed regularly.

Solid information is critical, and the company's internet-accessible databases are updated daily with the latest on the political, social and medical climate, and the subtleties of doing business.

For example, look up Pakistan and it advises that terrorists use anniversaries because they are western traditions leading to public gatherings. If you're in Pakistan today, it says, avoid all US-branded pubs, hotels, embassies and churches, all demonstrations of any nature, and crowds.

McRitchie has noticed since last September a greater demand for such detailed information; Ministry of Foreign Affairs advisories are no longer seen as enough.

Companies now scrutinise the need for travel more closely, and increasingly video-conference instead. Many have increased the number of security staff at overseas offices.

Why? Risk perceptions have changed, he says. Now, it's not just travellers at risk - who would have thought New York office buildings, with their thousands of occupants, would become a target?

And who would have predicted such cruel sophistication? Also fuelling the changed picture, says McRitchie, is uncertainty over United States intentions in Iraq and a loss of faith in governments' ability to provide security.

With New Zealand increasingly looking to business links with Asia, anxiety is justified.

In central Asia, India and Pakistan, Southeast Asia and the Middle East, terrorism against high-profile targets such as embassies, schools and airports is a popular tool to grab media attention, says McRitchie.

In addition, he describes a "Pacific arc of instability": Papua New Guinea, the Solomon Islands, Vanuatu and Fiji.

And you are not necessarily safe in New Zealand. David White, the business development manager of International SOS in Auckland, says that in March, a marketing adviser of a multinational energy company who planned to travel to Lahore, Pakistan, received a death threat by email soon after arriving at his Wellington office one morning.

The gist of the message was that the sender had his itinerary and to turn up in Pakistan would mean death.

It read: "We are killing all those foreigners who come to the Holy Land. You must have read what happened to [American journalist] Daniel Pearl, it was we who did it."

SOS was alerted and swung into action, contacting relevant authorities - police, embassies and the Ministry of Foreign Affairs - in New Zealand and Pakistan.

The staff member was advised to stay put, his colleagues directed to get bodyguards, and the company to audit all security procedures.

A probe eventually discovered a leak in the company's Pakistan office.

Companies can't afford to be ill-prepared when they have a duty of care to their staff.

In Australia, the Supreme Court ruled in 2000 that a company failed in its duty to provide destination information to a female sales consultant travelling to Port Moresby in PNG - not the safest combination.

While there, a man attacked her. Psychological problems followed.

The award for her company's negligence totalled more than half a million dollars.