Over the past several months, the Somali military, in
cooperation with local, regional, and international forces, has managed
to put the Islamist militant group al Shabaab on the run. Nearly every
week, there is a new report of another Somali town winning its
liberation. Officials in Mogadishu have aimed to completely annihilate
the group, and they predict that soon the al Qaeda–affiliated
organization will no longer have any significant presence in their
country.
But if al Shabaab is losing its foothold in Somalia,
it is working assiduously to gain another one next door. Kenya is on its
way to becoming the world’s next hotbed of extremism as a result of al
Shabaab’s active and growing presence there. And so far, the Kenyan
government has been its own worst enemy in attempting to reverse this
trend.
Al Shabaab’s membership is still primarily Somali, but
the group has long wanted to export its ideology to Kenya and establish
a physical presence there because of the country's geographic proximity
and growing susceptibility of its Muslim population to radical thought.
Since 2012, al Shabaab militants have been aggressively producing propaganda videos, social media campaigns, and slick e-magazines
in English and Swahili, Kenya’s primary languages. Al Shabaab is also
using its social media expertise to win new sympathizers; militants
present their own hardships in Somalia as analogous to the plight of
marginalized Muslims in Kenya.
The strategy seems to be working. Hundreds, if
not thousands, of Kenyans have been recruited by al Shabaab over the
years. The group's efforts have taken on a greater sense of urgency
since its operational space in Somalia has been shrinking. Sectarian
and terrorist incidents in Kenya are now on the rise. Attacks on
Christians are commonplace, and disquieting incidents, such as a thwarted car bomb plot in Mombasa in March, are likely precursors of far worse things to come.
Kenyan government's policies and actions have clearly aided al Shabaab’s recruitment efforts. Muslims make up only around ten percent of Kenya’s population,
and the group has a legitimate reason to feel disenfranchised. For
years, Kenyan authorities have used ethnic Somalis as a scapegoat,
blaming them for virtually any terrorism-related incident or unsolved
crime. Earlier this month, for instance, in response to a spate of
terrorism incidents in Nairobi, Kenyan forces indiscriminately arrested
an estimated 4,000 Muslims, mostly ethnic Somalis. This type of
finger-pointing has seeped into Kenya’s public consciousness; it has
been a core reason for the country’s endemic ethnic profiling, and fuel for many violent riots against the embattled group.
The Kenyan police have earned a reputation for
corruption, incompetence, and brutality, in particular against Muslims.
This has created fertile ground for further appeals from radical
Islamists to ethnic Kenyans. In the coastal city of Mombasa, for
instance, which has become the epicenter of Kenya’s home-grown radicalization problem,
the police have a reputation for throwing due process out when it suits
them. Over the last year and a half, a number of firebrand Islamic
clerics have been gunned down in high-profile drive-by shootings, but
the police have never conducted serious investigations into the
incidents. That has led many Muslims to assume that the police either
tacitly approved or covertly supported the killings. Ever since, violent protests against security forces have shaken Mombasa. Things got much worse this February when officers stormed the city’s restive Mussa mosque, citing evidence that a “jihad convention” was underway. Hundreds of worshippers, several of whom were under the age of 12, were dragged into the streets, beaten with batons in full view of the public,
and hauled away to prison. Not surprisingly, protests erupted once
again. This dynamic has played right into the hands of al Shabaab.
Militants have also taken advantage of the central government’s inability to control its border with Somalia. A Kenyan parliamentary report released in January
went so far as to say that al Shabaab had overtaken the northeastern
border town of Mandera, with security forces essentially ceding control
of the area to the militant group. According to a National Intelligence Service report leaked last October,
al Shabaab also controls two-thirds of Garissa County, which the
group’s top operatives have declared as their preferred base of
operations. This has proved to be a strategic location; it has allowed
al Shabaab to target the half million Somali refugees sandwiched between
Garissa and the Somalia border as potential recruits. These refugees,
who fled Somalia’s civil war, have been languishing in a state of
perpetual uncertainty in dismal refugee campus for years or even
decades.
The Kenyan government’s hard-line response to these
recruitment efforts has proved self-defeating. The refugees had
previously been permitted to work in neighboring towns, but on March 25,
following a series of sectarian attacks attributed to al Shabaab
sympathizers, Kenya’s interior ministry demanded that all refugees stay
permanently in the camps and threatened to force the Somalis back to
their homeland. It is common knowledge that some Somali refugees do
sympathize with al Shabaab, but the experience of being scapegoated by
the Kenyan government has won even more converts to the cause. Al
Shabaab has been able to depict the government as eager to inflict more
suffering on the already disadvantaged.
Al Shabaab is slowly creating a lawless border region
in Kenya, akin to the Taliban-held land in Pakistan. Regional and
international officials are clearly worried. On March 24, UN envoy to Somalia Nicholas Kay
warned that al Shabaab may be looking to move to Kenya as a result of
the AMISOM offensive. One day later, Kenyan President Uhuru Kenyatta
formally asked Washington for help in monitoring and securing its border
with Somalia, and U.S. ambassador to Kenya Robert Godec confirmed the indefinite deployment of FBI agents to Kenya to assist in terrorism-related matters.
The Kenyan government, unlike its Pakistani
counterpart, does not support the militants, nor does it have any
interest in their survival. In this case, the creation of an extremist
safe haven will depend largely on the degree of support from local
populations. And since Nairobi seems bent on pursuing short-sighted
policies that push its Muslim citizenry into the arms of the extremists,
that possibility is turning into a reality.
Although it might be necessary for Kenya to use force
against the most extreme elements of these groups, recent history
testifies that force alone does not convince or compel radicalized
individuals to abandon violence. Absent a fair and conciliatory
political environment, the disadvantaged will remain susceptible to
extremist ideologies, and radicals will remain a permanent fixture in
the region, growing ever more separated from the idea of borders and
national identity.
http://www.foreignaffairs.com/articles/141357/paul-hidalgo/kenyas-worst-enemy?cid=soc-facebook-in-snapshots-kenyas_worst_enemy-042414
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