Kenya: Africa Insight - Africa Can't Run Away From Somalia
- By News Hound
- Published 06/28/2007
- Politics
- Unrated
News Hound
Your servent relentlessly hunting for interesting news stories around the world.
View all articles by News HoundKenya: Africa Insight - Africa Can't Run Away From Somalia
by Patrick Mutahi
The Somali refugee crisis is now a continental problem causing ethnic tension even in the far-flung South Africa, hence presenting states with a tricky choice between hosting refugees and protecting their national interests.
The explosion that killed a man and injured 39 people in Nairobi on June 11 has put back refugees into sharp focus security-wise.
So far, The Kenya Police has interrogated nine suspects most of them Muslims of Somali origin. The most sought suspect, whose photograph was published on the media, Farah Ahmed Hirsi, handed himself to the police. Farah, a Kenyan citizen born in Mandera District in Northern Kenya, is a businessman in Eastleigh, Nairobi, which houses thousands of Somali refugees. He has a Masters Degree in Islamic Studies.
In August 2006 Farah was arrested and questioned about his alleged links to terrorism-and was threatened with deportation to Somalia for allegedly being in Kenya illegally.
This adds to the perception, in certain quarters, of ethnic Somalis in Kenya as a state security risk since the Shifta (bandit) war in the 1960s. This has also presented intractable difficulties to the protection of the increasingly criminalised Somali asylum-seekers and refugees.
Somalia has been ravaged by decades of civil war after the fall of the Siad Barre regime in 1991 sparking off one of Africa's most protracted refugee crises. In the same vein, Somalia-based al-Jihaad fighters alleged to have links with al-Qaeda have the potential to change the security dynamics in the Greater Horn of Africa.
In a post-September 11 (2001) world, refugees are caught in an intricate web of the global "war on terror". Now, they are pawns in a geopolitical game in which they are seen as agents of insecurity and terrorism.
According to the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees publication 2006 Global Trends, the number of refugees has increased globally since 2002 by 14 per cent to almost 10 million. This is largely as a result of the crisis in Iraq.
In 2006, the main group of refugees under UNHCR's mandate continued to be Afghans (2.1 million), followed by Iraqis (1.5 million), Sudanese (686,000), Somalis (460,000), and refugees from the Democratic Republic of the Congo and Burundi (about 400,000 each).
African governments have become less tolerant and increasingly inhospitable to refugees. Consequently, refugee policies and administrative structures are geared towards keeping refugees and asylum seekers out by closing borders, preventing entry, denying them asylum and sending them back home even forcefully.
With the fall of the Islamic Courts Union in December 2006, thousands of refugees flocked into the common border with Kenya to escape the fighting as the Islamists abandoned Mogadishu and their last strongholds of Jilib and Kismayo in the Juba River Valley to Ethiopian-backed government forces .
Wary of the security repercussions of Islamic militants and their supporters flocking into its soil, Kenya barred over 7,000 Somali refugees from crossing its border with Somalia, precipitating a humanitarian crisis and international outcry.
Meanwhile, the US had entered joined the fight against Islamists, pushing the security imperatives of the 'war on terror' to bear on the Somalia refugee situation.
Over a decade of insecurity in Somalia has forced thousands of refugees to flee the country. The fall of the Siad Barre government pushed over half a million people into Ethiopia and some 200,000 into Kenya. At the height of the civil war between 1991 and 1992, an estimated two million people were internally displaced and 800,000 forced to flee to the neighbouring countries.
The bloody battle for Mogadishu between Ali Mahdi - elected as president by a cabal of Hawiye politicians on 28 January 1991- and General Mahammed Faarah Aideed after 1992, turned Somalia into one of the most unsafe places in the world.
Furthermore, drought, disease, floods and starvation have collectively claimed thousands of lives, displaced some 600,000 people within Somalia and made lives in refugee camps in Kenya unbearable.
A crippling drought between 2005 and 2006 and crop failure in mid-2006, against the backdrop of escalating war, almost wiped out the livelihoods in Southern Somalia and drove many people to refugee camps in north-eastern Kenya as the Islamic Courts Union (ICU) found a firm footing in the country.
The rise of the courts was as dramatic as their fall. In June 2006, the ICU defeated the US-backed warlords' Alliance for the Restoration of Peace and Counter-Terrorism (ARPCT) and took over Mogadishu.
The ICU-ARPCT fighting killed 400 civilians and displaced 1,500, bringing the total of internally displaced persons in Mogadishu to 250,000.
The Somali refugee crisis is now a continental problem causing ethnic tension even in the far-flung South Africa, hence presenting states with a tricky choice between hosting refugees and protecting their national interests.
The explosion that killed a man and injured 39 people in Nairobi on June 11 has put back refugees into sharp focus security-wise.
So far, The Kenya Police has interrogated nine suspects most of them Muslims of Somali origin. The most sought suspect, whose photograph was published on the media, Farah Ahmed Hirsi, handed himself to the police. Farah, a Kenyan citizen born in Mandera District in Northern Kenya, is a businessman in Eastleigh, Nairobi, which houses thousands of Somali refugees. He has a Masters Degree in Islamic Studies.
In August 2006 Farah was arrested and questioned about his alleged links to terrorism-and was threatened with deportation to Somalia for allegedly being in Kenya illegally.
This adds to the perception, in certain quarters, of ethnic Somalis in Kenya as a state security risk since the Shifta (bandit) war in the 1960s. This has also presented intractable difficulties to the protection of the increasingly criminalised Somali asylum-seekers and refugees.
Somalia has been ravaged by decades of civil war after the fall of the Siad Barre regime in 1991 sparking off one of Africa's most protracted refugee crises. In the same vein, Somalia-based al-Jihaad fighters alleged to have links with al-Qaeda have the potential to change the security dynamics in the Greater Horn of Africa.
In a post-September 11 (2001) world, refugees are caught in an intricate web of the global "war on terror". Now, they are pawns in a geopolitical game in which they are seen as agents of insecurity and terrorism.
According to the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees publication 2006 Global Trends, the number of refugees has increased globally since 2002 by 14 per cent to almost 10 million. This is largely as a result of the crisis in Iraq.
In 2006, the main group of refugees under UNHCR's mandate continued to be Afghans (2.1 million), followed by Iraqis (1.5 million), Sudanese (686,000), Somalis (460,000), and refugees from the Democratic Republic of the Congo and Burundi (about 400,000 each).
African governments have become less tolerant and increasingly inhospitable to refugees. Consequently, refugee policies and administrative structures are geared towards keeping refugees and asylum seekers out by closing borders, preventing entry, denying them asylum and sending them back home even forcefully.
With the fall of the Islamic Courts Union in December 2006, thousands of refugees flocked into the common border with Kenya to escape the fighting as the Islamists abandoned Mogadishu and their last strongholds of Jilib and Kismayo in the Juba River Valley to Ethiopian-backed government forces .
Wary of the security repercussions of Islamic militants and their supporters flocking into its soil, Kenya barred over 7,000 Somali refugees from crossing its border with Somalia, precipitating a humanitarian crisis and international outcry.
Meanwhile, the US had entered joined the fight against Islamists, pushing the security imperatives of the 'war on terror' to bear on the Somalia refugee situation.
Over a decade of insecurity in Somalia has forced thousands of refugees to flee the country. The fall of the Siad Barre government pushed over half a million people into Ethiopia and some 200,000 into Kenya. At the height of the civil war between 1991 and 1992, an estimated two million people were internally displaced and 800,000 forced to flee to the neighbouring countries.
The bloody battle for Mogadishu between Ali Mahdi - elected as president by a cabal of Hawiye politicians on 28 January 1991- and General Mahammed Faarah Aideed after 1992, turned Somalia into one of the most unsafe places in the world.
Furthermore, drought, disease, floods and starvation have collectively claimed thousands of lives, displaced some 600,000 people within Somalia and made lives in refugee camps in Kenya unbearable.
A crippling drought between 2005 and 2006 and crop failure in mid-2006, against the backdrop of escalating war, almost wiped out the livelihoods in Southern Somalia and drove many people to refugee camps in north-eastern Kenya as the Islamic Courts Union (ICU) found a firm footing in the country.
The rise of the courts was as dramatic as their fall. In June 2006, the ICU defeated the US-backed warlords' Alliance for the Restoration of Peace and Counter-Terrorism (ARPCT) and took over Mogadishu.
The ICU-ARPCT fighting killed 400 civilians and displaced 1,500, bringing the total of internally displaced persons in Mogadishu to 250,000.
