In mid-January 2016, al-Shabaab, an al-Qaeda affiliate, attacked an African Union base in the southern Somali town of el-Ade. The militants killed dozens of Kenyan soldiers, fueling anger in neighboring Kenya towards the Islamist terror group. But the attack also nurtured a longstanding distrust of Somali immigrants in Kenya.
By Antonia Sohns
(via OneWorld, United Nations University)
A severely malnourished child in
Dagahaley. Hundreds of Somali refugees are arriving each day having fled
drought, famine and civil war in Somalia.
In mid-January
2016, al-Shabaab, an al-Qaeda affiliate, attacked an African Union base in the
southern Somali town of el-Ade. The militants killed dozens of Kenyan soldiers,
fueling anger in neighboring Kenya towards the Islamist terror group. But the
attack also nurtured a longstanding distrust of Somali immigrants in Kenya.
Since the
outbreak of civil war in 1991, Somalia has seen violence, political
instability, starvation, and disease. In 1995, the second phase of the United Nations peacekeeping
operation in Somalia withdrew in failure, and the number of civilians affected
by the widespread violence continued to rise.
Many Somalis
sought refuge in Kenya. In 1991, the refugee camp of Dadaab was established 60
miles from the Somali border as a temporary shelter for 90,000 people. Now,
however, more than 300,000 Somalis call it home. Dadaab has become the largest
refugee camp in the world.
Throughout
Kenya, the UN High
Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) registered nearly 420,000 refugees
from Somalia, as of November 2015. Overall, Kenya currently hosts more than
600,000 refugees and asylum-seekers.
Over the
decades, not only have Somalis fled to Kenya for protection, but they have also
migrated to Kenya for increased opportunities to study, to find work, and to
make it their home. Today, six percent of Kenya’s population is of Somali
origin. Of these 2.4 million Somali-Kenyans, several are leading government
officials including the current foreign minister.
Al-Shabaab is
one of Kenya’s main security threats
Due to the
lack of a functioning government in Somalia, the terror group al-Shabaab has
taken hold of remote territories and roams the country instilling fear and
extorting civilians. To fight the extremists, Kenya has contributed more than
4,000 troops to the 22,000 African Union troops deployed in Somalia. These
forces have driven al-Shabaab out of major strongholds in the country, but an
estimated 7,000 to 9,000 Islamist fighters remain in central and southern
Somalia.
As al-Shabaab
is defeated by African Union troops, the militants have retaliated against
Kenya with horrific violence. In September 2013, al-Shabaab coordinated an
attack on the Westgate Mall in Nairobi where it held hostages for 80 hours and
killed 67 people. In April 2015, four masked al-Shabaab gunmen left 148 people
dead at Garissa University College.
All four of
the militants who executed the Garissa attack came from Kenya, and one of the
men was the son of a government official. One of the main security threats in
Kenya today emanates from the al-Shabaab attacks.
The militants’
connections to Kenya stoked fear in the population, as Kenyans debate how to
prevent radicalisation and violence. Kenyan officials seek to balance
preventing al-Shabaab militants from entering the country while ensuring that
its actions to fight the terror group do not inspire home-grown extremists.
Reasons for that could be human rights abuses or the widespread discrimination
of Somali-Kenyans.
Ethnic Somalis
face widespread discrimination in Kenya
Despite their
contribution to Kenyan society, Somali-Kenyans have been the victim of
discrimination and terror by the Kenyan police as tension rises due to continued
al-Shabaab attacks.
In principle,
all people have the right to acquire citizenship without discrimination in Kenya.
The Bertelsmann
Transformation Index (BTI) shows in its latest edition, however, that
“in practice, members of certain groups — such as ethnic Nubians and Somali —
face significant problems gaining identification documents and are required to
provide additional evidence. As a result, individuals are often denied full
citizenship rights at least for a part of their lives whilst they try to
negotiate these specific and discriminatory layers of bureaucracy.”
In Eastleigh,
a predominantly Somali neighborhood of Nairobi, Somali-Kenyans are monitored by police, and throughout Kenya, they are pulled
off of buses and subject to police checks despite Kenya’s claim that there is
no racial profiling. Such discrimination is reminiscent of the 1980s, when the
Kenyan government used a screening process to strip tens of thousands of
Somali-Kenyans of their Kenyan identity.
Moreover, as a
response to al-Shabaab attacks, ethnic Somali communities are routinely singled
out for abuse by Kenyan security forces, including beatings, arbitrary
detention and theft of personal property, as
Human Rights Watch confirms. The perpetrators nearly always go unpunished.
The Kenyan
government has been targeting Somali-Kenyan citizens and Somali refugees
because it perceives these communities as “potential hiding and breeding
grounds for al-Shabaab terrorists”, as the BTI report on Kenya points
out.
The principle
of voluntary return
To diminish
this threat, the Kenyan government also debates building a wall along the
Somali border to restrict access to the country. Even with Kenya’s Somali
border closed, the 682 kilometers remain largely unguarded due to the border’s
size and the government’s lack of resources.
Moreover,
Kenya has deported hundreds of Somalis back to Mogadishu in the
past years, including registered refugees, violating international obligations.
Additionally, the Kenyan government has repeatedly threatened to close Dadaab
and force thousands of refugees over the border.
However, in
practice the government in Nairobi has thus far remained largely committed to
the Tripartite Agreement for
repatriation of Somalia refugees in Kenya, which it had signed together with
Somalia and UNHCR in 2013. It stipulates the principle of voluntary return. As of October 2015, nearly 5,000
refugees from Dadaab have returned home since December 2014.
Another way of
reducing the size of Dadaab, and thereby diminishing breeding ground for
terrorism (as it is perceived by Kenyan officials), would be to provide means
for refugees to secure work. Currently, Kenyan policy does not allow refugees
to work and restricts their travel, leaving them largely dependent on food aid
for survival.
While the
Kenyan government seeks to protect its citizens, it must balance its
much-needed national security interests with human rights. The ongoing regional
fight in East Africa has global implications as terror groups like al-Shabaab
continue to root and sow terror worldwide, and the global population of
refugees grows due to ongoing violence and the onset of climate change.
About The Author:
Antonia
Sohns is an analyst at the World Bank. She writes this article in her personal
capacity. Bertelsmann
Stiftung’s Transformation Index, BTI 2016, is available at: bti-project.org.
Somali Refugees: Between Shelter and Discrimination by Antonia
Sohns is licensed under a Creative Commons
Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License by United Nations University's One World Blog.
