After Garissa, Kenya needs to break the cycle

If
anyone doubted it before, the abominable attack on Kenya’s Garissa University College
on 2 April confirms the depth of Kenya’s security crisis. At least 147
students, faculty members and others are confirmed dead, scores of others were
injured in the day-long attack and the death toll could still rise.

The
attackers entered the campus at 5.30am and began hurling grenades and firing indiscriminately
with machine guns, before taking scores of students hostage. They later singled
out Christians for execution, taunting them and telling them the attack was revenge
for Kenya’s military deployment in Somalia, according to survivors. Al-Shabaab,
the Somalia-based Islamist militant group, swiftly claimed responsibility.

Targeting civilians

Garissa
is the largest town in Kenya’s north-east region and mainly populated by ethnic
Somalis, who are mostly Muslim, but the students were from around the country,
of many ethnicities and religions. Witnesses and family members of victims said
that in the initial phase the assailants killed randomly. “We have relatives at
the university who were not spared by al-Shabaab,”a human-rights activist in
Garissa county told Human Rights Watch (HRW). “This has been a big blow to all
of us. They were clearly targeting all civilians, no matter the religion.”

Al-Shabaab’s
narrative that it spares Muslims is belied by its grisly record of repeatedly
attacking civilians in predominantly Muslim Somalia—where it has shown no
compunction about murdering students, women and children in countless suicide
bombings. So singling out Christians in Kenya seems more of a tactic aimed at stoking
ethnic and religious tensions than a matter of ideological conviction.

And
it may be succeeding.

Many
members of Kenya’s Muslim and Somali communities are paying an especially heavy
price, being twice victimised. First come al-Shabaab and its supporters, seeking
to sow terror, hatred and division. Then come Kenya’s security forces, who routinely
mete out collective punishment to members of the Somali and Muslim communities,
based solely on their ethnic and religious affiliation.

For
years HRW and other human-rights organisations have repeatedly documented mass beatings,
detentions, even torture of whole neighbourhoods and villages, in the wake of militant
attacks on Kenyan security forces. The military and various police units, from
the administrative police to the anti-riot squad known as the General Service
Unit (GSU), have also been responsible for mass extortion and looting in the
course of raids and operations.

Grim history

Human-rights
abuses by the security forces long predate al-Shabaab. Kenya’s north-east has a
grim history dating back to the secessionist war which began in the 1960s. For
decades the region was under a state of emergency and the Kenyan military
committed serious human-rights violations, including one of its most horrific
crimes—the notorious 1984 Wagalla
massacre near Wajir, in which several thousand ethnic Somalis were killed.

Kenya’s
Truth, Justice and Reconciliation Commission, established after the 2008 post-election
violence and mandated to investigate violations since independence, produced a
long report which provides
important material on the history of such abuses in the north-east, and the
country more broadly. The commission found that Kenya’s military and police had
been the main perpetrators of mass killings, torture and other “violations of
the bodily integrity” of Kenyan citizens over the preceding five decades,
whether in the north-east or elsewhere.

Corruption and lack of accountability have long been identified as twin roots of many of the failings of Kenyan institutions, including the police.

The
report, whose recommendations have not been implemented two years after it was
handed to the president, Uhuru Kenyatta, also concluded that there had been no
political will to address this dire record. On the contrary, successive Kenya
administrations have gone to great lengths to cover up and deny it.

Since
al-Shabaab intensified its campaign in Kenya in 2011, there have been scores of
grenade and gun attacks, often relatively small-scale but usually killing a
number of civilians, which have drawn little international attention. Abusive
operations by the security forces have usually followed.

In
Nairobi, for instance, authorities carried out operation Usalama Watch in April 2014, following
a series of grenade and gun attacks in the predominantly-Somali Eastleigh
neighbourhood of the capital, Nairobi, and in Mombasa. Kenyan police and
military deployed about 5,000 security personnel to Eastleigh over several weeks.
Officers beat scores of people, raided homes, buildings and shops, extorted
massive sums, and harassed and detained an estimated 4,000 people—including
registered refugees, Kenyan citizens, journalists and international aid workers—without
charge and in appalling conditions, for periods well beyond the 24-hour legal
limit.

The
abuses during the Usalama Watch operation and others have been documented by various
groups, including the Independent Oversight Policing Authority (IPOA). It has
issued several critical reports,
raising concerns about slow responses by the security services, failure to
protect civilians and poor co-ordination during incidents.

Abuses denied

Instead
of seriously addressing the allegations and undertaking the essential police reforms
spelled out in several inquiries—and re-emphasised by the IPOA in its
recommendations—to meet constitutional requirements, the government routinely
denies the scale of the abuses. It has credibly investigated or prosecuted few terrorism
suspects and even fewer of those within the security forces responsible for violations.

Al-Shabaab
appears to understand and exploit this pattern, which plays into religious and
ethnic fissures in Kenya. Other than Nairobi, the areas with frequent attacks are
home to the country’s largest Muslim communities, whose residents have complex
and longstanding political and economic grievances. The anger and frustration
many communities feel is only exacerbated when they are targeted by both al-Shabaab
and the security forces ostensibly sent to protect them.

Why
would most Kenyan Somalis even attempt to report security information to
police, if the likely response is a request for a bribe, with the threat of
arbitrary detention and beating and, at best, taunts that ‘you are al-Shabaab’.
As for refugees, in addition to the physical and verbal abuse, there’s the risk
of having precious identification documents destroyed or confiscated, as has
happened repeatedly in Eastleigh over the past few years.

Many
also question why they should report police abuse, since no one will be held to
account. In Lamu county HRW interviewed scores of villagers who described the
usual pattern of assaults, detention and so on in a security operation there in
late 2014, after armed attacks on Mpeketoni and several other villages—also
claimed by al-Shabaab—had killed more than 60 people in mid-June. A man and his
son who were beaten by police never reported the abuse, since the commander in
charge of the unit was attached to the local police station. “Where do we go
now?” he asked. “This is not how to fight terrorism.”

If
Kenya’s government understands that it needs to build trust within Somali and
Muslim communities, it has yet to show any sign of shifting course and addressing
the profound deficits in confidence, accountability and competence which plague
the military and police. Instead, Kenyan officials contend that the solution to
the security crisis is to restrict further core human-rights protections.

Wide-ranging

Justifying
restrictions on rights as a security measure is not unique to Kenya and some
rights can be limited in times of emergency for defined periods. But in
December the government proposed, and the parliament controversially passed,
wide-ranging amendments to numerous laws to expand police and intelligence-service
powers, while restricting investigative journalism, freedom of expression and the
rights of refugees—in violation of Kenya’s own constitution and international
law. Courts struck down key provisions, but the government appears to adhere selectively
to judicial rulings, weakening the overall rule of law.

As
news of the Garissa killlings began to emerge, for instance, one of Kenyatta’s first
actions was to order 10,000 officers, whose appointments the High Court had
nullified because of suspected corruption in their recruitment, to report to
camp for training. The president’s action was symbolic of the broader deficiencies
which have contributed to the security crisis.

Corruption
and lack of accountability have long been identified as twin roots of many of
the failings of Kenyan institutions, including the police. For instance, there
has been no justice or accountability for the 2008 violence, which saw at least
1,100 people die, displaced hundreds of thousands more and nearly precipitated a
civil war—despite widespread agreement that accountability and security-sector
reforms are essential for Kenya’s long-term stability.

Kenya’s
government ignores these reforms at its peril, especially since the security
crisis generated by al-Shabaab is not simply a spillover from Somalia. One of
the shifts in al-Shabaab’s strategy over the past few years has been
increasingly to recruit and deploy Kenyans and to cultivate
Kenyan affiliates, who may be responsible for some of the recent attacks,
including in Garissa. It’s clear that some recruits are drawn from a range of
ethnic and even religious backgrounds.

Addressing
the abuses, corruption and impunity which fuel radicalisation and al-Shabaab
recruitment in Kenya should be a high priority in efforts to improve security. To
enforce security while protecting human rights is not contradictory. Far from
the targeting of suspected terrorists or discrimination against entire
communities being legitimate, such violations simply alienate communities whose
support is desperately needed by the security forces if they are effectively to
protect Kenya’s population. The abuses have profound implications for all
Kenyans, and ultimately put every Kenyan at risk.

Like us on Facebook to follow the latest openSecurity articles, and tell the editors
what we should publish next.