The war against terror in Kenya could turn into a success for al Shabaab

 

THE PAST COUPLE of weeks have seen the government implement the most dramatic combination of an anti-terror operation and a crackdown against illegal immigrants in decades – Operation Linda Usalama.

Broadly it seems aimed at responding the security meltdown underway across the country and more specifically at the threat posed by ‘Islamic extremism’.

This operation has been accompanied by a series of massive sweeps in Nairobi and other towns seeking out illegal immigrants and terrorists supposedly associated with the originally Somali al Shabaab terror group.

Initially, these sweeps were aimed mainly at members of the Somali community and other Muslims in the context of a steadily and intensifying number of terrorist attacks over the past couple of years. By last week security forces were going house-to-house in an invasive (and for many expensive) graduation of the operation.

From grenades being thrown into churches, eateries and matatus killing and wounding a rapidly growing number of innocents; to the discovery of sophisticated improvised explosive devices (one of them in a car parked in a police station after being driven thousands of kilometres from Kismayo to the Coast) – its clear Kenya is under attack. Fear and anger have grown with every attack.

The most shocking was the brazen violent strike on the high-end Westgate Mall in Nairobi last September that resulted in 67 deaths and over 170 injuries. Most of the victims were middle class that lent events a resonance far more profound than would otherwise have been the case.

All this has been accompanied by the extra judicial assassination of some of the more outspoken Coast-based radical Muslim preachers over the same period.

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A genocide that never ends

He does not like to tell his story. Edouard Bomporiki rubs his eyes. That terrible image in his head. He was eleven years, too young to participate in the genocide that began on April 7, 1994 in Rwanda, and cost the lives of 700,000 Tutsis and 100,000 moderate Hutus.

“I was lying on a hospital bed with malaria when an old Tutsi man ran inside carrying a baby. He hid under my bed. The extremists of the Interahamwe militia pursued him. They beheaded him and then split his skull into two. The baby they beat to death with a club full of nails. I did not understand. My mother said: ‘Oh my son, you will never understand.’”

Twenty years after the genocide, Rwanda is still a traumatized country. The survivors live with a shadow in their souls, with a daily feeling of emptiness. Many of the one million Hutu perpetrators of murder, rape and theft are haunted daily by the memories too: the images of how they routinely hacked to death children and the elderly with machetes. The people under 20 years, to whom the stories were handed down from their parents, equally become victims: they either carry the stigma of the atrocities of their father and mother, or the feeling of hatred because their families were exterminated. The killers and the survivors must live on the same hills and in the same villages. “Rwandans are working hard on reconciliation, but we are still injured. Everyone is looking for recognition for what happened to him. Therefore, every Rwandan has his story to tell. That is the only way out,” says Edouard Bomporiki.

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Is Someone Trying To Kill Devolution?

I am one of those who insist that Kenyans did not choose to adopt a devolved system of government because they had thought it through rationally, weighed all the options at hand, before deciding on it as the most efficient and desirable governance system given our circumstances. Rather, decades of centralised, ethnicised, authoritarian, corrupt, deeply discriminatory and unequal development as a result of the national government policies favouring Nairobi and the elites that dominate it, forced the hand of the majority who voted for it.

The attitude was, “We’ve tried everything else –political pluralism, successful agitation for basic freedoms and rights etc – and those who have controlled the center of power in Nairobi since independence continue to make off with a hugely disproportionate chunk of national cake.” On the ground, this developed into a powerful narrative that has in turn been ethnicised and politicised to the extent that it has helped define the outcome of elections in the multi-party era; the only policy pillar that stood out in ODM’s 2007 campaign, for example, was ugatuzi.

As a slogan, this was read by many Kenyans as essentially a political instrument to correct ethnic discrimination in development, especially as regards access to justice and economic opportunity. Devolution remains, in effect, the biggest rungu in the arsenal of those communities who aren’t, and probably will never be, part of the so-called “tyranny of numbers”.

A similar underlying rationale informed the ‘District Focus for Rural Development’ initiative of the Moi administration that kicked off in October 1982. In essence, this was in actual fact Kenya’s first real attempt at an affirmative action programme to more equitably distribute resources and opportunities to parts of the country that had historically been economically and politically marginalized. However, a mixture of incompetence, graft and the politics of patronage scuttled the potential of the initiative.

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