Pride and Prejudice: Kenya's Response to Garissa

In an effort to restore confidence in the security authorities, the Kenyan government has responded to the Garissa attack with a hardened approach. Within hours of the siege ending, incumbent President Uhuru Kenyatta issued a statement vowing to eradicate the transnational terrorist group and to respond to the attack in the severest way possible. The government has since frozen the accounts of 86 Somali individuals and entities suspected to be financing terrorism in the country, including 13 Somali remittance firms. The Kenyan government has also issued an ultimatum to the United Nations High Commission for Refugees (UNHCR) to repatriate the approximately 600,000 Somali refugees from the Dadaab refugee complex, located in Garissa County, within the next three months; the government asserts the camp has become a breeding ground for Al Shabaab recruits. Finally, on 16 April 2015, Kenyan media reports revealed that construction had begun on a wall between Kenya and Somalia, which is expected to extend some 630km along the porous border, to act as a buffer to insecurity in Somalia.

This reactionary response is aimed at the manifestation of rather than the root of the problem of terrorism in Kenya. Al Shabaab is long thought to have been embedded in northeast Kenya, entrenched among the region’s growing ethnic Somali communities, and continuously bolstered by the influx of refugees from the destabilised state. While the earliest presence of Al Shabaab in Kenya comprised recruitment, financing, and logistical networks, the Kenyan Defence Force’s independent military intervention in Somalia, ‘Operation Linda Nchi’ launched in October 2011, flagged Kenya as a direct enemy of Al Shabaab, prompting retaliatory attacks. Having already achieved an established presence in the country, Al Shabaab has been able to take advantage of grievances within Kenya’s own Muslim community to cement support from within the country, meaning attacks linked to the group have come to involve Kenyan nationals. Evidence suggests that non-Somali nationals have been involved in the majority of terrorist activity outside of Somalia, including those orchestrated within Kenya. Indeed, part of the success of these external attacks has been Al Shabaab’s ability to rely on local assistance.

Yet the Kenyan authorities have displayed a tendency to externalise the issue of terrorism in the country, placing blame on immigrant communities that have taken up residence in the country. The government’s latest response, which specifically targets immigrant Somali communities, again relocates the source of the problem across the border. Kenya’s domestic counterterrorism policy has been criticised for its narrow focus on ethnic Somali communities and for constructing Kenya’s terrorism threat as an imported problem. Following the Westgate attack, for example, authorities launched a large-scale security operation, known as ‘Operation Usalama Watch’, in Nairobi and Mombasa, which identified Al Shabaab operatives and sympathisers in the country. The operation began with a refugee relocation programme that stipulated that all Somali refugees residing in the country’s urban centres should return to Kenya’s two main refugee camps, specifically, the Dadaab and Kakuma complexes. Security forces conducted several sweeps in the cities to identify individuals aligned with Al Shabaab. The sweeps were met with much controversy amid allegations of police brutality. This blanket approach achieved little in identifying prominent Al Shabaab militants in Kenya and served only to vindicate claims of prejudice within the affected communities.

While counter-terrorism operations remain acutely focused on these immigrant communities, Kenyan authorities have failed to recognise that disenfranchised youth among Kenya’s own Muslim population have proven increasingly susceptible to radicalisation and extremism. Kenya’s Muslim community, which accounts for approximately 11 percent of the population, has long claimed socio-political and economic discrimination by Kenya’s predominantly Christian government. A noteworthy repercussion of such sentiments has been the formation of the Muslim Youth Centre (MYC) and subsequent emergence of the extremist Al Hijra cell. While the MYC was initially an informal advocacy group focused on voicing the socio-economic grievances of Muslim communities, with branches in Nairobi, Mombasa and Garissa, Sheikh Aboud Rogo, an open Al Shabaab sympathiser, heavily influenced the group’s ideology. Despite its publically declared allegiance to Al Shabaab, the MYC’s overall rhetoric has maintained an internal focus and is highly critical of the incumbent administration. Nevertheless, the mere establishment of Al Hijra and its identification with Al Shabaab’s ideology highlights the frustrations felt by the Kenyan Muslim population and how Al Shabaab’s cause fills the vacuum left in the absence of state-led opportunities.

Given these developments, it seems unsurprising that at least one of the perpetrators of the recent Garissa attack was Kenyan. As Al Shabaab continues to exploit these domestic grievances in Kenya for its own organisational advantage, Kenya’s efforts to combat terrorism will yield few results unless these deficiencies, including the purported marginalisation of Muslim communities, are addressed.