How the hidden agenda of global governance is pushed in Africa
By Venatrix Fulmen (*)
All refugees in Kenya shall now, due to a deadly attack at a church on Kenya’s coast, be driven from anywhere in the country into two already overcrowded detention camps.
According to the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) there are currently 56,000 asylum seekers and refugees registered with UNHCR in Nairobi and other urban centres in Kenya. The largest segment of this group is made up of Somalis (33,844) followed by Ethiopians (10,568) and nationals from the Democratic Republic of the Congo (7,046). Others come from Eritrea, South Sudan and the Great Lakes.
Kenya has repeatedly claimed that refugees crossing over from Somalia are threatening its security countrywide, but often failed to establish any clear link, except in cases directly at the long, disputed borderline. But even there Kenyan-Somalis were often enough at least among the culprits.
However, the internal Kenyan conflicts in it’s huge coast province are rarely fully investigated. This economically important zone of the otherwise landlocked rest of Kenya – inherited from the governance of the Sultan of Zanzibar and later the colonial Brits – is a very sensitive subject and such incidences are usually brushed under the carpet. Thus to also not affect the fledging tourism industry, which is suffering since the post-election violence in 2007/08, for whose 1,500 killed Kenyans the trial at the International Criminal Court (ICC) so far was not able to find justice.
To assess the situation properly, it must also be taken into consideration that many of these attacks and skirmishes have their root in historical injustices and present day power-struggles within the new governance structures of Kenya – characterized by devolution of power – and are since several years fuelled by a strong secessionist movement – spearheaded by the outlawed Mombasa Republican Council (MRC), which seeks to establish an own state. For Sunday’s attack at the church in Likoni, where already years back coastal people tried to push out inland-Kenyans with armed assaults and also had raided a police station to get the weapons, so far nobody has claimed responsibility and it is at least questionable if al-Shabab was behind it.
That Somalia’s al-Shabab – internationally listed as terror group – would also be behind the in fact rampant illegal killing – romantically still dubbed poaching – of wildlife for ivory, rhino-horn and game meat, is likewise a fiction, which just serves powerful interests to solicit funds from the coffers of the war-on-terror games and often enough protects the real culprits with links to Kenyan, African and international organized crime, including the Chinese, who certainly can not be called an al-Shabab affiliate.
Though Somalia’s al-Qaeda-linked al-Shabab group allegedly briefly claimed and subsequently is blamed to have been behind the four-day siege at the Westgate shopping mall in Nairobi in September 2013 in which 67 people died, the real truth of this case has likewise not yet been established either. Many questions remain open in this controversially assessed assault, in which also a Kenyan crack-unit commander was killed by “friendly fire” on the first day after he had re-established state-control over the building and reportedly refused to hand over command to the arriving Kenyan army, which later was found on CCTV to have for three more days just being looting the shops during the alleged “siege” and with heavy weapons-fire then destroying evidence – while the real culprits had actually fled the scene already just hours after their cruel attack.
But despite all these uncertainties and insincerities the Somali refugees are blamed.
Refugees as Scape Goats
The US-based Refugees International (RI) group said the Kenya government should immediately withdraw their new refugee directive.
“Kenya has signed international conventions that allow freedom of movement for recognized refugees, and Tuesday’s decision flies in the face of those assurances,” the group said in a statement.
A similar decision in 2012 was declared unconstitutional by the Kenyan High Court, but not before it sparked violence, harassment, and extortion against refugees at the hands of the security services, RI said.
Refugee Camps a Disaster
Around half a million refugees, mostly Somalis, suffer already in Dadaab and more than 100,000 in Kakuma, where new refugees also from Somalia, both Sudans as well as Southern Ethiopia arrived recently.
Many observers realize that “Refugees” is a multi-million dollar business in Kenya – for the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) as well as powerful Kenyan and Somali business groups and certain NGOs, carefully selected to work within the UNHCR scheme. The refugee “commodity” is thereby abused since decades to solicit funds from the donor community to keep and expand the UNHCR business model accompanied by rampant corruption. Those refugees, who for fear of their lives can not go to the camps often end in slave-labour like situations in Kenyan citiesnd towns. Abuse and trafficking of girls and women from these strata as well as from the camps is on the rise again.
“Kenya must protect especially the persecuted refugees, who often are victims of or fled from forced recruitment by Al Shabab and not push them into these camps, which are infested by radical underground-groups and corrupt businesses,” all serious analysts agree.
Critics also decry the appalling refugee situation in Kenya at large by stating: “Instead of working on solutions which would make even the existence of UNHCR as well as its camps and scams in Kenya obsolete, they are just expanding their business model more and more and on the backs of the poorest of the poor – the uprooted and desperate refugees, who are trapped between a rock and a hard place.” The same scheme can be observed in a growing number of conflict countries in Africa, in the Middle East and elsewhere..
Historical Wrongs
Historically Somalia never has recognized the colonial border with Kenya and a referendum just before independence did proof that back then the mostly Somali population living between the Tana River and today’s boundary wanted to actually belong to Somalia. But oil-finds by Shell already back then pushed the will of the people into the lowest drawer of the British Crown and there it was left by post-colonial Kenya, while – though still often neglected by the Kenyan government – the Kenyan-Somalis of this zone certainly don’t want to be pushed onto a still broken Somalia right now.
The present day move by the Kenyan Armed Forces – now called ‘Kenyan Defence Force’ after they engaged in their first ever “war” and invaded Somalia at first without the consent of and without a mandate by the United Nations (UN), the African Union (AU) or the regional body IGAD (Intergovernmental Agency on Development) – to push the de facto boundary to the River Jubba, where already during colonial times the British and the Italian troops had established a border and exchanged fire, is all but a bad dream.
It looks like a grim Krym (Crimea) situation in Africa – with the only difference that the ethnically united takeover-forces on the Krym are countered by the USA and their West-European vassals with sanctions, while in the Somalia expedition the alien Kenyans, Ethiopians and Ugandans are even paid by the same masters via the AU, the second-layer proxy-force after the usually dropped-in UN-troops to possibly annex these lands – formerly called Trans-Jubba from a Mogadishu perspective. Hypocacy at best, but all to enforce the will of world governance in Africa today.
IGAD forgot quickly about their initial and politically wise verdict, ruling that none of the neighbouring states could get involved with peace-enforcing or peace-keeping armed forces missions in Somalia, the very moment they realized how much money can there be made from the neo-colonial masters and local advantages. Until today Kenyan Forces in Kismayu oversee the highly lucrative im- and export from Kismayo harbour, Jubbalands new capital – including the strictly forbidden and illegal export of charcoal from the already denuded country of Somalia.
The Way Forward
While the highly paid members of the so called trilateral commission on the voluntary repatriation of Somali refugees – combined bureaucrats from Kenya, Somalia and the UNHCR – are dragging their feet in plush Nairobi, they must be held responsible for not having come up with any tangible, sustainable and first of all humane solutions to end the 25 year long Somali refugee crisis in Kenya so far. It thereby becomes obvious that this appalling situation has to be solved now at once and for all times in the interest of the suffering people.
But voluntary repatriation requires a welcoming and secure situation inside Somalia, integration requires an uncorrupted liaison with the genuinely hospitable Kenyan people in different counties, where many Somali communities already are established, and for the persecuted individuals with their families all serious states with profoundly and honestly assessed immigration capacities must come forward and grant asylum abroad.
Any action not serving any of these three tasks is not only a waste of time, money and resources, but will feed the corrupt refugee-extortion models as well as underground rebellions. And first of all it would simply be inhumane to just keep the refugees as slaves and as play-ball for the stake-holders with ulterior motives for a single day longer under these horrible conditions and without a self-determined future.
With driving the destitute refugees into detention centres and just pushing often GMO-contaminated food into the camps to keep them alive, it certainly is not done.
The stake-holders, if they don’t want to be accused for crimes against humanity like the terrorists, must step back and the people must count for a change.
(*) Author, analyst Venatrix Fulmen, can be reached directly via e-mail: venatrix.fulmen[at]tightmail.com