Wednesday, June 24, 2015
KENYA: When Kenyan police arrested six men in the vast Dadaab refugee camp near the Somali border in April 2014, their ultimate aim was to dismantle a decades-old sugar smuggling trade that is funding Somali militants waging war on Kenya.
The arrests, coming weeks after four al Shabab gunmen massacred 148 people at nearby Garissa University, were part of Nairobi's new strategy to choke off the flow of money to Islamists whose cross-border raids have hammered Kenya and its tourism industry.
While cash from sugar smuggling might amount to only a few million dollars, experts say such sums are enough for attacks that need just a few assault rifles, transport and loyalists ready to die – such as the Garissa raid or the 2013 assault on Nairobi's Westgate shopping mall that killed 67 people.
“It's like the government is awakening,” a senior Kenyan security source from the Garissa region said, adding the authorities had previously often “turned a blind eye to all these things, because a lot of people were benefiting – but at a cost of security”.
However, if a lasting impact is to be secured, more must be done, say security and diplomatic sources. That includes rooting out corruption in the police force and going after smuggling cartel bosses, as well as the middle men detained so far. The move to tackle the cross-border trade might prove as vital as the military offensive against al-Shabab inside Somalia by African Union peacekeepers and Somali soldiers that has pushed the group into smaller pockets of territory.
“Unless al-Shabab sources of revenue are chopped off, we are not going to see the end of instability in south Somalia and the region,” Rashid Abdi, a Somalia expert based in Nairobi, said.
President Uhuru Kenyatta's government had taken steps to halt the trafficking of sugar from the southern Somali port of Kismayo to Kenya's frontier and had set up a special unit in the National Intelligence Service to dismantle smuggling cartels, the security source said. Days after the Garissa attack, Kenya published a list of 85 entities and individuals with links to al-Shabab. That list did not elaborate on the links, but a government document marked “secret” detailed how 30 listed people were involved in smuggling.