Kenyan policemen clash with
youths after a protest against the killing of an Islamic cleric in the
coastal Port town of Mombasa, Kenya, October 4, 2013. REUTERS/Joseph
Okanga
Thursday, October 31, 2013
A
Kenyan police crackdown on Islamists is fuelling Muslim resentment and
moderate preachers say it undermines their efforts to counter recruiting
by al Qaeda militants with links across the border in Somalia.
Smashing Islamist recruitment networks among its Muslim
minority has become a priority for Kenya, however, as it tries to end
attacks by Somali militants bent on punishing it for sending troops over
the frontier to fight al Shabaab rebels.
The cost of failure was laid bare in September when al
Shabaab gunmen, one of whom police say is a Kenyan from the port of
Mombasa, raided the Westgate shopping mall in the Kenyan capital
Nairobi. At least 67 people were killed.
Police say their tough approach, taken before Westgate but
stepped up since, has limited the flow of would-be jihadists in and out
of Somalia, citing a drop in the number of suspected militants they have
tracked and arrested in the past year.
But Islamists, former militant sympathisers, independent
security experts and diplomats, some of whom acknowledge short-term
benefits from the police actions, say sweeping detentions and
perceptions police are carrying out extra-judicial killings have fuelled
Muslim resentment in the mostly Christian nation.
Police deny accusations of running anti-Muslim hit squads.
Moderate imams, particularly along the coast where most
Kenyan Muslims live, have been attacked by Islamist radicals and some
say they have been cowed into silence as a result.
Police tactics "are benefiting al Shabaab more than they are
benefiting the government", said Akullah Khamis, a 33-year-old Muslim
in Mombasa, Kenya's second city. He works with young people and
non-governmental agencies and says he himself fended off a bid by al
Shabaab to enlist his support three years ago.
Kenya's battle against militancy is seen as vital to the
stability of east Africa's biggest economy, the gateway for regional
trade and with a long coastline that has become a transit route for
would-be jihadists trained in Somalia.
The United States, Britain and Israel, which fret about the
reach of Africa's al Qaeda-aligned Islamists, have trained and equipped
Kenya's anti-terror police and intelligence forces.
Mombasa county police commander Robert Kitur dismissed
suggestions the force was being heavy handed or targeting the wider
Muslim community: "We have never been brutal," he told Reuters. "People
shouldn't generalise this is about Muslims."
"These are not Muslims, these are hooligans. We are going to
deal with these people ruthlessly. We are just applying force when it
is necessary."
VENTING ANGER
However, one man accused by Western governments of aiding
the militants believes widespread arrests, along with raids on mosques
and the deaths of people during clashes with police, are helping al
Shabaab recruiters.
"This being done to Muslims opens the eyes of the youth to
al Shabaab being right," Abubakar Shariff, accused by the U.N. Security
Council and the United States of raising funds and recruiting for al
Shabaab, told Reuters at his Mombasa home.
Shariff, whose assets have been frozen by Western powers, denies the charges against him.
There is also new friction between majority Christians and
Muslims, something that historically has been rare. Muslims, who make up
about a tenth of Kenya's 40 million people, also complain of economic
disadvantage in their coastal heartland compared to more prosperous
central areas around the capital.
On Oct. 4, Muslim youths burned a Mombasa church after
Islamist cleric Sheikh Ibrahim Omar died in a drive-by shooting - an
attack some Muslims blamed on police. His mentor, Sheikh Aboud Rogo, was
shot dead last year in similar circumstances.
Police deny wrongdoing and say they are investigating.
Two Christian pastors have been killed in recent weeks and
one group of clergy has asked the government to issue rifles to protect
their churches.
Joseph Sigei, police commander in the port of Lamu, near the
Somali border, said the flow of suspected militants across the frontier
has fallen sharply due to police tactics - only a quarter as many
suspects had been detained trying to cross the frontier this year
compared to last, he said.
Al Shabaab's losses in Somalia, where Kenyan and other
African troops had driven them out of many cities and towns, had helped
turn rebels into informants, Mombasa commander Kitur said, describing
part of the police approach.
"(They) helped us with vital information about who, where and when radicalisation was happening," Kitur said.
But regional intelligence and diplomatic sources say
recruitment and radicalisation of Muslims goes on, albeit more
discreetly in the light of the police crackdown on Islamists.
One Western diplomat said a small group of "well-organised
violent extremists" was able to drive their message home because of the
weakness of mainstream Kenyan Muslim leadership.
"There is not a good counter-narrative coming from the moderates and moderate leaders," said the diplomat.
"BURN IN HELL"
For their part, moderate voices say their work has been
undermined because the police make so many ordinary Muslims feel
persecuted, fuelling suspicion of the authorities.
"Those of us who have stood up to speak against these things
are viewed as traitors," said Hassan Suleiman Mohammed, an imam whom
young Muslims threatened to kill as they fought police during riots on
Mombasa's palm-lined avenues on Oct. 4.
Mohammed suspects that radicals who incited youths to roll
over his car and jeer him in his mosque during Friday prayers also
distributed a CD that named him and dozens of fellow imams "condemned to
burn in hell" for opposing armed jihad.
Many Muslim leaders who support the government - if not
police tactics - tread a fine line for fear of reprisals from al Shabaab
and castigation by their communities, said Bryan Kahumbura, an analyst
at the International Crisis Group.
"It is especially difficult to aggressively speak out
against al-Shabaab down at the coast," he said of moderate Muslims. "So
many people feel the government can't guarantee their own personal
security and safety."