From: Berhane Habtemariam (Berhane.Habtemariam@gmx.de)
Date: Sun Oct 25 2009 - 06:00:41 EST
Kenya admits to secret police training for Somalia
By MUGUMO MUNENE and GITAU WARIGI
Posted Sun, October 25, 2009 at 22:34
The Kenyan military has been secretly training police officers on behalf of
Somali's fledgling transitional government in what Department of Defence
spokesman Bogita Ongeri says is in line with international agreements.
The timing of the official admission by Kenya's usually tight-lipped
military is telling. It coincides with rumours widely circulating in
northeastern Kenya and in Somalia itself that the Kenya Government has been
recruiting fighters from among young Kenyan Somalis to help the TFG fight
the Islamist threat inside Somalia.
Dismissing the reports, Mr Ongeri said "as far as we know, all those we have
trained are from Somalia and were handed over to us by the TFG for
training".
"The Kenyan military has not done anything outside the UN and AU frameworks
of assisting Somalia as a country to achieve peace and tranquillity. Kenya
was to chip in by training the Somali police. We will continue to train
them," he told Africa Insight.
The location of the training remains secret for "security reasons".
According to Mr Ongeri, the Kenyan military had not received any complaints
from any Kenyan parent that their son was recruited to be trained as a
Somali police officer or to play any other role in the conflict that has
raged for nearly two decades.
Potential soldiers
The commander of Somali military forces, General Yusuf Dhumal, told
reporters in Mogadishu last Thursday that Somalia and Kenya are cooperating
in efforts to recruit potential soldiers for the Somali government from
Kenya's northeastern region.
The general said that 1,500 Kenyan men have been recruited and are being
trained at camps in Kenya to fight Islamist rebels in Somalia. He says the
recruiting effort is part of the Somali government's plan to build a strong
army that can defend the country.
But Mr Ongeri said if at all there is any Kenyan who may have lied on his
nationality to enrol for the police training, if discovered, will be
discontinued and punished.
Human Rights Watch had accused Kenya of backing the recruitment of Somali
refugees at United Nations camps in northeastern Kenya to fight for the
Somali army against militant Islamist insurgents in a report released this
week.
But Somalia's Prime Minister Omar Sharmarke dismissed the Human Rights Watch
report. "We never recruited in Kenya," Mr Sharmarke said. On his part, Mr
Ongeri dismissed the claim as "propaganda''. "We are not involved in any
such operation," he was quoted as saying in the Human Rights Watch report.
A month ago, Kenya's Defence Minister Yusuf Hajj said leaders from North
Eastern Province had received unconfirmed reports that Al-Shabaab was
targeting Kenyan youth for training but that there was no conclusive
evidence to show the same.
However, the leaders - MPs and sheikhs from the vast province - did not just
dismiss the unconfirmed reports but launched a campaign to ask their youth
to desist from falling to extremist teachings and tendencies associated with
some militia groups in Somalia.
It is noteworthy that the Kenyan military are the ones conducting training
for Somalis who are meant to be police officers. Kenya has for long borne
the brunt of an unstable Somalia with proliferation of small arms that have
been used to push Kenyan law enforcers to the limits.
That notwithstanding, the likelihood that these personnel trained by the
Kenyan military will be inducted by the hard-pressed TFG into paramilitary
duties cannot have escaped the Kenyan trainers. But it's a matter squarely
in the hands of the TFG.
The TFG has not disclosed where exactly it trains its troops. But this
month, it emerged that Djibouti was one of the countries that conduct
training when the first batch of trainee soldiers estimated at 500 were
received at the Villa Somalia, the presidential palace in Mogadishu.
According to Radio Garowe, which broadcasts from Puntland, French military
advisers assisted in the training. Some of the freewheeling Somali blogs
claim that Sudan, Uganda, Burundi and Ethiopia are assisting the TFG with
military training, but the reports have not been confirmed.
Whereas the extent of Al-Shabaab's possible penetration into northern Kenya
remains unclear, the reach of the Islamists' recruitment outside their
homeland appears to be extensive. The TFG itself has repeatedly circulated
reports of fighters allied to Al-Shabaab trickling in from Yemen, the
Persian Gulf and even Pakistan.
Ethnic Somalis driven to join the Islamists have been uncovered coming from
as far away as Minnesota in the US. However, it is the reported presence of
so-called international jihadists with links to Al-Qaeda that the US and
Somalia's secular neighbours are particularly alarmed about.
This is the element believed to have introduced into the Somali conflict the
signature jihadist method of suicide bombing. Last month, such a suicide
attack targeted premises occupied by AU peacekeeping troops in Mogadishu and
resulted in several fatalities.
In the same month, a Kenyan fugitive accused of Al-Qaeda links, Ali Saleh
Nabhan, was killed in a helicopter attack staged by US special forces in
southern Somalia. The circumstances that prevailed at the time the Islamic
Courts Union (ICU) were scoring their successes in Somalia are markedly
different from those Al-Shabaab and its allies are encountering presently.
Though in most cases the same militias who fought for the ICU are the same
ones who reconstituted themselves into the ranks of the Al-Shaabab
insurgency, the ICU had a more coherent programme of extending civil order
among the population and were able to win popular support for being a
bulwark against the hated clan warlords of old.
Thus, the ICU was able to rapidly entrench its authority in much of Somalia
and to wrest control of the capital Mogadishu before the Ethiopians
intervened in December 2006 and crushed them militarily. Despite the air of
invincibility Al-Shabab's hold is limited to south and parts of central
Somalia. Control over Mogadishu - the biggest prize - remains stalemated
between the Islamists and TFG forces.
The all-important port of Mogadishu still remains in the hands of the TFG.
The Islamist front in Somalia has actually been significantly weakened by
open differences between Al-Shabaab and their chief ally Hizbul Islam. These
differences recently degenerated into brutal gunfights in Kismayu.
The control of Kismayu is critical for the levying of port taxes which the
militias appropriate. It is also crucial as the entry point of clandestine
shipments of weapons needed by the Islamists. Analysts do not discount
further fragmentation within the Islamist ranks, especially if the overall
situation in Somalia continues to be a stalemate and the international
community remains steadfast in ensuring the TFG does not collapse.
They believe that the strategy is to keep the TFG standing with the hope
that Al-Shabaab will lose steam and fragment as the deadlock persists.
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