There is something so unique about Somali people. They have
a great sense of humor; I suppose it’s their way of making sense of the myriad
bizarre things that happen in the world. I was once at the OB-GYN’s office once
when a Somali couple came in. The man was carrying a new born baby and the
woman was behind him, carrying the baby’s nappy bag. She was covered from head
to toe, but when she walked in she lifted her veil or niqab so we could see her
face.
“Here is a present for you!” says the father, smiling
cheekily. The receptionist smiles and
says, “Mashallah! What is his name?”
“Barrack Obama,” Says the wife. That nearly killed me, I
laughed to tears.
This cryptic sarcasm is definitely a Somali thing – Soon
after the Kenya Defense Forces invaded Somalia, Major Emmanuel Chirchir found
himself in a twitter war with some very amusing twitter handles claiming to be
Al-Shabaab. “@Emmanuel Chirchir – you are using made in Kenya vehicles that’s
why you can’t catch us.” The joke there is the fact that Kenya does not
manufacture any vehicles, for those who don’t know.
It’s truly sad, thus, that these same Somali people have
faced the most brutal forms of tactics in the name of governance in Kenya and
as Counter Terrorism measures.
You must understand that even in the pre-colonial period
there was not one territory that had as large an ethnically homogenous
population as the Greater Somalia, rendering them a uniquely unified entity
among whom the tactic of divide and rule would take a more personal and
intrinsic nature than how it inevitably worked among colonies like Kenya which
was ethnically diverse. So the division
of the greater Somalia into the territories that now constitute Kenya,
Ethiopia, Djibouti and Somalia which includes the former British, Italian and
French Somalia, never went down well with the Somali people. This division of
territory is a source of the conflict in the Horn of Africa to this day.
By the 1960s, as Kenya approached independence, a
secessionist movement was born among the Somali people, mostly out of a desire
to reunite with their kinsmen and fellow Muslims and also out of a fear of
being marginalized in the new nation. So the Somali population in Kenya was
pushing for the annexation of the Northern Frontier District to Somalia. At the
time, majority of the Somali people voted to be joined to Somalia, but this was
overridden by the Kenyatta government. What followed then was a civil uprising
that was viciously and violently quelled by Jomo Kenyatta’s administration –
They referred to the Somali as Shifta and declared all of them bandits and
criminals who must be exterminated. This ensuing conflict led to a state of
emergency being declared in the Northern Frontier District and the territory
was deemed “a closed area” and remained that way for decades. Though the
initial secessionist movement was eventually crushed, the Kenyatta government
thereafter viewed all Somali with suspicion and any attempt to politically
organize them was subsequently crushed as well.
To contain the Somali, the government applied a divide and
rule tactic; they would instigate clashes between the different clans of the
Somali people. These clashes and internal conflict have taken on a life of
their own, to date, there is still a lot of insecurity and violence in the
area.
This government fear of the Somali people was based on two
fronts – they are ethnically homogenous and are also religiously united. The
Kenya government has time and again applied very violent tactics in dealing
with the Somali people, causing them to organize themselves around their faith
as Muslims. The Somali people became so
radicalized due to their oppression that they even went so far as to declare
Jihad against their tormentors, thus inviting the wrath and disdain of the
global anti-Islam brigade.
It was only much later that President Moi reached out to the
Somali people after a Somali general Mohmoud Mohammed helped to crush the 1982
coup. Moi brought the Somalis to the fore as he rallied the smaller Kenyan
ethnic communities in response to the threat he felt from the larger ethnic
communities whom he believed were against his regime. But this amiable
situation did not last, as the ingrained government attitudes towards the
Somali people and their brutal tactics were revived after the events in Nairobi
of the 1998 bombings of the US embassy and were exacerbated by the 2001 September
11th bombing of the Twin Towers in New York.
Once again, the Somali people as a wholly Muslim population
became suspects. By this time, the situation in Somalia had deteriorated
extensively; without a recognizable government, a thriving black market trade
and proliferation of illegal arms across the Kenyan border made the Somali
people even greater targets for human rights atrocities by the Kenyan
Government.
To date, the Kenyan government tactics employed by US and
British funded agencies like the Anti-Terrorism Police include rape, plunder,
vandalism, torture and incarceration of entire families. More importantly, the
Kenya government is guilty of flagrant disregard for the rights and freedoms of
their citizens and this is most wickedly expressed in permitting CIA and FBI
agents to perform Rendition. Rendition is just a fancy way of saying
KIDNAPPING.
Rendition is the illegal extradition of “suspects” from one
jurisdiction to another with the intention to extract information and also
subject the suspect to a judicial process in a country or state where the laws
are conducive with the overall objectives of the US government’s War On Terror.
Because nobody has noticed, or rather no one reports these abuses and
extractions, a lot of Muslims and in particular Somali people have disappeared
into black holes in detention facilities mainly in Egypt and Europe. Once rendition occurs, the suspect is
tortured for weeks or even months with the aim of extracting information that
will lead to even further arrests. Most of the people picked up by the Kenya
Anti-Terrorism Unit are community leaders or activists; people who are deemed
dangerous because they seek to raise awareness and also to unite their
communities under the Islamic Faith. The fact is, on any given day, in any part
of Kenya, a Muslim can be arrested and disappear forever.
With the support of the Kenya government’s own law
enforcement agencies, and the full knowledge of members of our judiciary, our
political leaders and even some members of the press, Kenyan Somali people have
been subjected to incredibly inhuman conditions, torture, rape, violence,
mental and physical anguish, and through all this, and despite all of this, the
Somali people still manage to rise, in faith and hope. Somalis are – AMAZING.
No comments:
Post a Comment