Kenya has pledged to reinforce its border with Somalia in an attempt to stem the recent string of abductions carried out by militants, as stated in a TransWorldNews release.
Government officials have been concentrating their efforts on halting the actions of the Somali insurgent group al-Shabab which it blames for the recent flow of illegal weapons into the country as well as the abductions.
Kenya’s President Mwai Kibaki addressed the issue saying, “Our borders are porous and it is not a place where you can totally keep al-Shabab at bay. But we are trying our best.”
Al-Shabab militants are being blamed for the abduction of three foreign aid workers in Kenya over the weekend, an act that apparently went unchallenged. The Islamic militants have also been seen trying to recruit young men outside a Kenyan school. The group is currently waging an intense war against the Western-backed Somali government and has launched a series of attacks inside the capital city of Mogadishu.
Background
The instability which periodically plagues the Kenya-Somalia border area is part of a broader, complex pattern of state failure and communal violence afflicting much of the Horn of Africa, so states the report “Kenya-Somalia Border Conflict,” published by the United States Agency for International Development.
Chronic instability along the Kenya-Somalia border zone is part of a larger pattern of state failure, lawlessness, and communal violence afflicting the Kenyan border areas from Uganda to Somalia, frequently described as “not peace not war.” Local communities suffer levels of displacement and casualties akin to civil war, but in a context of sporadic, low-intensity communal clashes punctuated by extended periods of uneasy peace. Spoilers embrace armed conflict not in pursuit of victory but to create conditions of “durable disorder” from which they profiteer. Conventional conflict prevention and management approaches have generally been frustrated in the face of these unconventional conflict dynamics.
Violence and lawlessness are particularly acute in remote border areas where states in the region have never projected much authority. When they have, state authorities have sometimes been the catalysts of insecurity rather than promoters of peace. On the Somali side of the border, the central government collapsed in January 1991 and has yet to be revived. In Kenya, the vast, remote, and arid frontier areas bordering Somalia, Ethiopia, Sudan, and Uganda were never entirely brought under the control of the state in either colonial or post-colonial eras. Thousands of Kenyans have died in periodic communal violence in these border areas over the past fifteen years, in clashes which sometimes produce casualties levels normally associated with civil wars. Kenyan government administration of its peripheral territory ranges from weak to non-existent. There, government outposts are essentially garrisons; police and military units are reluctant to patrol towns after dark, and are badly out-gunned by local militias. “Even the police are never safe here,” lamented one Kenyan newspaper headline.
The United States Agency for International Development identified the following issues which contribute to the Kenya-Somalia border conflict:
Key Structural Sources of Border Area Conflict
• The level of poverty, unemployment, and underdevelopment in the Kenya-Somalia border area is among the highest in the country and is a major contributor to crime, insecurity, and alienation.
• Environmental degradation of rangelands contributes to increased communal competition and pastoral conflicts over water and rangeland are endemic. A long and on-going western expansionism by Somali pastoralists at the expense of other groups contributes to periodic clashes over land.
• Competition over new and growing urban settlements is a more immediate driver of conflict in the Kenya-Somalia border area. Towns and villages are important sites of trade and aid. On the Kenyan side of the border “locations” serve as seats
of local government, conferring upon those who control them paid positions as chiefs and assistant chiefs and control over local patronage.
• Dramatic expansion of cross-border commerce from Somalia into Kenya has had a variable affect on conflict, at time serving as a force for cross-clan collaboration and basic security, and at other times producing conflict over control of key trade routes.
• Competing clans increasingly view control over locations not merely in administrative terms but as a means for establishing exclusionary zones within which they can evict or block other clans from access to pasture and business activities. The result is misuse of locations to engage in localized ethnic cleansing, which in turn greatly increases the political stakes for control over locations.
• Recent attempts to revive the state-building exercises inside Somalia have contributed to armed violence on the Somali side of the border, especially in El Wak, where the Marehan and Garre clans are jostling fiercely to expand or maintain their control over land in order to maximize the number of parliamentary and cabinet seats they hope to claim.
• The trend toward clan or tribally-based locations in Kenya, ethno-states in Ethiopia, and proportional clan-based representation in Somalia’s nascent federal government has led to a “hardening” of ethnic identities in northern Kenya (where identity was previously more flexible and nuanced) and some ethnic groups now face an increasingly exclusionist political environment.
• Spillover from protracted state collapse in Somalia has been a major driver of conflict in the border areas, producing destabilizing flows of refugees, gun-smuggling, banditry, warfare, and clan tensions. But Somalia’s collapsed state is not the sole or even most important source of insecurity in northern Kenya.
• Some Kenyan state actors have been a source of conflict rather than a source of prevention and mediation. Under the previous administration, government officers reportedly were complicit in commercialized livestock rustling in the region. Today, some Members of Parliament in the region are accused of fomenting ethnic tensions in pursuit of parochial political gain.
• On both sides of the border, the arrival of newcomer, or galti, clansmen has been a major source of destabilization. The outsiders are members of local clans but hail from other regions, are typically much better armed, and are not stakeholders in local peace processes. Much of the internal conflicts plaguing the Marehan clan in Gedo region are animated by tensions between indigenous (guri) and galti Marehan. The current conflict in El Wak has drawn heavily on outside Marehan from Kismayo and Garre militia from Ethiopia.
Key Precipitating Factors and Accelerators of Border Area Conflict
• Acts of crime – principally stolen vehicles, rape, and murder – are typically the sparks which produce widespread communal violence. Even clans with historically close ties have had difficulty preventing reprisal attacks which then provoke larger cycles of violence. Use of the border by criminals to escape apprehension aggravates the problem.
• Outside elements – political and business leaders in Nairobi, merchants from outside clans, the diaspora, and the galti interests noted above – have exploited or fomented inter-clan tensions in the region for a variety of reasons. Though local communities at times exaggerate this factor to absolve themselves of responsibility, there have been several instances in which interests in Nairobi or Mogadishu have accelerated local conflicts with military assistance or political meddling.
• Local spoilers have exploited local tensions and blocked reconciliation efforts in pursuit of their political or economic interests. Warlordism is no longer as acute a problem today as in the early 1990s, but some spoilers remain, particularly those local actors operating businesses which rely on humanitarian aid contracts.
• The proliferation of small arms in the border area has increased the flammability of local conflicts and increased the carnage of local raids. Customary clan law and blood compensation mechanisms, designed to manage small numbers of casualties, are overwhelmed by raids and attacks in which dozens of people die.
Key Sources of Conflict Prevention and Management
• Though the Kenya-Somalia border area remains chronically insecure and prone to flare-ups of deadly violence, the region is dramatically more secure than was the case in the early 1990s. Understanding the sources of this improved peace and security, offers important clues to managing insecurity in other troubled, ungoverned border zones in the Horn of Africa.
• Since the mid 1990’s, the Kenyan government has been willing but unable to extend its authority into the border regions. The result has been a “mediated state” arrangement, in which the Kenyan government partners with local non-state, civic, and traditional actors to fulfill core functions including conflict mediation, cross-border diplomacy, and the dispensation of justice, normally associated with the state, For communities along the Kenyan-Somali border the mediated state approach is a major departure in local experience with the state.
• The local partners which the Kenyan government works through in this mediated state system are organized in local Peace Committees (PCs), umbrella groups of local CBOs, including traditional clan elders and a government representative. The PCs have varied in performance, but overall have been the single most important factor in the dramatic reversal of anarchy and insecurity in the region.
• The PCs success is due to several key features – a good functional relationship with the Kenyan government, which has generally given the PCs adequate space and autonomy to operate; strong local ownership; commitment and knowledge of local conflicts; open, flexible membership combining traditional and civic leadership; international financial support; a strong spillover effect, in which one successful PC is emulated by others in other regions and across the border; and a nascent institutional learning capacity, in which lessons are shared by PCs from one region to the next.
• Reliance on customary clan law and traditional elders to enforce it has at times played an important role in managing conflict and reducing or deterring crime.
• Religious leadership, including Islamic leadership, has played a prominent role in pressuring local parties to reach accords. For example, in Mandera, the recent Murille-Garre accord was reached largely due to mediation by the Supreme Council of Kenyan Muslims (SUPKEM).
• Because most of the economic activity in the region is long-distance commerce, which requires safe roads, business partnerships and interests generally work toward peace and security in the region. Most commercial ventures require cross-clan partnerships to insure access and protection, and those cross-clan partnerships provide lines of communication and shared interests.
Policy Considerations: Addressing the Mediated State
• For Kenya’s northern border areas, the mediated state approach may be the only alternative to anarchy in the short to medium term. As an approach to state-building, it has a number of advantages. It is flexible with regard to selection of local partners; it provides the state with governing partners who possess deep knowledge of local affairs and who are real stakeholders in promoting peace; and it allows external aid agencies seeking to assist with both state-building and conflict prevention the opportunity to work both to improve government capacity and provide local CBOs with needed support.
• The flexible mediated-state system of governance is evolving in a number of other “willing but not able” states in Africa, but Kenya appears to be the most advanced case. The Kenyan experiment thus warrants close monitoring and could develop as an important model for lessons learned that could be applied elsewhere.
• Assistance to the mediated state can and should take a number of forms, from direct financial support to the PCs to support for state offices liaising with PCs to the convening of workshops allowing PCs from different regions to share lessons.
• Care must be taken not to compromise the PCs through too close an affiliation with external aid agencies. This is especially the case in sensitive border areas like northern Kenya, where Western counter-terrorism (CT) efforts are prominent and where any local linkage with Western agencies may be misconstrued and lives put at risk.
• As a framework for state-building, the mediated state model may be of even greater utility in Somalia, where most anticipate the emergence of a weak government which will depend on local intermediaries to help govern its remote frontier zones for the foreseeable future.
• In both Somalia and Kenya, support to local PCs is a complement to, not a substitute for, the larger enterprise of building state capacity to govern its hinterlands.
Policy Considerations: Addressing Structural Drivers of Conflict in the Border Area
• Strengthening the governing capacity of the mediated state helps local communities manage conflicts, but does little to address the underlying sources of conflict afflicting the border area. A more comprehensive conflict prevention policy must also address key conflict drivers themselves.
• Several of the conflict drivers noted in this analysis may be ripe for external assistance, including the need for clarification of political, economic, and pastoral rights within locations in Kenya. Programs which provide the Kenyan government and legal aid offices with the capacity to reshape local understanding of the rights of citizenship and to enforce the laws will go a long way toward eliminating the emerging threat of ethnic cleansing in Kenya’s burgeoning new locations in the northeast.
• Endemic poverty and low levels of education in the border areas are other major conflict drivers which urgently need attention. Local residents consistently cite lack of access to education as a major impediment for regional development, and international aid agency data back them up.
• Aid interventions which can build upon existing commercial cross-clan networks and increase the business community’s capacity to serve as a line of communication and promoter of open roads and peace would serve the region well.
Comments