June 23, 2010
Dr. Muhammad Shamsaddin Megalommatis
The unacceptable, inhumane and racist treatment of the numerous Somali refugees in Kenya is an open wound throughout East Africa, and testifies to the cruel, colonial and Freemasonic identity of the most loathed local regime.
Worse, this policy triggers reaction and spreads fanaticism and extremism from Mozambique to Egypt; it thus plays into the evil game of Western secret services-promoted Islamic Terrorism, because due to the continued existence of the colonial regimes of Abyssinia ad Kenya radical political groups manage to recruit more members and more adepts.
The subject became the topic of a comprehensive Report elaborated by the leading international NGO Human Rights Watch. I will therefore republish the entire Report that should be taken into consideration by European and North American administrations while shaping their – insofar failed – East African policies.
Similarly with Abyssinia (fake Ethiopia), Kenya must be broken to several pieces - countries so that the therein imprisoned and terrorized nations, once liberated and organized as democratic societies, serve as perfect break waves against the rise of the East African Islamic extremism tsunami.
In forthcoming articles, I will reproduce further parts of the Report, which under the title "Welcome to Kenya – Police Abuse of Somali Refugees" was published a few days ago. In the present article, I republish the related Press Release, the Table of Contents, and the Summary.
Kenya: Police Abuse Somali Refugees
Government, UN, Donors Should Address Widespread Violence, Degrading Detention, Extortion, and Policing Failures
Kenyan police at the Somali border and in nearby refugee camps are abusing asylum seekers and refugees fleeing war-torn Somalia, Human Rights Watch said in a report released today. Kenya should immediately rein in its abusive police, and the UN refugee agency should step up its monitoring of the situation and press for an end to the abuses, Human Rights Watch said.
Based on interviews with over 100 refugees, the 99-page report, "´Welcome to Kenya': Police Abuse of Somali Refugees," documents widespread police extortion of asylum seekers trying to reach three camps near the Kenyan town of Dadaab, the world's largest refugee settlement. Police use violence, arbitrary arrest, unlawful detention in inhuman and degrading conditions, threats of deportation, and wrongful prosecution for "unlawful presence" to extort money from the new arrivals - men, women, and children alike. In some cases, police also rape women. In early 2010 alone, hundreds, and possibly thousands, of Somalis unable to pay extortion demands were sent back to Somalia, in flagrant violation of Kenyan and international law.
"People fleeing the mayhem in Somalia, the vast majority women and children, are welcomed to Kenya with rape, whippings, beatings, detention, extortion, and summary deportation," said Gerry Simpson, refugee researcher for Human Rights Watch and principal author of the report. "Once in the camps, some refugees face more police violence and the police turn a blind eye to sexual violence by other refugees and local Kenyans."
Dozens of asylum seekers from among the estimated 40,000 Somalis who crossed Kenya's officially closed border near the camps in the first four months of 2010 told Human Rights Watch that police ignored their pleas for free passage from the border. Instead, the police demanded money and deported or detained, beat, and falsely charged them with unlawful presence if they could not pay. A Kenyan refugee aid worker described the police operation between the border and Garissa, the provincial capital, as "one big money-making machine."
"Welcome to Kenya" also documents how the threat of police interception and related abuses forces most asylum seekers to travel toward the camps on small paths away from the main road. There they are also vulnerable to attacks from common criminals, who prey upon them, raping women and stealing the little money they have.
Once in the camps, refugees continue to face police violence, according to the report. Police have failed to prevent, investigate, and prosecute sexual violence against refugee women and girls in the camps by other refugees and Kenyans, creating a culture of impunity and increasing the risk of sexual violence.
The report also examines Kenya's illegal policy of prohibiting the vast majority of refugees registered in the camps from travelling to other parts of Kenya, unless they have special permission for reasons such as medical appointments or education in Nairobi. Under international law, Kenya must justify any such prohibition as the least restrictive measure necessary to protect national security, public order, or public health, which it has failed to do. In 2009, the authorities allowed only 6,000 of Dadaab's almost 300,000 refugees to travel outside the squalid and overcrowded camps.
The report documents how police arrest refugees travelling without - and increasingly those with - government-issued "movement passes," extort money from them, and sometimes take them to court in Garissa, where they are fined or sent to prison.
"Welcome to Kenya" contends that the organized nature of the police's extortion racket and abuses - extending almost 200 kilometers from the border town of Liboi through the town of Dadaab to Garissa - is the direct result of Kenya's three-year-old decision to close the border. Human Rights Watch said that the related closing of a refugee transit center in Liboi, 15 kilometers from the border and 80 kilometers from the camps, has only made matters worse.
Before it closed, the Liboi transit center was a safe place where the vast majority of Somali asylum seekers first sought refuge in Kenya and from which the UN refugee agency, the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR), transported them to the camps. Without the center, an estimated 300,000 Somalis fleeing their country to Kenya since January 2007 - half of whom have gone to the camps - have had to use smugglers to cross the border. The police take advantage of the clandestine nature of their journey, falsely accusing them of unlawfully entering Kenya and threatening arrest if they don't pay money the police demand.
Under Kenya's Refugee Act, all asylum seekers have 30 days after entering Kenya to travel to the nearest refugee authorities to register as refugees, regardless of how or where they entered the country. But the police routinely ignore this right. Echoing Human Rights Watch's recommendations to the Kenyan authorities in a March 2009 report, "From Horror to Hopelessness," the new report reiterates its call on the authorities to open a new center in Liboi where newly arrived asylum seekers can be screened and from which they can be safely transported to the camps.
"For more than three years the closed border has benefitted no one except corrupt police officers and has led to untold abuses against hundreds, if not thousands, of asylum seekers," Simpson said. "Kenya needs to guarantee safe passage and protection to Somalia's vulnerable refugees."
The Kenyan government has real security concerns relating to the Somali conflict, but its anti-Somali political rhetoric has only reinforced the abusive police behavior, Human Rights Watch said. Asylum seekers say that police accuse them of belonging to the Somali insurgent group Al-Shabaab or to Al Qaeda, or of being "terrorists" before - in some cases - forcing them back to Somalia. Based on eight cases involving the forced return to Somalia of 152 people that Human Rights Watch documented during its research in March 2010, Human Rights Watch believes it is likely that police have returned hundreds, if not thousands, of Somalis to their country in early 2010 alone.
International law prohibits the forcible return of refugees to persecution, torture or situations of generalized violence. Although Kenya has the right to prevent certain people from entering or remaining in Kenya - including those reasonably regarded as a threat to its national security, such as al-Shabaab members - it may not close its borders to asylum seekers. International law also forbids the authorities from deporting asylum seekers back to Somalia without first allowing them to apply for asylum.
"The police say they are protecting Kenya from terrorists and are enforcing immigration laws when they stop refugees," Simpson said. "But the fact that they extort Somalis to pay their way through checkpoints and out of police custody suggests more concern for lining their pockets than protecting their borders."
The report calls on the UN refugee agency to improve its monitoring and advocacy with the authorities and to make more frequent visits to police stations near the border, the town of Dadaab and Garissa.
With regard to sexual violence, victims told Human Rights Watch that the police either ignore their complaints, tell them to produce evidence, or abruptly drop the cases without explanation. In the rare event that police arrest alleged attackers, the suspects are usually released within hours or days, with little hope for further questioning or accountability. Many women believe their alleged attackers successfully bribe the police to drop investigations or to let the suspects go.
Human Rights Watch said that despite some improvements since the early 1990s, the government's response to sexual violence in the camps fails because there are too few police in the camps with skills to investigate these crimes and because there is inadequate supervision of police handling of these cases.
"Nearly two decades into their existence, the camps remain a place where justice for rape victims is the exception and impunity for perpetrators the rule," said Meghan Rhoad, researcher with Human Rights Watch's Women's Rights Division, who wrote the section of the report on sexual violence. "The refugee women and girls who bravely come forward and report sexual violence to the police deserve better."
Based on interviews with over 100 refugees, this 99-page report documents widespread police extortion of asylum seekers trying to reach three camps near the Kenyan town of Dadaab, the world's largest refugee settlement. Police use violence, arbitrary arrest, unlawful detention in inhuman and degrading conditions, threats of deportation, and wrongful prosecution for "unlawful presence" to extort money from the new arrivals - men, women, and children alike. In some cases, police also rape women. In early 2010 alone, hundreds, and possibly thousands, of Somalis unable to pay extortion demands were sent back to Somalia, in flagrant violation of Kenyan and international law.
Kenyan police wearing green uniforms in three cars stopped us a few kilometers before Liboi. The driver talked to them in a language I did not understand, but some of the other passengers understood and said they were the police. At one point they said to the driver, "All men here will be weighed and according to their weight they will give us money – and if they can´t pay, then give us the passengers." Then they took the men, including my husband, away in a car, leaving the rest of us, seven women with several children. The police told us to get out of the bus. They put me and two women with children to one side. I was pregnant. Then four of them took the other women into the bush. They held us in the bush for three days. On the third day, two of the policemen brought the women back. We knew something bad had happened because they were walking slowly and limping. They had scratches, their clothes were torn, some were barefoot, and one woman had blood on the bottom half of her dress. One was crying. They all looked like they were in shock. They said the police had beaten them. The driver said he thought they had been raped because otherwise they would have also taken all the women and because they could have just beaten us all where we were, next to the bus. Later that day, the police brought back the men and allowed us to leave. The men said the police had beaten them and stolen their money. Human Rights Watch interview (1), Ifo camp, March 9, 2010.
The police said, "You are all in trouble - everyone will be weighed." The driver´s assistant said the police wanted us to pay them money so we could pass. Then some of the police took us eight men to Liboi police station. Others stayed behind with the women. The police held us for three days and two nights in a cell about 3m x 4m. They gave us no food or water. We had to use the cell floor as a toilet. On the second day six policemen tied our hands behind our backs and made us lie down on the floor. They searched our pockets. Some of us struggled and they kicked and punched us. They turned me around. Three of them beat my chest with their rifle butts and two stamped on my chest. Another put his boot on the side of my face. I still have problems breathing. On the third day we heard the police on the phone, discussing with the driver we had left in the bush. That evening they drove us back to the same spot where we had left the bus. The women, children, the driver, and his assistant were all there. We heard one of the officers tell the driver to give him money. Then they let us go.
Human Rights Watch interview (2), Ifo camp, March 9, 2010. Wife (interview 1) and husband (interview 2) were interviewed by two different researchers in different locations at the same time.
"We were treated like animals in a truck."
Refugee detained at the Garissa police station, in Kenya´s North Eastern Province.
Kenya´s reputation for hospitality towards Somali refugees is turning sour. Two decades after they first started to flee the brutal conflict in their country, Kenya provides asylum to 325,000 registered Somali refugees—and probably an equal number who have not registered. No one doubts the weight of the burden. But the authorities´ increasing demonization of these refugees—80 percent of whom are women and children— as a national security threat has made them among the most vulnerable victims of Kenya´s notoriously corrupt and abusive police force.
Near Kenya´s officially closed border with Somalia, police have free rein to intercept as many as possible of the estimated 10,000 mostly Somali asylum seekers who cross the border every month with the help of people smugglers. Making no distinction between women, children, and men, police often use violence, unlawful detention in appalling overcrowded conditions, and threats of deportation to extort money from them. Some police officers rape women near the border. During the first ten weeks of 2010, hundreds, if not thousands, of Somali asylum seekers unable to pay were unlawfully sent back to Somalia.
The widespread threat of police interception and abuses forces most asylum seekers to travel on small paths away from the main road between the border and the refugee camps, where common criminals (often described by asylum seekers as "men not wearing uniform") also prey upon them, raping women and stealing the little they have.
About half of all Somalis fleeing to Kenya register in the world´s largest refugee settlement, made up of three overcrowded refugee camps near the town of Dadaab in north-east Kenya, now hosting almost 300,000 people. The other half make their way to Nairobi, Kenya´s capital, where very few are able to register as refugees due to the limited capacity of the government and the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR). In the camps, police responsible for protecting refugees sometimes detain, assault, and extort money from them. Police have also failed to investigate cases of sexual violence between refugees, leading to a climate of impunity for those responsible.
Kenya currently unlawfully confines refugees to camps, denying them their freedom of movement and choice of residence, in contravention of the 1951 Refugee Convention, although thousands have also registered in Nairobi. Under this policy, police arrest refugees travelling without (and at times with) permission, extort money, and sometimes take them to court in Garissa where they are fined or sent to prison.
Only by handing over money to police—either when intercepted in the border areas, or while detained in the Liboi, Dadaab, and Garissa police stations—can refugees pay their way out of the abuse and intimidation.
The systematic and widespread nature of the extortion racket and related abuses by police officers are a direct result of Kenya´s three-year-old border closure and the related closure of a refugee transit center in the Kenyan town of Liboi, 15 kilometers from the border and 80 kilometers from the camps. The transit center previously served as a safe place where the vast majority of Somalis fleeing their country first sought refuge in Kenya and from where UNHCR transported them to the camps. Without it, police have turned the border closure to their advantage, setting up what in the words of a Kenyan who works with Somali refugees is "one big money-making machine." Kenyan authorities´ increasingly anti-Somali political rhetoric, particularly after a Somali Islamist group´s threat to attack the capital, Nairobi, has helped justify the police´s abusive behavior against Somalis.
Police arresting newly arrived Somali asylum seekers incorrectly tell them they are unlawfully in Kenya and charge them with offenses under Kenya´s Immigration Act which prohibits entry into Kenya without documents and a visa. But the Act does not apply to asylum seekers who, under Kenya´s Refugee Act, have 30 days from the moment they enter the country to register as refugees with the authorities at the nearest office of the Kenyan Refugee Commissioner. For Somalis crossing overland from Somalia, that means the Dadaab camps.
International refugee and human rights law prohibit refoulement, the forcible return of refugees to persecution, of anyone to torture and, in Africa, of civilians to situations of generalized violence. Kenya has every right to regulate the presence of non-nationals on its territory and may therefore normally prevent certain people from entering or remaining in Kenya—including those viewed as a threat to its national security such as members of the Somali Islamist group al-Shabaab. But Kenya may not close its borders to asylum seekers and may not deport them, or registered refugees, back to Somalia.
The fact that police in the border areas allow intercepted asylum seekers to pay their way through checkpoints to reach the camps suggests that personal gain—not national security concerns—is the real reason police arrest, threaten, and falsely charge them with unlawful presence.
Although refugees are victims of police abuses in the border areas and the camps, they nonetheless rely on the police to protect them against crimes by private individuals, including the sexual violence against women and girls that has long plagued the camps and their surroundings. But women and girls who have suffered sexual violence describe an utterly inadequate police response to sexual violence.
The government maintains that police are instructed to conduct proper and timely investigations. However, survivors say their complaints are often ignored rather than investigated, at other times are put on hold while police ask them to produce evidence against the alleged perpetrator, or are abruptly dropped without explanation. In the rare event that the police arrest alleged attackers, survivors say that in most cases the police release them hours or days later and take no further action in investigating or prosecuting the offense. Many women say that alleged attackers have successfully bribed the police to prevent investigations from taking place or to secure their release if arrested.
Kenya´s international and regional human rights commitments oblige the authorities to prevent, investigate, prosecute, and punish violence against all women—including refugee women—in Kenya. There has been important progress in the police´s response to sexual violence during the camps´ nearly two-decade-long existence. Sexual and gender-based violence cases can be prosecuted in a mobile court in Dadaab town every month and the Dagahaley police station has a gender desk to handle these cases. Two more gender desks are planned for Ifo and Hagadera camps. However, the government has not put in place the required police numbers, training, and supervision. Consequently, justice for sexual violence survivors in the camps remains the exception and impunity for perpetrators the rule.
Over a period of six days in the Dadaab camps in March 2010, Human Rights Watch interviewed 102 refugees about police abuses and sexual violence in and around the camps. Half of the interviewees spoke about police abuses, including excessive force leading to death and miscarriages, rape, whipping, beatings, and kicking. Fifteen said the police had arrested and detained them—together with around 220 other people—soon after they had entered Kenya. Eight said that the police had deported them, and 152 others, back to Somalia after they had failed to pay the police money. Despite the limited time Human Rights Watch had to conduct research in the camps, this number suggests that the abuses documented in this report are systematic and widespread.
UNHCR has failed to put in place an effective monitoring system to collect information on the types of abuses documented in this report. The UN refugee agency says that a number of factors have affected its ability to carry out its protection mandate: security concerns that restrict its work in the camps, a lack of human resources and financial capacity, and the absorption of its time and resources in addressing the myriad needs relating to the humanitarian situation in the chronically overcrowded and underfunded camps.
In response to a Human Rights Watch letter to the Kenyan authorities with a summary of this report´s findings, the Minister of State for Provincial Administration and Internal Security informed Human Rights Watch on May 5, 2010, that "any unlawful action that may have been taken by a police officer is not a reflection of government policy." He also said he had requested an investigating team to look into Human Rights Watch´s findings. The team is to prepare a report which the government "shall review … and test [in terms of] reliability." In addition, the Minister said that "if any police officer is found guilty of having participated in such atrocities, appropriate action in accordance with the law shall be taken." The team is made up of a Muslim cleric of Somali origin, two women representatives (a woman from the Dadaab area and a woman from a National Women´s Organization), a youth representative from Dadaab and a representative of the Refugee Consortium of Kenya. Human Rights Watch welcomes the Minister´s decision to set up an investigative team; but this is only a first step.
To help put an immediate end to the widespread abuses described in this report, the Kenyan authorities, UNHCR, and donor countries should take a number of urgent steps.
The Kenyan authorities should immediately instruct the police to end their systematic interception, detention, abuse, deportation, and extortion of asylum seekers crossing the border from Somalia and instruct them to allow asylum seekers to safely travel to the Dadaab refugee camps. The authorities should expedite their plans to open a new refugee screening center in Liboi to ensure the orderly registration of all newly arrived asylum seekers and allow all registered refugees in the camps to freely move throughout Kenya. The authorities should also introduce rigorous monitoring and supervision of police handling of sexual and gender-based violence in the camps by creating a national police task force on sexual violence against refugees in coordination with the National Commission on Gender and Development. Further, the police should ensure sufficient police capacity including through the stationing of female police officers to effectively prevent and respond to sexual violence.
UNHCR should swiftly introduce a new protection monitoring system in the camps to capture further information about abuses of the kind presented in this report and use such information to advocate on behalf of the victims and to prevent further abuses. UNHCR should frequently visit the Liboi, Dadaab, and Garissa police stations to monitor whether or not the police are unlawfully detaining asylum seekers and push for their release. UNHCR should also cooperate with the police in improving the police´s response to sexual violence, including by using UNHCR´s sexual violence data to develop a police patrolling program in the camps aimed at preventing sexual violence.
Donor governments should raise the abuses set out in this report with the Kenyan authorities and call on them to put an immediate end to these practices. They should call on the Kenyan authorities to ensure that all asylum seekers can access Kenyan territory to claim asylum and to expedite their plans to re-open the refugee screening center in Liboi. Donors should also push the authorities and UNHCR to ensure that newly-deployed police in the camps are specifically tasked with improving the police´s prevention of, and response to, sexual violence in the camps. Finally, donors should encourage UNHCR to carry out frequent monitoring in the Liboi, Dadaab, and Garissa police stations and fund UNHCR to set up a new protection monitoring system.
Source: The American Chronicle
