Collateral diplomacy: Kenya’s diplomatic failure with Somalia

In March 2020 President Kenyatta warned Somalia to ‘stop and desist from unwarranted provocations’ from what he termed as ‘provoking Kenya by violating her territorial integrity’. Fast forward to March 2021, Kenya pulls out of the Kenya-Somali maritime dispute hearing at the International Court of Justice and then gives a 14 day ultimatum for the closure of the Dadaab and Kakuma camps, a cruel and dangerous declaration that unfortunately is not new within Kenya’s band-aid diplomatic solutions to ensure regional state dominance and entitlement.

It is necessary to note the lack of clarity surrounding the issuance of the closure of the refugee camps, as the main concern given by the government of Kenya is national security. However, multiple humanitarian organizations have dismissed links between terrorism and the camps as the government hasn’t shared any justifiable and credible data to back these claims. Therefore, the opaque nature of these perennial declarations gives rise to the surety that Kenya’s threats to close the camps are a direct form of using refugee lives as collateral to push international donors into settling funding capacity and unknown deals. Kenya has actively engaged in undermining Somalia’s sovereignty and statehood with no accord to restore the two countries’ already precarious ties, while continually discriminating against Cushitic communities within Kenya all through the first presidency.

The discourse involving the two camps that host a majority of Cushitic communities revolves around the constant pathologizing of Somalia as a hub of violence inhabited by deficient citizens whose government is predestined for failure and crisis. This superficial sense of Kenyan nationalism is linked to xenophobia with a deliberate reduction of Somalia to a failed state. Such discourse continues to advocate tougher border deterrence and protection that seeks to prevent Cushitic communities from entering Kenya.

Kenya’s actions have been influenced by its proximity to empire and have always looked at Somalia as an imminent threat, therefore allowing the state to look at Kenyan Cushitic tribes as an imminent threat. Kenya’s long reign of terror in Somalia is not a new phenomenon.  Even before the Kenya Defence Force’s invasion of Somalia in October 2011 through ‘Operation Linda Nchi’ and later joining of the neoliberal imperialist AMISOM Command with the main agenda of combatting Al-Shabaab, Kenya has had a history of trivializing its Somali citizens and waging direct attacks towards Somalia’s sovereignty. Of all the three major massacres with over 2500 fatalities in post-independent Kenya, all have been state sanctioned atrocities in Kenya’s north-eastern regions.

In 1980, the Garissa massacre saw the brutal killing, abuse and raping of Somali residents of Garissa town over a span of three days with fatalities of over 3000. In turn, the Supreme Revolutionary Council led government of Somalia threatened to overthrow the Nairobi regime and occupy the country. In retaliation the Kenyan government unconditionally released the detainees and evacuated the area. Four years later, we saw the same short-sighted action of the Kenyan regime where Kenyan troops occupied Wajir town and over three days killed over 5,000 ethnic Somalis on the Wagalla Airstrip. The commissioner of the later established Truth, Justice and Reconciliation Commission acknowledged that the Wagalla massacre represented the worst human rights violation in Kenya’s history.

In turn the rhetoric remains, who exactly are the criminals in question as until the 1998 bombing of the United States embassy in Nairobi, there were no prior attacks in recent times waged by Somalia. To cement domination, this was the beginning of the larger front of the war on terror and counter-terrorism efforts that were later solidified by President Kibaki’s administration with the incumbent’s willingness to position Kenya as an ally to the USA and an aide to the West. All the presidents in Kenya’s history have a long history of subjugating Somalis and enabling violent anti-cushitic rhetoric, and President Kenyatta’s administration is an example of Kenya’s imperialism backed diplomacy in Somalia.

According to a report by watchdog organization ‘Journalists for justice’ in 2015, top Kenya Defence Forces (KDF) officials within AMISOM have been involved in colluding with Al-Shabaab in an illicit export operation of sugar and charcoal worth between $200 and $400 million USD per year. The trade has become a key financial lifeline for Al-Shabaab, the terrorist group it’s there to fight.

If Kenya was actively genuine in her desire to reduce the entry of Somali refugees, the first action would be ending its illegal occupation of Somalia’s Southern Border and the withdrawal of Kenyan troops from Somalia. Engaging with the lives of already disenfranchised refugees as collateral is not just immoral but also in contempt of international law. As of now, there is almost no way in which refugees can access Kenya other than means deemed illegal, therefore already adding to the risks they are to face upon entry. Such actions by the government are short-sighted and cynical as they deny refugees the chance of community re-integration. What makes it even more difficult is that the country  trying to  evict them from the temporary settlements in Kakuma and Dadaab is the same one  militarizing and policing their homes back in Somalia.

The denialism of humanity and the concurrent placing of refugees as statistics and disposable collateral allows the support of such actions by the citizenry, however we must understand that these refugees are not just statistics, they are humans with emotions who have been forcefully expelled from their homes. The use of imperial spatial management to ‘host’ these refugees allows the continuous statisizing of these lives and the continual undermining of their humanity which leads to the implementation of non-human centred policies and laws that will eventually increase the risk of violence on these populations and groups.

The environment in Dadaab and Kakuma in itself is already hanging by a thread. In an article by Sally Hayden, residents explain that life in both settlements can be difficult and especially with the continuous disruption and curtailing of their movement, however for many of these residents these camps have been and continue to be  their homes. These camps contain refugees in carceral like conditions with minimal care and protection, with continuous surveillance and the prevention of free movement thus forcing the refugees to remain in these areas of settlement.

Kenya’s authoritarian border ‘protection’ and refugee settlement focuses on the fallacies of purist refugee stereotypes to determine who is a refugee and who is not. Unfortunately, such a mechanism creates violent stereotypes that are targeted at excluding refugees en masse from acquiring refugee status and fall back onto the generalization of ‘undocumented’ persons denying them human dignity. In the case of the Cushitic communities, I argue that Kenya continues using the purist refugee mentality and policies, to manipulate refugees and use the imperialist tactics of divide and conquer to exclusively deny Cushitic communities access to Kenya.  For as long as Kenya has existed it has seen Somalia as an enemy and this manifests in identity, where it now seems all Somalis’ who do not fit Kenya’s standards of a ‘good Somali’ are deemed as prospective terror threats.

The threat to close the camps is not a deterrence measure or matter of national security as the ministry is promoting to Kenyans, but rather it is a cynical policy that seeks to rubber-stamp the basic tenets of an increasingly fascist government and using national security to absolve accountability for contravention of international law.