Our world-class appetite for money makes this a safe Shabaab playground
By MURITHI MUTIGA
Posted Saturday, July 7 2012 at 18:59
Posted Saturday, July 7 2012 at 18:59
At around the time Siad Barre was driven out of Mogadishu, leaving the shell of a state behind, a certain Saudi millionaire was watching those events from not too far away.
Osama bin Laden had been driven out of Saudi Arabia because he had become a nuisance to the royal family with his demands that American troops leave the Gulf.
He found a warm welcome in Omar al-Bashir’s Sudan. In fact, it is in Khartoum that al-Qaeda’s ideological foundations were solidified, with the help of fundamentalists fleeing from Hosni Mubarak’s crackdown on the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt.
(According to American journalist Lawrence Wright, who wrote the definitive account of al Qaeda’s road to 9/11, Osama was not content to spend all his time in Khartoum.
He loved horse racing and would occasionally appear at Nairobi’s Ngong Racecourse at weekends.
The experience was spoilt for him, the author says, because there was a lot of “heathen” music being played around the course, and Osama had to cup his ears to keep them from being polluted).
Anyway, Osama and his allies spotted an opportunity to spread al Qaeda’s tentacles into Somalia once the government fell.
David Shinn, a scholar and former American ambassador to Ethiopia, notes in the paper “Al-Shabaab’s foreign threat to Somalia,” that the first envoy bin Laden sent to the lawless country was his trusted lieutenant, Abu Hafs al Masri from Egypt.
Al-Qaeda saw Somalia as a low-cost environment where their organisation could thrive.
They started making arrangements to supply arms and train youth to hit American targets in the Horn and on the Arabian Peninsula, beginning in neighbouring Yemen.
After the initial scouting missions in 1992, the first al-Qaeda operatives left Peshawar, Pakistan, travelled through Kenya, and arrived in Somalia in February 1993.
But al-Qaeda soon had to scale back its operations in Somalia.
One of the reasons, Shinn notes, quoting declassified documents captured from Qaeda operatives, were the high bribes expected from Kenyan police and immigration officials to allow militants safe passage.
“Al-Qaeda underestimated the cost of operating in Somalia. Getting in and out of the country was costly, while expenses resulting from corruption in neighbouring states were high,” he writes.
Al-Qaeda soon decided it was easier to go to Afghanistan and the Afghan-Pakistan border areas where the Taliban had already established an infrastructure they could use.
More than anything else, the world-class appetite for bribes among Kenyan officials, even frontline actors whose most important mission is to keep the country safe, explains why the Shabaab are finding this one of the best places in which to operate.
Ethiopians generally have a fierce sense of patriotism and national pride that means the prospect of a ragtag militia operating there with impunity is remote indeed.
The Ugandan security forces are not the most disciplined, but maybe because the military is much more integrated in internal security operations there, they are uncompromising when it comes to external threats to their country.
In Kenya, for the right price, you can get anything you want. Nobody can tell for sure how many Somali nationals are in the country because we have sold them our national IDs and passports for years on end.
Marry that with the opportunistic sympathisers and radicals within our midst and you can see why the Shabaab see Kenya, whose military they cannot confront on the battlefield, as the best target in their mindless war.
mmutiga@ke.nationmedia.com
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