Muslim faithful resolved this week to organise mass action, including street protests, beginning this Friday to compel the Kenyan government to end what they are calling extraordinary ”renditions” and holding terrorism suspects incommunicado.
The decision follows the disappearance last Sunday of a leading anti-rendition campaigner, Farah Mohammed Abdullahi, after he questioned the continued incarceration of his younger brother, Abdi Mohammed Abdullahi, in Somalia. Police arrested Abdi early this year on suspicion of being a key member of an al-Qaeda cell in Kenya.
Rendition — or the act of transferring terror suspects to detention camps outside their countries for interrogation — has become a fashionable means of flushing out potential terrorists and sidestepping run-ins with human rights activists.
Abdi Abdullahi was rendered to lawless Somalia, a known haven for al-Qaeda, where about 100 Kenyans suspected of involvement in terrorism are being held, according to a report published last month by the Muslim Human Rights Forum.
Lawyers representing the two brothers advised family members not to comment on the matter, lest the authorities target them for expressing solidarity with their kin.
A senior forum official, Al Amin Kimathi, said on Tuesday that Muslims in the East African nation are outraged ”by the selective manner they were being targeted in the war against terrorism”.
”Given the discriminatory manner of the arrests and renditions, we’re apprehensive that more arrests are on the way,” Kimathi told the Mail & Guardian when the human rights group met in Nairobi on Tuesday to plan its strategy to press for the release or repatriation of deportees.
The disappearance of Abdullahi, a Kenyan, brings to five the number of alleged terrorism suspects who have gone missing since June and who Muslim leaders suspect have been abducted by the anti-terrorism police unit and ”rendered” to either Ethiopia or Somalia or are being held incommunicado at secret locations.
His disappearance and subsequent condemnation by Muslim leaders has raised security concerns over imminent al-Qaeda reprisals in Nairobi and Mombasa, where security is on high alert.
The two cities bore the brunt of al-Qaeda-sponsored attacks in bombings in 1998 and 2002 in protest against Kenya’s cooperation with the United States and Britain on counter-terrorism activities.
The proximity of Mombasa to the Middle East and the porosity of Kenya’s Indian Ocean coastline have placed the country in the eye of international terrorism.
At the height of renditions in June this year, a hand grenade exploded at a busy Nairobi bus terminus, killing a bystander and injuring 40 others.
Police linked the grenade attack to recent government policy blocking Somali nationals seeking asylum from entering Kenya.
Kimathi said this week that Abdullahi might have been spirited out of the country to Ethiopia to join 26 other al-Qaeda suspects arrested in Kenya in April. ”We have petitioned the minister for internal security [John Michuki] to issue a statement over the arbitrary arrests and renditions of Muslim faithfuls without success.” He said he did not believe the US was involved in the incident.
”This is the work of the anti-terrorism police unit. From the scanty information we have, the US has nothing to do with the latest rendition,” he said.
”We are seeing a pattern that is developing where the police act as if they are a law unto themselves and the government does not even come to heed the cries to have the human rights and the legal rights of suspects adhered to,” Kimathi said.
Similar condemnation has come from the Kenya National Commission of Human Rights, a government body, which criticised the police this week for targeting Muslims.
So far, however, the Kenyan government appears to remain indifferent to the criticism from home and abroad, despite prompting from the media and parliament.
Since it supported last year’s US-backed Ethiopian ousting of the Islamic Courts Union in neighbouring Somalia, the Kenyan government has come under stinging criticism for human rights violations.
A report commissioned by the human rights commission and the forum and published last month notes: ”The Kenya government … facilitated the invasion of Somalia by Ethiopian forces that launched their forays from within Kenyan territory … This enabled the Ethiopian ground forces to rout the erstwhile Union of Islamic Courts (UIC) fighters with the aid of US aerial bombardments that resulted in heavy civilian casualties.”
It adds: ”Perhaps most diabolical for the Kenyan government was its role in the rendition to Somalia of at least 20 Kenyans [since January], alongside the detained foreigners and the extraordinary rendition of the Kenyan sent to Guantanamo Bay.”
The nationalities of those who have been rendered by the Kenyan government include citizens of the US, Britain, France, Canada, Sweden, Ethiopia, Eritrea, Tunisia, Oman, Yemen, Rwanda, Tanzania, Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates, Sudan, Uganda, Syria, the Comoros Islands, Morocco and Jordan.