Unrest in Coastal Kenya

Coastal Kenya is a neglected region with a majority-Muslim population, mostly Mijikenda and Swahili, and a significant share of Somalis. Ethnic favoritism by the government, harsh police tactics, and activities of Al Shabab have stirred a secessionist movement and radical Islamism in the once-quiet region.

Kenya's coast—with the major port of Mombasa in the south and the tourist islands of Lamu County in the northeast—is economically weak and politically underserved compared to the inland regions around Nairobi. It is a sore point among "Coasterians" that inland people (especially from the influential Kikuyu group) have become rich from awards of coastal land. This issue energized the secessionist movement led by the Mombasa Republican Council. After the 2007 elections, political violence surged throughout Kenya and continued to rise in Muslim areas, especially after Kenyan troops crossed into Somalia in pursuit of Al Shabab. Radical clerics in the coastal region recruited for Al Shabab, reaching out to Mijikenda and Somali youth. Security forces used police-state tactics against all suspected Islamic or secessionist radicals. In 2014, attacks in Lamu County exposed the situation's complexity in coastal Kenya. While Al Shabab claimed responsibility for the attacks, the government blamed locals with a grudge against the Kikuyu. Both accounts are plausible.

Key Organizations

  • The Mombasa Republican Council, founded in 1999 and banned in 2010, advocates independence for the coastal region through peaceful means. The group is highly secretive and has been blamed for violence, including machete attacks against officials.
  • Al Shabab, the Al Qaeda affiliate in Somalia, conducts frequent raids into Kenya. After a purge of leadership in 2013, raids became larger, heavily armed, and ambitious. Al Shabab propaganda includes Internet and radio appeals to the coastal Kenyan majority in the Kiswahili language.
  • Kenya's Anti-Terrorism Police Unit (ATPU) is widely feared in Muslim communities. It has been accused of carrying out assassinations and renditions for the United States and Israel.

Key Events

  • 2002—International jihadists align with Al Qaeda to launch simultaneous attacks in Mombasa on an Israeli-owned hotel and an Israeli airliner.
  • 2008 —Nationwide riots after the December 2007 elections leave 1,100 dead and 600,000 displaced. In the coastal region, violence reflects anger at the Kikuyu, the inland ethnic group in control of the government.
  • 2011—Kenya sends troops into Somalia against Al Shabab, joining with the UN's AMISOM force.
  • 2012—Aboud Rogo, a cleric linked to Al Shabab, is the fifth Islamist leader to be killed or abducted this year.
  • 2013—About 200 men armed with guns, machetes, and bows and arrows ambush police on election day. The Mombasa Republican Council is accused but denies responsibility.
  • 2014—In June and July, gunmen attack hotels and police stations in Lamu County, leaving 100 dead. Al Shabab claims responsibility.
  • 2015—Al Shabab attacks and kills 148 people at Garissa University College.
  • 2018—The National Crime Research Centre (NCRC) identified forty-three gangs operating in Mombasa.
  • 2019—Officials recognize Mombasa as a major heroin and cocaine trafficking hub, totaling around 100 million euros. The 500-kilometer coastline allows these activities to go unnoticed.
  • 2020s—Violence resulting from the increased drug trade, the prevalence of gangs, and attacks by Al Shabab continued to grow.

Status

As violence spiked in mid-2014, political rhetoric heightened confusion in the region. President Uhuru Kenyatta said there was evidence that "local political networks" were responsible for the attacks, not Al Shabab. Kenya's leading newspaper, Daily Nation, commented that more time and resources were spent on attaching blame than restoring the coastal counties' security. Opponents of the government charge that fostering conflict is a deliberate policy to keep the region weak. An attack by Al Shabab in April 2015 that killed 147 at Garissa University College in the former North Eastern Province—in retaliation, the group said, for Kenyan involvement in Somalia and non-Muslims occupying Muslim land—further inflamed religious and ethnic tensions in the country. After these attacks, violence grew as Al Shabab gravitated toward Kenya as they were driven away from Somalia.

In-Depth Description

The people of coastal Kenya—living in six counties established under the 2010 constitution, formerly the Coast Province—are different from the rest of the country regarding ethnicity, history, and religion. The majority are Mijikenda, a group that branched off from the great Bantu migration to East Africa 2,000 years ago. Along the northeastern coast (Lamu County), the Swahili are descendants of Mijikendas, who intermarried with Arabs and Persians. The coastal population also includes Somalis and refugees, but most permanent residents. During the colonial era, inhabitants on the coast were governed as subjects of the Sultan of Zanzibar, while the people of the highland interior were British subjects. As a result, 80 percent of Kenya's population is Christian, but the majority on the coast is Muslim. The coastal region is about the size of South Carolina. In 2019, the population was 4.33 million, with a little more than a quarter living in Mombasa.

After Kenya gained independence in 1963, "Coasterians" looked with increasing disfavor on the government in Nairobi. Their region generally received less than its share of government spending, and projects that it did receive showed little benefit to residents. Fury built up for decades against Kikuyu politicians who sold public lands (appropriated from locals during the colonial era) to fellow Kikuyus. The Kikuyu—a Bantu people of the central highlands—are Kenya's largest demographic bloc, with 22 percent of the population. They have held the presidency from 1964 to 1978 and from 2002 to the present. In the violence that followed the 2007 presidential election, Coasterians sided with the Kalenjins in the Orange Democratic Movement against the Kikuyu.

The security environment in Kenya became tense after the 1998 bombing of the United States Embassy in Nairobi. In Mombasa, another Al Qaeda-style attack took place on November 28, 2002, as a vehicle bomb killed thirteen at the Paradise Hotel, and two shoulder-launched missiles were fired at an Israeli airliner during take-off but missed their target. These incidents brought an infusion of US support for security forces in Kenya. Muslim communities—Nairobi's Eastleigh neighborhood, Kenya's North Eastern Province (bordering Somalia), and along the coast—experienced increasing harassment and intimidation by the police and army. The Anti-Terrorism Police Unit (ATPU), organized in 2003, gained a reputation for taking direct action against suspects. The human rights group Open Society identified twenty people investigated by the ATPU who subsequently disappeared or were murdered.

MRC and the 2013 Elections

In 2010, the government outlawed the Mombasa Republican Council (MRC), calling the secretive group a threat to national security. In its public statements and actions, the MRC advocates that the coastal region should be allowed to secede legally because it had a separate status before Kenyan independence. However, questions about the group's inner workings—its Council of Elders, sources of funding, and vows ("oathing") taken by members—made it a conspicuous target for terror investigations. The Mombasa High Court overturned the ban on the MRC in July 2012 but re-imposed only three months later. In an October 2012 raid, police arrested the MRC's leader, Omar Hamisi Mwamnuadzi, along with thirty-eight followers and seized one AK-47 and fifteen bullets. Mwamnuadzi and his wife were charged with practicing witchcraft and possessing the rifle and bullets.

Government critics said the renewed crackdown on the MRC in late 2012 was timed to intimidate and confuse Coast voters, who supported the opposition in 2007. The elections in March 2013 were the first to be held under the new constitution, which included reforms decentralizing the powers of the national government and increasing local control. The MRC initially called for an election boycott but then reversed that position. Nevertheless, authorities in Kilifi County blamed the MRC for two attacks against police on election day. Armed with handguns, machetes, and bows and arrows, a group of 200 laid a police ambush and then attacked a nearby police station. The US State Department reported in 2013 that there was no evidence linking the MRC to violence. In some cases, pre-election violence occurred in localities where power was about to shift from one ethnic group to another under the new constitutional system. Hundreds were killed in raids and retaliations between farmers and herders in Tana River County.

Al Shabab and Muslim Clerics

In 2012, Al Shabab revealed that it had a branch in Kenya led by Sheikh Ahmad Iman Ali. Ali was already known as the head of the Muslim Youth Center (MYC), an underground network that did fundraising and recruiting for Al Shabab. The MYC, sometimes known as Pumwani Muslim Youth, had operated in ethnic Somali neighborhoods in Garissa and Nairobi since 2009 or perhaps as early as 2006. The MYC was also active in coastal Kenya, especially in Mombasa, where poverty and unemployment generated large numbers of disaffected youth.

Radical Muslim clerics played a key role in developing prospects for Al Shabab. In Mombasa, three preachers made headlines as their inflammatory rhetoric drew followers and then drew the attention of assassins:

  • Sheikh Aboud Rogo Mohammed was acquitted of complicity in the 2002 attack on the Paradise Hotel but did not hide his support for international jihad. In 2011, he was listed in United Nations sanctions for providing material aid to Al Shabab. Rogo was killed by gunmen in August 2012. During the three days of rioting that followed, a grenade attack on a police station killed two police and a civilian.
  • Sheikh Ibrahim Ismail incensed audiences with praise for the Al Shabab attack on Westgate Mall in Nairobi in September 2013. In October, he was killed by gunmen. Riots followed, in which a church and several businesses were burned down, and four people died.
  • Sheikh Abubakar Shariff Ahmed was shot to death in April 2014 as he left a court building, where he faced charges of harboring Al Shabab recruits. An associate of both Rogo and Ismail, Ahmed was widely known as Makubari ("Graveyard" in Swahili). Rioting broke out after his assassination. Police rounded up 4,000 ethnic Somalis in a stadium for interrogation and classification.

Attacks in Lamu County

In June 2014, attacks by fifty gunmen in Lamu County left at least sixty-five people dead—a casualty count on the scale of the Westgate Mall rampage in September 2013. On the evening of June 15, while many residents were watching World Cup soccer on television, the gunmen arrived in three vehicles in Mpeketoni, a mainland town near Lamu Island, a principal resort for Kenyan tourism. The attackers, carrying the Al Shabab flag, stormed the police station first, then moved on to hotels and searched through the town, killing non-Muslims. People caught in the attack had to prove they were Muslim by reciting verses from the Koran. Mpeketoni is unusual for the region in being a majority-Christian town. Two days later, a second wave followed in the nearby towns of Poromoko and Maleli Kakati. Al Shabab claimed responsibility for all three attacks. No women or children were killed, a change in tactics from past raids by Al Shabab.

On July 5, 2014, gunmen set fires and killed twenty-nine in the villages of Hindi, in Lamu County, and Gamba, in Tana River County. They also freed a prisoner at the police station who had been detained during the Mpeketoni attack in June. Al Shabab again claimed responsibility, and no women or children were killed.

Officials offered an alternate explanation of events, suggesting the attacks were based on ethnicity rather than religion. They said local Oromos (ethnic Somalis) were lashing out at Kikuyus, who had been resettled in Lamu County under a government program. In this scenario, the attackers pretended to be Al Shabab to avoid prosecution. At the national level, President Uhuru Kenyatta, who is Kikuyu, claimed that local police had received intelligence warning of an imminent attack but failed to take action. Uncertainty about the meaning of the violence—whether it was motivated by religious zeal, ethnic hatred, or even facilitated by police—only worsened the ferment of suspicion and anger in Kenya's coastal region.

In the late 2010s and early 2020s, Al-Shabaab began losing significant ground in Somalia and appeared to turn to Kenya. Though most of their attacks remained small-scale, in early 2023, the group started beheading civilians and conducting gruesome attacks in the region.

Bibliography

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Mercy, Nasimiyu, and Mwangi John. “Communities’ Perceptions of Reintegration of Al-Shabaab Returnees in Mombasa and Kwale Counties Kenya.” Journal for Deradicalization, no. 21, 2021, pp. 71–109. doaj.org/article/2d6050a953764ddabceb4275f905fb2f. Accessed 9 Oct. 2023.

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Yusuf, Mohammed. "Villagers in Kenya’s Lamu County Flee After Terrorist Attacks, Beheadings." VOA News, 26 June 2023, www.voanews.com/a/attackers-burn-houses-kill-five-in-kenya-say-police/7152765.html. Accessed 10 Oct. 2023.