Kenya admits to secret police training for Somalia

The Kenyan military has been secretly training police officers on behalf of Somali’s fledgling transitional government in what Department of Defence spokesman Bogita Ongeri says is in line with international agreements.

The timing of the official admission by Kenya’s usually tight-lipped military is telling. It coincides with rumours widely circulating in northeastern Kenya and in Somalia itself that the Kenya Government has been recruiting fighters from among young Kenyan Somalis to help the TFG fight the Islamist threat inside Somalia.

Dismissing the reports, Mr Ongeri said “as far as we know, all those we have trained are from Somalia and were handed over to us by the TFG for training”.

“The Kenyan military has not done anything outside the UN and AU frameworks of assisting Somalia as a country to achieve peace and tranquillity. Kenya was to chip in by training the Somali police. We will continue to train them,” he told Africa Insight.

The location of the training remains secret for “security reasons”. According to Mr Ongeri, the Kenyan military had not received any complaints from any Kenyan parent that their son was recruited to be trained as a Somali police officer or to play any other role in the conflict that has raged for nearly two decades.

Potential soldiers 

The commander of Somali military forces, General Yusuf Dhumal, told reporters in Mogadishu last Thursday that Somalia and Kenya are cooperating in efforts to recruit potential soldiers for the Somali government from Kenya’s northeastern region.

The general said that 1,500 Kenyan men have been recruited and are being trained at camps in Kenya to fight Islamist rebels in Somalia. He says the recruiting effort is part of the Somali government’s plan to build a strong army that can defend the country.

But Mr Ongeri said if at all there is any Kenyan who may have lied on his nationality to enrol for the police training, if discovered, will be discontinued and punished.

Human Rights Watch had accused Kenya of backing the recruitment of Somali refugees at United Nations camps in northeastern Kenya to fight for the Somali army against militant Islamist insurgents in a report released this week.

But Somalia’s Prime Minister Omar Sharmarke dismissed the Human Rights Watch report. “We never recruited in Kenya,” Mr Sharmarke said. On his part, Mr Ongeri dismissed the claim as “propaganda’’. “We are not involved in any such operation,” he was quoted as saying in the Human Rights Watch report.

A month ago, Kenya’s Defence Minister Yusuf Hajj said leaders from North Eastern Province had received unconfirmed reports that Al-Shabaab was targeting Kenyan youth for training but that there was no conclusive evidence to show the same.

However, the leaders – MPs and sheikhs from the vast province – did not just dismiss the unconfirmed reports but launched a campaign to ask their youth to desist from falling to extremist teachings and tendencies associated with some militia groups in Somalia.

It is noteworthy that the Kenyan military are the ones conducting training for Somalis who are meant to be police officers. Kenya has for long borne the brunt of an unstable Somalia with proliferation of small arms that have been used to push Kenyan law enforcers to the limits.

That notwithstanding, the likelihood that these personnel trained by the Kenyan military will be inducted by the hard-pressed TFG into paramilitary duties cannot have escaped the Kenyan trainers. But it’s a matter squarely in the hands of the TFG.